Defending Danny Ferry

It's fashionable for basketball writers (I'm looking at you, Bill Simmons) to criticize Danny Ferry for not getting LeBron James an All-Star sidekick, the Scottie Pippen to LeBron's Jordan, or a core of young talent around him. Why couldn't Ferry be more like Sam Presti, the GM of the Thunder, who surrounded Kevin Durant with Russell Westbrook, Jeff Green, and James Harden? The reason Ferry couldn't do what Presti did was because Ferry had much less to work with. This post shows how little Ferry had to work with.

Put yourself in Danny Ferry's place. It's June 2005, and you've been hired to build a team around LeBron James. There are three ways to improve a team: the draft, trades, and free agency.

Draft

The draft is the best way to add young talent to your team, but the caliber of talent available depends on where you draft. Here's where the Cavaliers have drafted during the Ferry era.

• 2005: No draft picks
• 2006: 25th
• 2007: No draft picks
• 2008: 19th
• 2009: 30th

Ferry's predecessor, Jim Paxson, traded away the first round picks in 2005 and 2007. So in five years, Ferry had only 3 first round picks: 19, 25, and 30. The chances of drafting a star player at the end of the first round are miniscule. Most star players are drafted within the first five picks. Add the fact that the 2006 NBA Draft was weak because it was the first draft after high school players were banned from entering the NBA out of high school, and the chances of drafting a great player got slimmer.

What star player did Ferry pass on? The best player Danny Ferry didn't draft was Paul Millsap, but I don't think Millsap would have been enough to get the Cavaliers past the Celtics and Magic.

Contrast that with Sam Presti, who picked at #5 in 2007, #4 in 2008, and #3 in 2009. I wonder why Kevin Durant has young talent around him while LeBron doesn't. You can get better players at picks 3, 4, and 5 than you can get at 19, 25, and 30? Shocking.

Trades

Another option to improve your team is with trades, but to make trades you need players that other teams want. Let's look at the roster Ferry inherited (besides LeBron)

• DeSagana Diop
• Drew Gooden
• Lucious Harris
• Zydrunas Ilgauskas
• Luke Jackson
• Jeff McInnis
• Jerome Moiso
• Ira Newble
• Sasha Pavlovic
• Eric Snow
• Robert Traylor
• Anderson Varejao
• Dajuan Wagner
• Jiri Welsch
• Scott Williams

If you were a GM of an NBA team, would you trade a high draft pick or an All-Star caliber player for any of those players? Without any tradable assets Ferry was left with trading for overpaid players unwanted by their current teams, such as Wally Szczerbiak, Ben Wallace, Mo Williams, Shaq, and Antawn Jamison. Jamison was just overpaid, not overpaid and unwanted.

Free Agency

The last way to improve a team is through free agency, and it is the most difficult way to improve a team. The NBA's collective bargaining rules allow teams to offer their prospective free agents more money, which means star players make more money by staying with their teams. Add the fact that Cleveland is not a hot free agent destination, even with LeBron, and getting a star player via free agency becomes more difficult.

The Cavaliers had a lot of cap room in 2005, and Ferry used the money to sign Larry Hughes, Donyell Marshall, Alan Henderson, and Damon Jones. Those signings did not work well for the Cavaliers, but read the list of free agents in 2005. Who should the Cavaliers have signed instead? Remember that Ray Allen and Michael Redd re-signed with their teams. The best unrestricted free agents I can see are Chris Andersen (Birdman), Robert Horry, and Matt Barnes, none of whom is a star player.

If you say that Ferry should have saved his money and not signed Hughes, Marshall, and Jones, remember the roster Ferry inherited. LeBron's rookie contract was coming to an end. If Ferry stayed with the roster he inherited, LeBron may have refused to sign a contract extension. Would you have taken that chance?

Conclusion

To anyone who says Danny Ferry failed to surround LeBron with good players, what should he have done? What draft picks, trades, and free agent signings would have gotten LeBron the supporting cast he needed? What would have gotten LeBron the same core of young talent Kevin Durant has?

Why People Hate Environmentalists

It's because of environmentalists like Stewart Brand. Watch him being interviewed by Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. He sounds like a spokesperson for electric utilities.

Brand wants us to stop using fossil fuels to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The short-term solution to Brand is nuclear power. While it is true that nuclear power is currently the cleanest option among the large-scale options in terms of emissions (solar and wind currently aren't large scale), Brand glosses over the problems with nuclear power.

Nuclear waste? Not much of a problem to Brand. Nuclear power generates very little waste so you just store it on-site. If the amount of nuclear waste is so small that it can be stored on-site, why was the government contemplating storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain? Colbert didn't ask so Brand didn't have to answer, but Brand mentioned drilling down 3 miles into the ground and storing the nuclear waste there, with concrete around it.

What about the dangers of meltdowns like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island? Apparently there is no longer any danger of meltdowns at nuclear power plants. And there never could be a problem with a nuclear power plant, right? Same way offshore oil rigs are safe and never malfunction.

After pimping nuclear power Brand shilled for "clean coal". Charles Davis explained "clean coal" better than me.

For starters, take the Kerry-Lieberman proposal’s subsidies for “clean coal,” a P.R. term that refers to capturing a coal plant's carbon emissions and storing them under ground -- though nobody’s actually doing that at the moment -- while passing legal liability for any problems onto to taxpayers. Despite being the leading contributor to climate change -- proponents of the bill would say because -- coal companies stand to reap tens of billions of dollars over the next few decades in direct subsidies for what is the climate policy-equivalent of cleaning the floors by sweeping dirt under a rug – except sweeping dirt under a rug is technically and commercially feasible.

So Brand thinks nuclear energy and clean coal are the solutions to our environmental problems. Is Brand an environmentalist or a lobbyist for the electric utilities? It's hard to tell. Brand's views are identical to the utilities.

The problem with the environmental movement is their single-minded obsession with global warming and greenhouse gasses. Do whatever it takes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, even if it harms the environment in the process.

Response to Dennis Loo

It's rare that Counterpunch has a sports article, but recently there was one by Dennis Loo entitiled LeBron James and the Culture of Narcissism. He posted the article on his blog at Open Salon, but I didn't feel like signing up for a Salon account just to rebut one article so I'm rebutting here.

Apparently Loo started watching LeBron this past season. If he had followed LeBron throughout his NBA career, he wouldn't have made the following erroneous statement:

How can he be the King when he hasn’t taken his team to even the NBA finals?

LeBron led the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals in 2007. I was at Games 3 and 4 of the 2007 NBA Finals as well as Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals, when they clinched their berth in the Finals. A quick Google search will also confirm that the Cavaliers played in the 2007 NBA Finals and that LeBron James was on the Cavaliers.

Apparently Loo didn't watch Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals, when LeBron scored the last 25 points for the Cavaliers on the way to a victory in double overtime. If you have NBA TV, Dennis Loo, they usually air that game on December 30, LeBron's birthday. It's one of the greatest playoff performances in NBA history. And I think it qualifies as an example of "take your team on your shoulders and say, follow me."

Loo ends his LeBron bashing with the following gem:

If I were a Cleveland fan, I’d think real hard about whether I wanted him back after this. Not because he lost to Boston, but because of the way he did it.

I am a Cleveland fan, and I want him back because I remember what things were like before LeBron. In the four seasons before LeBron joined the Cavaliers, they lost 220 games. That's 55 losses a season, which is losing approximately two-thirds of their games. The arena was 75% empty on weeknights unless Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, or the Lakers were the opponent. Things sucked pre-LeBron, and they will suck post-LeBron. I know you don't remember how things were before LeBron, Dennis Loo. You don't even know what they were like during his tenure with the Cavaliers.