The Cavaliers are in denial

Tyronn Lue isn’t a victim in his unceremonious Sunday firing by the Cleveland Cavaliers after an 0-6 start. He’s been blessed with sweet relief from a job going nowhere.

The Cavaliers were going to fall short of the NBA playoffs this season and Lue would have been fired next summer anyway. This way, he still gets paid ($15 million, reportedly), he’s free to find a warm homebase during the long Lake Erie winter, and his respectable head coaching record stays clean.

Best of all, he doesn’t have to live up to absurd expectations that it seems Cavaliers management, led by owner Dan Gilbert, harbor.

In the wake of James’ not-terribly-surprising decision to bail on Cleveland again this summer, the Cavaliers locked up Kevin Love and didn’t feint toward a full rebuild. The second big contract Cleveland offered up this summer — a four-year, $45 million extension to 25-year-old Larry Nance, Jr. — is defensible, but also a commitment to a player at the same position as the team’s only star.

The Cavaliers kept a high draft pick instead of trading it to get James and Love more help last season — that pick ended up being Collin Sexton, who has struggled through six games. But no other moves Cleveland made spoke to the future of the franchise. The Cavaliers, after locking up Love, Nance, and Sexton and losing James, essentially decided to run it back.

Now they are 0-6, tilting toward a thoroughly embarrassing season, palling around with the Knicks and Hawks.

If that was the plan all along, it’s not clear why the Cavaliers locked up the 30-year-old Love (which I supported at the time). His new contract — $144 million over five years, or almost $30 million a year through age 34 — is just big enough to give interested teams pause. Without the deal, Love could have become a free agent in 2019 and left. Would a Love rental have fetched more on the trade market than an expensive, long-term Love mortgage will when the Cavaliers eventually get religion and trade him? We’ll never know, but given what the Spurs and Pacers got for all-star rentals over the past two years and what the Wolves are asking for in the Jimmy Butler trade war, it’s worth considering. Love could fit in on any team, but now he’s a really expensive fit.

The other question is why the Cavaliers brought Lue back. Sure, Gilbert and company would have gotten ripped for firing Lue in the offseason after a successful three-year run as lead assistant and then head coach, but then at least Cleveland could have installed a coach tailored to developing Sexton, Cedi Osman, and the other youngsters sure to pass through. Clearly, the Cavaliers braintrust had limited faith in Lue to do the job. If they had, they wouldn’t have tossed him overboard so quickly into the season instead of just let him do the job once they realized it needed doing.

The Cavaliers thought they’d be in a playoff mix in the East, and instead they appear to be the worst team in the East (no small feat).

The sad thing is that you can see why Cleveland thought it had a chance to remain spunky: Love carried an under-equipped Minnesota team to the cusp of the playoffs his final season there, and he still had veteran help in the wake of James’ departure. This wasn’t Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison circa late 2010: this is Love and ... well, role players who could help Love rebound and score. (Not defend. There’s not a single defender on this roster. This is why the Cavaliers got swept out of the NBA Finals. This is partly why James is a Laker.)

Gilbert keeps thinking he can build a good team without James on it. This is the fifth bite at that apple, and it’s still rotten. Last time James left, it took the Cavaliers a half-season to realize they needed a deep cleaning rebuild, and even that fortune-infused lottery-focused rebuild fell short until James came back. Cleveland made the same mistake again this season, thinking they could stay afloat without King James holding the franchise above water.

Whoops.