Cavaliers Have Put It All Together

At least Chuck Daly can say he saw it first.

One disenchanting evening last summer, Detroit’s head coach bolted awake in his bed and realized that he had been watching Cleveland play for the National Basketball Association championship on the playground of his subconscious.

Months later, Daly finds little comfort in the knowledge that his dream was right on target.

“It’s become a nightmare, that dream,” Daly said last Monday. “They’re for real; big time real. I think they’re better than anybody in the league right now. They’re a perfect extension of Lenny Wilkens (their coach) -- how he played and how he coaches. No flair, nothing spectacular, just solid, silent, assassin basketball, night in and night out.

“Let’s see,” Daly continued. “Golden State is going in there ... with, what, eight straight wins? Look out!”

Look out, indeed. The Warriors left Richfield, Ohio, a befuddled 142-109 loser, their eight-game winning streak a memory and their brilliant coach, Don Nelson, a Cavalier convert.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Nelson said, “but Cleveland is far and away the best team that we’ve played.”

The Cavs have turned into a great team almost overnight, shooting to the top of a well-balanced league and leaving the established contenders to reexamine their own title chances.

After losing to the Bullets Sunday, Cleveland’s league-best record is 31-9. They are outscoring opponents by nearly 10 points a game. They won 11 straight by an average 15 points.

And to think, just five seasons ago Cleveland was a laughingstock, a misbegotten franchise that exemplified all that was wrong with the league. Under the twisted reign of owner Ted Stepien, the “Cadavers” traded first-round draft choices as if they were baseball cards, missed the playoffs six straight times and couldn’t attract 4,000 fans to home games.

Finally, the league intervened, and the Cavaliers were sold to George and Gordon Gund, Cleveland natives who own hockey’s Minnesota North Stars. The Gunds purchased the Cavs on the condition that they’d receive four future No. 1 draft picks to compensate for Stepien’s indiscretions.

One pick was used to select Ron Harper, now Cleveland’s leading scorer, in the 1986 draft -- the same draft that brought center Brad Daugherty (at No. 1) and point guard Mark Price (in a draft-day trade). John Williams, chosen the year before despite his involvement in the Tulane point-shaving scandal, also became eligible around that time.

So, Cleveland went into 1986-87 with four solid rookies, and no one doubted that the Cavaliers were a team of the future. It’s just that no one expected them to mature so quickly. A year ago, the Lakers’ Magic Johnson called them “The team of the ‘90s.”

Well, welcome to the 1990s.

Wayne Embry was thinking ahead to the ‘90s when he became Cleveland’s general manager two days after that 1986 draft. He needed a head coach to nurture all that young talent, and it didn’t take him long to settle on Lenny Wilkens.

“No one else was available who had the experience or past success that Lenny had,” said Embry, best remembered as the man who traded Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Milwaukee to the Los Angeles Lakers. “You had to respect anyone who had done what he’s done as a coach and a player.”

Wilkens, an all-star point guard with four NBA teams, had already won more than 500 games as a head coach. In 1969, at age 32, he became Seattle’s player-coach, succeeding Al Bianchi. Later, he coached in Portland, departing the year before the Trail Blazers won the championship. In 1977-78, he took over a 5-17 Seattle team and took it to the finals. The next year, he led the Sonics to the title.

His record aside, Wilkens had the ideal personality for a young team -- quiet and abiding, able to endure the growing pains of rookies while educating them on the game’s nuances. And Wilkens quickly discovered that he had inherited the brightest bunch of players he’d ever coached.

“I tell you,” Wilkens said, “as I got to know them as rookies, I’d sit around and we’d talk the game. We’d talk basketball, discussing situations and what we’d want to do, what to look for and how to look for it.”

Two years later, his “quiet assassins” have become a youthful expression of Wilkens’ patience, intelligence and guile. One reason they’ve emerged so quickly is that his youngest starters, Daugherty (23) and Price (24), are also his brightest players, and the offense flows through them.

They’re also his most gifted passers. Daugherty, in fact, is the best passing center in the game. “There aren’t many smarter centers who’ve played the game,” said Embry, who played with Bill Russell in Boston. “And I know there aren’t many who have passed as well as he does.”

Daugherty has become adept at finding Price, an extraordinary outside shooter, coming off picks, and dishing off to Harper, Williams and Larry Nance. The top five scorers all shoot over 50 percent. Harper, Daugherty, Nance and Price all average between 18 and 20 points a game.

“Hey, everyone at this level is physically gifted,” said Daugherty. “I don’t want to finger any teams, but the difference between the good and bad teams is having people who are mentally prepared.”

That reflects on their stoic, cerebral coach and general manager who, it is worth noting, both happen to be black.

“I think this team is finally learning to be a little calmer, more mild-mannered, just like Lenny,” said backup Craig Ehlo, a reserve on the Houston team that lost to Boston in the 1986 finals.

“Lenny is a very smart man,” said Tree Rollins, the Cavs’ seldom-used, million-dollar center. “Like the team, he’s intense, but it’s sort of a subtle intensity. I think we have a subtle confidence about us.”

They certainly aren’t a revival of Animal House. It would be hard to find a more restrained collection of young men. Daugherty’s idea of fun is hunting snakes in the mountains of his native North Carolina. Price, who signed a five-year, $5 million contract before the season, is a Christian singer who donates one-tenth of his salary to a church.

Williams, whose mother died when he was seven months old and whose father abandoned him soon after, reveres “Coach Lenny” as if he were the father he never knew. In Cleveland, they say if Wilkens asked Williams to shovel snow, Williams would do it with a smile.

“Our goal is to be consistent, and so far we’ve been able to do that,” said Price. “We try not to get too caught up in things. But hey, we’ve definitely got some characters.” And definitely, some character too.

It was shortly before last season’s All-Star break that Embry decided that he was one major character short. Surveying his team, he realized that it lacked a forward who could run, score and, most important, play interior defense. Daugherty was not a gifted shot-blocker, and to become a superior defensive team, Cleveland needed another front-court defender.

Embry needed Larry Nance. So, over three or four painstaking days last February, he sealed a deal that transformed the Cavaliers into a contender. He sent three backups -- center Mark West, forward Tyrone Corbin, and rookie point guard Kevin Johnson -- to Phoenix, getting Nance and Mike Sanders in return.

“We thought Nance would also provide some veteran leadership for us,” Embry said. “One thing you fear when you have a young team is the younger players coming together without influences other than themselves ... You hope one of them will emerge as a leader, but when they’re all the same age, it’s difficult for one to step to the forefront.”

Nance, who had seen good and bad times with Phoenix, including the regrettable drug scandal of 1987, saw it as “a new life.” But upon his arrival, Cleveland lost 11 of 14, and people wondered about Nance, who began wondering himself.

“I was supposed to be helping us win, and we were losing,” said Nance. “That was the roughest time of my career, trying to handle why, because I felt I could fit in with any team. I felt we were losing because of me.”

Wilkens sat Nance down, telling him to relax and play his game. He also had a heart-to-heart with Williams, who had been a starter throughout his brief career. Wilkens asked Williams to become his sixth man, though he could remain a starter if he wished.

“What Coach Lenny did was treat me like a man,” Williams said. “And that’s why I went to the bench to help out.”

Sanders, who had been a 6-6 center at UCLA, took Williams’ spot in the lineup, giving Cleveland a defensive stopper at the small forward. With the versatile Williams coming off the bench, Wilkens was now able to adjust his lineup for any circumstance.

The Cavaliers went 11-2 down the stretch. Although they lost to Chicago in the first round of the playoffs, they carried their regular-season momentum into this season. They went 8-0 in the preseason, and by mid-December had the league’s best record.

With Nance (the league’s sixth-leading shot blocker) leading the way, the interior defense has been the primary reason. The Cavs have held 20 opponents under 100 points, and they lead the league in blocked shots per game.

“Number one, we’ve got five guys willing to play defense,” Wilkens said. “That allows us to double-team, to trap, and to pick up full-court when we have to. We’re doing it more because guys understand where the help is coming from.”

Cleveland is also a trifle defensive about its unanticipated emergence. Like the New York Knicks, who host the Cavs Thursday, Cleveland prefers to downplay their sudden prominence and deflect any championship talk.

“I don’t think those feelings are too prevalent now,” Daugherty said. “You can’t start to reach out and touch something you’ve never been close to before. I think the media is setting us up for a fall by creating all this hoopla and expectation. But we can’t be concerned about it.”

The league is getting concerned, though, because this young Cleveland team can only get better. For people like Chuck Daly, that’s the greatest nightmare of all.