Hey, this is A.C. - What is happening!

And what a great year!

If you had told me at the beginning of the season that we’d have reached the NBA Finals, I’d have said, No way. To do what we did, I think, in one year really is phenomenal...We matured as a team, as a coaching staff, and as an organization and everybody played a role in it. Now we know what it takes to win a championship. I think before we were just guessing, but after experiencing it, we know now the energy level and concentration level it takes from game 1 through game 82 on through the postseason…

To get to the well and not be able to drink the water is frustrating. Still, it’ll be nice to hear when they introduce the Cavaliers as Eastern Conference Champions. That sounds good, doesn’t it?

And we need to stay hungry. When you have a team beat at the end of the third quarter, you’ve got to finish. The small games aren’t nitpicking. The key is, the right scenario has to happen for you to get deep into the playoffs. Winning those small games during the season - against Charlotte, against Atlanta, against the Knicks - helps you get the home court advantage which helps create the right scenario. If we had won half of those games we gave away early in the season, we could conceivably have had home court advantage throughout the postseason and the psychological edge that would have given us would have been big...


As for the offseason, you’d like to keep the core of the team solid, but free agency has its impact. Right after the Miracle year, we started losing our guys. The key is defining how we’re gonna play LeBron and set the offense up so that it goes through him or the small forward position; take the ball out of his hands as far as bringing it up the floor and instead get it and him down near the basket...

We need to make it so LeBron plays the game instead of having to orchestrate the game.

He needs to get his mid-range game going, the 15- to 20-foot jumpers that would let him get all the shots he wants without getting beat up. As we got deeper into the playoffs, it became harder for him to score easy. Michael Jordan became a master of the mid-range game after he came back from his first retirement...

We also have to move Z around a little bit more, keep Drew playing his mid-range game, set up the offense where all the big people can play all the big positions and can rotate without a problem. In the same way, Larry, LeBron, Boobie, all those guys have to be able to play the one, two or the three so that we give different looks and make it so the defense can’t key in on one thing. Play against the match-ups the defense provides. I think, naturally, we need to figure out what we’re gonna do at the point guard position, whether we keep Larry there or move Larry back to the two guard, and if Sasha goes back to the bench, which might strengthen our bench, like Manu does with the Spurs...

But for now, it’s been a great year. We've accomplished a lot, we’ve learned a lot - we even learned how to approach the regular season now – and the key will be not to get complacent and that will be crucial - how hungry are we gonna be?

We haven’t got the ring yet. And now we’re marked. Everybody’s gonna bring their A-game at us every night. So we’ll now have to play A-game basketball as the norm. A-game basketball all the time. Because we’re that close now. We're that close...

We're that close...