Absurdly Premature 2009-10 Cleveland Cavaliers Season Preview

Anyone who knows anything about how to live right as a Northeast Ohioan knows that basketball season doesn't start until February.  This is so no matter how bad the Browns or Buckeyes, or how good the Cavaliers.  Football season is football season, and basketball season doesn't start until football season is over.  One reason that we're able to know everything about sports like we do is that we observe this simple rule of nature. 

That said, the Cavaliers open what some folks call a "regular season" tonight at the Q against the Boston Celtics, so being the communitarians that we are, we offer the following absurdly premature Cleveland Cavaliers season preview. 

Anyone who is excited about the 2009-10 Cleveland Cavaliers should at the outset consider the potential reasons why Cleveland is unquestionably the longest and worst suffering city in American professional sport.  Basic principles of karmic justice that underpin nearly every major world religion hold that the people of Northeast Ohio deserve every bit of this suffering for clinging to a mascot for their baseball team that, in impact if not intent, mocks the genocide of our Nation's first people.  Not only is Chief Wahoo an embarrassment to our region, it is likely the best reason that's ever existed for a region to have cursed sports teams, The Curse of Chief Wahoo.  As an observer once noted, "[a] soccer team in Hamburg would never call itself the Jews and adorn its uniforms with caricatures [of Jews]." 

The 2009-10 Cleveland Cavaliers are poised for an historic clash with this Curse.  LeBron James, unquestionably the most talented basketball player on the planet and perhaps in history, and the rest of these Cavaliers represent what's likely the most talented roster of basketball players ever assembled under Cleveland's banner, and surely, Curse aside, a most legitimate contender for the 2009-10 NBA Title.  Yet extremely talented rosters have played under Cleveland's banner before, and recently.  Each of them has withered in a most horrifying way in the face of Wahoo's terrible Curse.  If LeBron James is somehow able to overcome this, it will be nothing short of a testament to otherworldly greatness. 

As for whether we're pulling for this to happen, for LeBron to overcome the Curse, we'll admit, we're not sure.  Before you become upset with us for this, please consider:  We like basic principles of karmic justice.  Very much so even, as we've found them to be among the very most useful concepts in making sense of our lives.  In this way we're not at all unlike adherents to nearly every major world religion.  This is important because the Curse of Chief Wahoo and the exquisitely painful ways it's played out here in Northeast Ohio might be the most profound evidence of the power of these basic principles that anyone could ask for. 

We shouldn't be forced to choose in this way, but we refuse to bury our heads in the sand with respect to a Curse that makes so much sense.  If these Cavaliers do manage to beat it, the quenching of our Championship lust at the leadership of Akron's son will still be at least among the very most terrifically enjoyable releases that we've ever experienced.  Our notions of basic karmic justice will still survive, though in less tact.  But it would all be so much easier, so much more enjoyable, and make so much more sense if we could just be rid of Wahoo first.  To those who insist otherwise, who insist that it's worth the risk of keeping the offensive caricature around, history, common sense, and the most basic commonly-held moral conceptions give you every reason to believe that you're wrong.  In the highly likely event that you do turn out to be wrong, we won't be able to say that it doesn't make sense to us, and we'll have to admit that we like it when things make sense.

So, yeah, it will be interesting.  But it shouldn't have to be this kind of interesting.  Perhaps a failure by these Cavaliers, which might be the highest-profile and most spectacular sporting failure in Cleveland's highest-profile and most spectacular history of such failures, might finally knock the cobwebs loose and cause folks in a position to do something about it to finally effect the long overdue burial of Chief Wahoo.  We remain optimistic. 

As for tonight, we'll take the Cavs -5 over the Celtics (3 units).  If these Cavs go down spectacularly as expected, it won't be because they're not the best team in the East. 

Biff tells us that he'll be talking Cavs here soon, and regularly until their Playoff run is over, so stay tuned for that.  We'll be back tomorrow with a World Series preview, and you can blame McManamon and his flaming idiocy for you having to wait until then for your Frownie Fotos as well.  Rest assured that nobody is more annoyed than we are that it couldn't have been a more fun day for us here at Frowns. 

Anyway, go Cavs in the meantime.  And please sign the petition to get rid of Wahoo ASAP. 

Thanks to Moms Break Free Printables for the image.