We turned the 10-minute cooling off period after the Magic-Cavaliers Eastern Conference finals into a 10-hour cooling off period. But there was some mulling to be done.Which is what the Cavs will be doing all offseason, by the way.
Real quick, a few things to wrap up:
-- Maybe someone can help me out. I keep hearing that Orlando's Mickael Pietrus did a magnificent job on LeBron James in this series. Heard that he was the X-factor and that he made James work, etc.
But we also keep hearing that James had a great conference final. So great, in fact, that it is supposed to be up there with the greatest performances of any individual player in conference finals history.
How can that be?
-- Even though Delonte West is pretty good in the low post for a guard, the mere fact that the Cavaliers went to him as many times as they did down there, particularly in Games 5 and 6, speaks volumes about their offense – or lack of it.
For months, Cavaliers general manager Danny Ferry was praised for the team he put around LeBron James. But as good as that team was in the regular season, winning a league-high 66 games, they looked punchless against the Magic.
It seems apparent James needs more help on the offensive end, and it shouldn't come as any surprise when we begin to hear the Cavaliers linked to veteran names such as Tracy McGrady, Shaquille O'Neal, Corey Maggette, Rasheed Wallace, Carlos Boozer, et al., in the offseason.
-- As great as James is, he'll never be in the Bird, Magic, Jordan class unless and until he gets this free throw thing under control. It's not that James is a bad free throw shooter. He isn't.
It's just that he's too erratic. He's a tad under 74 percent for his career, which isn't quite good enough. And his inability to be a sure thing at the line is going to make him just a little less impactful at the offensive end because he's going to go there a lot.
Again, the issue isn't that James is terrible from the line, it's that he's inconsistent. It's going to be perpetually nerve-wracking for Cavaliers' fans if he's the kind of player who one night will miss five big free throws in the fourth quarter of a playoff game and then come back the next game and knock down two with 5/10ths of a second left and the game on the line.
