Cavaliers news, features and notes
- Jason Lloyd: Lottery victory brings Cavs plenty of options through trades and draft
- Cleveland Cavaliers win draft lottery, will pick No. 1 again
- Cavs win draft lottery, will pick No. 1 in NBA Draft
- NBA Draft lottery: Cavs’ third-best odds have history of turning into top selection
- 2103 NBA Scouting Combine: GlenOak graduate C.J. McCollum hopes to be a lottery pick
- 2013 NBA Scouting Combine: Cleveland Cavaliers focus on drafting good players, not overall strength of draft
- 2013 NBA Scouting Combine: Otto Porter seems like perfect fit for Cleveland Cavaliers but no meeting on agenda
- 2013 NBA Scouting Combine notebook: Nerlens Noel won’t play until late December but still interests Cavaliers
- Projected top pick Nerlens Noel won't be ready for start of season, targeting Christmas
- Former Ohio State star Deshaun Thomas refuses to give NBA team his phone number at combine
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Dan Gilbert regrets adding guarantee to post-LeBron letter
CLEVELAND: Cavs owner Dan Gilbert said tonight he regrets guaranteeing the Cavaliers would win a championship before LeBron James and the Miami Heat. That ended, of course, in June when the Heat beat the Oklahoma City Thunder for James' first championship.
"Looking back now, that probably was not the most brilliant thing I've ever done in my life," Gilbert said. "If you're going to predict something that doesn't happen and you're going to do it publicly, you'd for sure take it back. When that happened, when they won, it was the end of the end of the end of that whole thing. Now there's nothing more to talk about."
Gilbert was asked about the new collective-bargaining agreement, which restricts teams to offering only one player a five-year contract and penalizes teams harsher for going over the cap. Gilbert was a proponent in stiffening the rules to prevent superteams from aligning, but in contrast, the stiffer rules are a big reason why the Oklahoma City Thunder traded James Harden.
The Cavs are modeling themselves after the Thunder, who drafted a nucleus of young players and watched them blossom into one of the best teams in the league. Gilbert said the lesson the Cavaliers learned from their summer of LeBron was illustrated by the Thunder's decision to trade Harden.
"The big lesson was if a player is not willing to extend, no matter who they are, no matter where they are playing, no matter what kind of season you had, you cannot risk going into a summer and having them leave in unrestricted free agency and get nothing back," Gilbert said. "It's not the player's fault. That's on ownership. Had we done that, the whole thing would have been crafted as I'm sure the player or whoever would have said, 'Of course I would have stayed. You guys screwed up and ruined the whole franchise.' You're in a no-win situation with that."
