Cleveland Cavaliers: Will They Discover The Secret?

Major kudos to Bill Simmons of ESPN and Grantland for what I’m about to talk about, since he wrote about this idea in his famous The Book Of Basketball, which is one of the best sports-related books I’ve ever read.

In it, he talks about a conversation he had with Isiah Thomas back in 2007. Together, the idea of The Secret of basketball was formed. Said Secret is when a team learns to fight the complications of statistics and money and play as a single unit with one goal in mind; to win.

This is called a secret because, no matter how much fans would like to shrug off the notion, the majority of teams in the league do deal with these issues in such a way that there is almost always a problem at some point. That’s sometimes why teams that are very capable of winning more games than they do fail to meet the predicted result.

On a larger scale, these things can also prevent a team from winning a title.

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For example,

has two chips. But imagine if he hadn’t been so obsessed with his own stats. He could’ve potentially won more than that. The guy was a freak of nature. He could do whatever he wanted, only the problem was that what he wanted most wasn’t to win, it was to be the best individually.

The Secret is also why we see a lot of teams who have won championships, win more than once while the ones that have never won have a tough time getting there in the first place. A team that wins an NBA title knows The Secret, knows what it takes to get there, and how to have every single player on the team commit to the goal of winning while placing stats and money aside.

Ultimately, this is what’s going to be extremely tough for this season’s Cleveland Cavaliers. They have four players that know The Secret: LeBron James, Mike Miller, James Jones and Shawn Marion. But only one of those guys is a starter and still in his prime, a voice that will be listened to by the entire team.

Presumably, it shouldn’t be so tough to get a guy like Kevin Love to listen and commit to the goal of winning, since he’s 26 years old and has had his years where he put up monster numbers that rank with some of the greatest ever.

Heck, he came to Cleveland with every intention of going there to win, not just rack up more aesthetically pleasing stat sheets.

It’s the younger players with potential, like Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters that are more of a concern. Both of them are only 22 and despite how professional they may act on the court, are still just two guys in their early twenties with suddenly much more money than they’ve ever had in their lives.

In Waiters’ case, it’s also clear that he likes getting his shots during a game. In preseason, he still put up a fair amount and told the media that he was going to “be himself.” That idea is all warm and fuzzy, but is it realistic? Can Dion thrive and help create a cohesive unit without changing his game at all? Doubtful.

We must address as well the fact that two of the Big 3 (Love and Irving) have never been to the playoffs. And a bunch of other young pieces as well. In fact, the starting lineup for the Cavs combined has played a total of just 229 playoff games, with LeBron accounting for 158 of those.

Can a team that has so little experience in a different type of basketball world really expect to sustain or have even learned The Secret by this time? It’s tough to say.

James will guide them in the right direction, and the vets will help.

But in the end it will be the decision of the others themselves to choose either the route of learning The Secret as fast as possible and fighting toward the only thing that matters as a competitor or fighting that mindset that will most definitely be set in place by the best player in the world, and cause themselves and the team as a whole a bunch of trouble.

It can be as simple as having a fight in the locker room (as Kyrie and Dion did last season), counting one’s own stats during an easy game against a weak club on a Thursday night in February or bringing personal troubles from outside the arena inside of it.

The Secret is hard to learn and even more difficult to grasp firmly. But once a team has it, they know what it takes to keep it.

This is what the Cavaliers will be striving for this season as the early-on hype turns into back-breaking expectation. Make no mistake, this entire season will be one of transition and progress for the franchise. For now, all one can do is wait and hope, as the wine and gold train leaves the station, that it’s on the right track.

Next: NBA Power Rankings: Regular Season Opener Edition