The Cleveland Cavaliers enter the NBA season as favorites to win the championship, but their first-year coach believes that hype is not warranted.
Whether it’s out of respect to the defending champion San Antonio Spurs or a tactic to decrease expectations for his squad, new Cavs coach David Blatt described the talk of the Cavs winning the title as “unfair.”
“Anybody talking about us winning it all, I think they’re being unfair to those great NBA teams that are out there that have either won it or have been there to win it, and also to us as a team that’s talented but new,” Blatt said Tuesday, via ESPN’s Dave McMenamin. “We have a lot of work to do before we can start claiming anything before it’s time.”
The Cavaliers are an interesting team because they have so much talent. They signed LeBron James, Mike Miller and Shawn Marion, and they traded for Kevin Love. With all the new pieces, it is difficult to project how they will play together. For those reasons, Blatt is unsure how the team will fare.
“We’re going to see,” Blatt said. “Obviously now that the real games are getting started, we’re going to find out. I thought we showed in preseason that we’re a pretty good, competitive group and we played some good teams. But, there’s a big difference between preseason and regular season — we all know that — for everyone. But we got the right kind of personalities and the right kind of character guys to certainly get out there and make an effort every night.”
Blatt and LeBron may be downplaying expectations entering the season, but we all know the truth of the matter: any team that has James and some other All-Stars like Love and Kyrie Irving is a championship contender. They can downplay expectations all they want, but we’re fully expecting the Cavs to win the Eastern Conference. So are the oddsmakers, which have installed Cleveland as NBA title favorites.
