Dealing with the Deadline

Hey Cavs fans! It’s A.C. here – what’s happening?

The Cavaliers have been a little inconsistent in February after a red-hot January. It’s a little bit of losing momentum with the All-Star Break and the injury bug beginning to catch up with them.

Actually I think it’s more the injuries. In the short term, you can make up for having a few guys down. But long term, it catches up with you. And it’s coming down now to where we have to get healthy and be at full-strength in order to finish the season on a strong note.

Because again, the schedule is starting to favor us, with nine of the next ten against teams with sub-.500 records. The big question is: are we mentally tough enough to take advantage of that stretch.

Another big distraction for the Cavaliers – and every other team in the league – is dealing with is the Trade Deadline. As a player, this can be a strange time for you. You hear things, your agent is telling you things. There’s a lot of stuff going on. And if a player has a weak personality or a weak constitution, it can bother him and it’ll affect his play.

All players are in-tune to the rumors. It’s just that part of the season. The strong survive and that’s just the way it is. It’s part of the business.

I remember when I was starting to have major injury problems and the Cavs were starting to talk about trading me. It would be on my mind a lot. ‘I have a home here, I have friends here, I have my family here.’ And the upheaval, when it happened to me in the Expansion Draft, it took me a while to recover from it. I just got so comfortable being in Cleveland.

Most players in this day and age, once you get to one or two years left on your contract, you need to understand that if you’re not a frontline guy, there’s a good possibility of you getting traded. That’s the nature of the business. You have a little more preparation because you know what’s going on.

Back when I played, it could just happen out of the clear blue sky because it was easier to move people. Coach would get mad at you and he’d say, ‘I’m trading you tomorrow’ – and BANG, that was it. You can’t do that anymore because of the way things are set up.

After the Deadline passes, you tend to relax a little bit. You look around the locker room and it’s like: ‘This is who we brought to the dance, and this is who we’re gonna dance with.’ Again, it might not be as big now as it was when I was in the league, because it was so easy to trade guys then. But it’s definitely something that’s on guys’ minds who are tradeable.

Right now, with the injuries and the Deadline looming, it’s hard to get a good gauge on the team. We have a big stretch coming up – most of the games are in our Division. So if we compete well against our Division, we can climb up the ladder. Things are aligned for us, but again, are we mentally tough enough to take advantage of the opportunity?

The Central is down this year. That’s why it’s so important for us to get healthy as soon as possible. With injuries, you’re susceptible to a role player or a lesser guy going off on you. You lend yourself to those types of situations, because of the injury situation, you don’t have your full complement of players to defend or shoot or get the job done.

And that’s what people don’t understand. The Cavaliers haven’t given the team that went to the Finals last year a chance to have a long run, and when we did, we ran off 11 of 13. So I’m not sure why fans are panicking and thinking there has to be a move made before Thursday.

As far as the Cavaliers are concerned – more than the schedule, more than trades, more than anything – HEALTH is the most important factor.