I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

Scottie Pippen is just a more athletic Drew Gooden? LOL…This tells me that you never really saw Scottie Pippen play basketball.

If I understand the argument, Alan et. al. are arguing that the current Cavs — essentially those teams from the last two years — are a very poor team without LBJ. Alan labels them a bad lottery team, and Corporate Whore labels them a 30-win team. Alan furthers that the team has built its exceptional non-LBJ record the last two years (6-1) by piling on against patsies who were playing on the road and without rest.

There is some truth to what he says. These are the teams against which LeBron has sat in the last two years: Knicks, Boston (twice), Atlanta, Golden State Philadelphia, Sacramento. Of those seven teams, only one (Golden State this year) was against an above-.500 team. Collectively, those teams won .376 of their games, or 31 games over a full season.

The Cavs did also play more (4) of those seven games at home than on the road, although it was hardly a huge differential.

And Alan is right and wrong about the amount of rest those teams had: Two of those opponents had two days off, two had one day off, and three played on no rest. However, the Cavs were actually “less” rested than their opponents, having played the same three games on no rest while having no games with two or more days rest.

So, how many games should a “deep lottery” team have won against that competition? I tried to project this, figuring each team’s home or road record in the season in which they played the Cavs (without LBJ), and by calculating how an average team (.500) should have done against the same record.

The results? An average (41-41) team should have gone about 4.6-2.4 against that array of teams. As you know, the Cavs actually won six of seven, so they did better than an average team would have been expected to do. (Seven games is a very limited sample, so that could reasonably be attributed to luck.)

Remember, though, Alan and Corporate Whore aren’t suggesting this team — sans LBJ — is average. They are saying that it is well below average. It is reasonable to suggest that a Corporate Whore-quality team (30-52) would have won one less game than an average team (against these seven teams in the same locales), and a “deep lottery” team might have won a half-game less than that. It’s still a small sample, but chalking up 2.5 or three wins in a seven-game span to luck — while possible — isn’t likely.

A couple other points:

The Cavs didn’t just win those games this year, they crushed their opponents. In four LBJ-less games this year, the Cavs outscored their opponents by a total of 57 points. Their lone loss was by a deuce. In the two years with this approximate cast of players, Cleveland has outscored its opponents by an average of nearly 10 points a game. The point differentials suggest they should have won six-plus of those games. In short, the Cavs really weren’t lucky to win those six games.

Lastly, LBJ is a wonderful player, arguably the best in the league. Basketball-Reference.com’s method of calculating his value places his contribution at 10-11 wins over .500 over the course of the season. That’s huge — the most of any NBA player — but it isn’t the 20-30 wins that people on this board are attributing.