I got a few e-mails and comments from folks saying (again) that Mike Brown was at fault for the Game 1 loss, that his lack of offensive coaching and his offensive (no pun intended) system were the reason LeBron James struggled.

Brown was asked what he saw from his team's offense when he watched the tape of the 76-72 loss (Note: Diagram to right for artistic purposes only and is NOT from Cavs playbook). His response: "I thought we did a decent job pushing the ball and throwing ahead. We had 17 fastbreak points and it's tough to get that against this team on the road. But beyond that when we're talking about going against their set defense, one of the things is we have to get the ball from one side of the floor to the other. Sometimes multiple times on the same possession. We didn't do a good job of that. Second thing we have to do is we have to space the floor better and use our spacing rules. Too many times the ball came to a standstill when we know if the ball gets swung here a basket cut should be made here followed by pick-and-roll. Or if the ball gets swung here a pin-down should happen on the back side, or if the swing is denied he should go back door and the next guy comes up. We have some basic rules and concepts that we've given our guys when you just have to play. Then the last thing we have to make sure us that we're aggressive driving the ball."

That's some basketball-ese, but it means moving the ball, don't stand around, and move without the ball. Spacing is important in the NBA. There must be room to maneuver, and to pass. If spacing is screwed up, all the plays are out of kilter. Sort of like a typewriter (remember those) with wrong spacing. All the words would squish into a big old mish-mosh that nobody could read (sort of like this blog).

Clearly, there is an offensive system in there. No, Brown's forte is not offense. It's defense. But the Cavs do have an offense. It's just not always run with the highest efficiency.

The second thing people wrote was to ask why the Cavs don't post up LeBron James more. It's a good question. It's something they did some early in the year, but they've gotten away from it. One reason is James doesn't always take to posting up. So if the play is called, he might decide to post up 15 feet from the basket and immediately turn and face the basket. The other problem is that it's easier to double-team James in the post, and if, for example, the Celtics double with Kevin Garnett that leaves Ben Wallace open and Wallace is not an offensive threat. I agree that James would be a weapon in the low post, but it does not seem to be something he's comfortable with right now. At least that's my guess, which in the long run might suffer from some more "bad spacing," except in this case it would be the spacing between my ears.

Bottom line: 30.7 percent shooting will make any offense look bad.

A lot of folks are having a lot of fun with James' reactions to getting hit. I wrote a little for Thursday's Beacon Journal about the fact that James was cut inside his upper lip on the flagrant foul Sam Cassell received. The Boston Garden crowd bellowed like James was faking it, and columnist Dan Shaugnessy of the Boston Globe said James' head snaps back like he's Kosmo Cramer when he drives to the hoop. "James gets more calls than any 23-year-old in the history of basketball," Shaugnessy wrote.

Now Shaughnessy and I share a college alma mater, so I'm not going to get on him. But let's get real — James is too good to act. Yes, he tends to be dramatic, but he's not making this stuff up. He gets hit. Check out the picture on the right from today's Boston Globe. I believe on this play that James reacted and had to re-adjust his headband. No call was made, and the crowd howled at James as if he was making things up. It doesn't look like he made this up — and it happened 25 feet from the basket. Cassell hit James, he deserved the flagrant foul. James gets hit other times too. This game was not officiated poorly. The guys with the whistles were not hacks. The calls James got he earned. And late in the game, he was played physically on a late drive to the basket and had to throw the ball up falling down. It didn't go in. I did not think a foul should have been called; it wasn't. Mike Brown thought James might have been fouled on his last attempt to tie the game; I didn't. It wasn't called. The game was well officiated.

That being said, Zyrdrunas Ilgauskas might have been treated a little differently if he had kneed Sam Cassell in the head early in the game as opposed to late in a close game. That one (left) had to hurt.

Just a guess, but it does not seem that Red Auerbach would be happy with fireworks, cheerleaders and dancing girls at Celtics games.

Bob Ryan concluded his story in the Boston Globe this way: "Let's get serious. When LeBron goes 2 for 18, you'd damn well better win the game. Or not lose it. The Kid will not be playing like this again."

I found compelling this argument that Chris Paul deserved to be the league's MVP.

Gilbert Arenas finally weighed in on his blog on NBA.com, and said this about the first-round series against the Cavs: "It was an entertaining series. The hype and drama behind it was bigger than I expected (but, I didn’t expect DeShawn to call LeBron “overrated,” either). To each his own. That’s how he felt and we had to stand by him. They had their own little problems off the court I guess, so he had to do what he had to do and we had to stand by him as a team and get him as comfortable as possible and help him. I think we could have helped him a little bit more. We could have trapped LeBron a little bit more than we did to get the ball out of this hand and let everybody else beat us the whole series, but we played him straight up and he straight up killed us, like he did during the regular season. But, it was entertaining. On the days I wasn’t playing, I enjoyed the hype. I know a lot of critics and sports analysts were killing us, I heard the Charles Barkley thing (called Washington the dumbest team ever, or something like that), but at the end of the day, they were watching. And at the end of the day, that’s all you want for your series are the viewers." For those into this kind of thing, in February it was reported that Stevenson was dating LeToya Luckett, formerly of Destiny's Child. Beyonce also was in Destiny's Child. Beyonce is married to Jay Z, who is LeBron's good friend. Evidently Luckett and Beyonce had a falling out at some point, which led to a lawsuit being filed and blah blah blah. This is just a guess, but perhaps somewhere in this web is the reason for those "little problems" off the court.

Here's a couple more excerpts from Gilbert's blog: "You had entertainers showing up, and you had entertainers making diss tapes. I’ve been in this league, I’ve been around the league, I’ve been watching the league for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never seen anything this wild in a series in my life." And: "It was amazing though, the whole city of Cleveland was into it. A couple of us were in the mall in Cleveland and a guy came up to us and was like, 'I know somewhere you guys haven’t been before …' And it caught us off guard. We were thinking he was going to be like, 'The Gap!' So we just were like, 'Where?' And he goes, 'The Second Round!' And he just took off running. We were like, what is this? This is crazy. But that is really a Cavaliers town. I love cities like that. They support their team, they’re not the bandwagon jumpers. Some of my Halo players showed up at the game wearing my jerseys and they got peanuts, cans, beers thrown at them. They needed an escort out of the arena because they had my jerseys on! But I like stuff like that. It shows that you’re down for your team."

This little video has nothing to do with the Celtics series, but it's entertaining, no?

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