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Coast To Coast is your bi-weekly (as in, twice a week, not every other week…or does that mean it’s semi-weekly?) look at the NBA outside of Cleveland through the perspective of the Cavaliers. Because even LeBron James can sometimes push away his teammates, if you know what I mean…

When Owners Attack! Perhaps not as exciting to some of you as the more famous When Animals Attack series, but it’s still fun to look at a train wreck from time to time. This week, two of the NBA’s most polar opposite owners went off on their teams. First up, the Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling ripped into his team after they lost their 3rd straight game and put up a pathetic effort against the San Antonio Spurs. Ben Bolch of the LA Times writes:

The situation had already been touchy late Monday after the Clippers’ 28-point loss against the San Antonio Spurs. Owner Donald Sterling, frustrated by what he perceived as a lack of effort, went on a tirade in the locker room afterward.

According to team sources, Sterling offered a blanket denunciation of the players and strongly backed Coach and General Manager Mike Dunleavy. The owner said he would be willing to trade all the players and said he was putting their future in Dunleavy’s hands.

“Bottom line is he stated some views and everyone understood the views he took,” said Dunleavy, who declined to comment further.

Asked if Sterling singled out any players, forward Al Thornton said, “You’ll have to ask Coach about that. He can give you more detail. Ask Sterling.”

Did the talk help the team?

“I really can’t say did it help or did it motivate us,” Thornton said. “I can’t go either way with it.”

Sterling openly ranted in the press room during the game against the Spurs and pulled a Times reporter aside at halftime to voice his displeasure.

But Sterling wasn’t the only owner to let his frustration boil over on his team. Whereas Sterling’s outward display of anger and frustration was pretty surprising to hear about, to say the least, the thought 0f the Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban seems far less peculiar. Tim MacMahon in his Mavs Blog for the Dallas News quotes Cuban as saying:  

“It’s only one game, which I keep reminding myself of today,” Cuban told reporters today. “But let’s just say I wasn’t happy with our preparation, execution or effort. Not only did it look like we had no idea what we were doing, but we did it without effort. The effort and energy, on both sides of the ball, by each player will decide their future with the Mavericks.

“If each player can’t take the personal initiative to make every game important and play like it, I don’t see them being here next season. The ball won’t always bounce the way we want it to, but every player can control their level of effort. If it’s not important enough to them to lay it out every game the rest of the season, they won’t be back. I don’t care what their contract is. I would rather turn over the roster 100 percent than subject fans to another game like last night.

“This team has the talent to win in the playoffs. But that’s only going to happen if all 15 guys know and execute their assignments and play every possession like it’s important.”

I don’t mind seeing owners take losing so personally, particularly an owner like Cuban who spares no expense or luxury on his team and thus expects maximum effort in return. What I do find hilarious, though, is these owners making these comments after the trade deadline expired. Sterling now says he’s willing to trade any player on his roster? Gee, that would have been nice a few weeks ago when the Cavaliers would have loved to have acquired Marcus Camby’s services. When you make threats of trading guys on your roster, it’s probably more effective to do so at a time when that’s actually a realistic possibility.
[Owners Gone Wild – Sterling and Cuban Go Off On Their Teams]

When you are a 6’11” starting center in the NBA, it’s probably not too much to ask that you get more than 2 rebounds in a game. But 2 rebounds is precisely where the Miami Sun-Sentinel’s Ira Winderman puts the over/under for Jermaine O’Neal’s rebounding output. Not good. Winderman explains in his Miami Heat Blog:

First of all, there is no question that Jermaine O’Neal is trying to make this work.

He said he is reviewing more tape than he has in years. He has spoken with coach Erik Spoelstra and Heat President Pat Riley about how he best can fit into the team’s system.

He is not happy, at all, with efforts such as Wednesday, when there were only two rebounds, the third time in his eight games with the team that there have been two or fewer.

That’s all well and good. But what the heck has happened? Recall, the first two times the Heat played Toronto, O’Neal had 18 and 17 rebounds. That’s when he was playing for the Raptors, back in November.

Probably not exactly what the Heat thought they were getting when they traded for O’Neal. If he can find his way (and I thought he had since he was allowed to wear his headband again), the Heat still have a chance to be a dangerous team in the playoffs.
[Over/Under on Jermaine’s Rebounds: Two?]

Is the NBA the next sport to fall victim to the dark cloud of performance enhancing speculation? Maybe, maybe not, but Blake Murphy of The On Deck Circle did an unbelievable job of taking on the issue and talking about why it would be naive to think performance enhancing doesn’t exist in the NBA at any level whatsoever. The article is kind of long, but I’ll pull out the part that sparked the most interest on my part:

It would seem to me that NBA fans everywhere have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion. Players may be deceiving them, but in reality they are only deceiving themselves if they truly believe that no one in the league is using performance enhancers. The probability that at least some players have used PEDs (specifically HGH) is too overwhelming to tune it out forever.

Certainly, I have nothing but observation and a distrusting nature that leads me to this conclusion. I have no smoking gun, no inside sources, no informant that has lead me down the rabbit hole towards this odious viewpoint.

Investigations must happen before anything can be said with any real certainty. Once the facts are had, we can distort them however we choose to. We can play them up, or set them on an angle, or misrepresent them altogether. Sourced, hard information must come before anyone is accused in earnest.

But with that said, please have a look for yourself at photographs of the body types of NBA players in the 1980s compared to those today. Hell, look at those as recently as 2000. There is a very clear trend: players are bigger, stronger, faster, and more athletic than ever before.

Look at Ben Wallace and compare him to power forwards of yesteryear: Kevin McHale, Kurt Rambis, Horace Grant. Gaze at LeBron James and appreciate that he is the size that Karl Malone was in 1998, when the Mailman was the most physically dominant power forward in the game. Examine Dwight Howard next to classic photos of Patrick Ewing and try to explain how improved weight-lifting techniques could account for such changes in growth.

Again, I am not accusing these specific players of anything. I merely use them as examples to prove my point that the public is reliving the lie it lead in 1998, when we were all so enchanted with the Chase for 62 that we never stopped to ask questions. The NBA now features the biggest, strongest athletes it has ever had, yet no one questions this.

There are several reasons this grabbed my attention. The most obvious being that he mentions a couple Cavaliers in Ben Wallace and LeBron James. Putting that aside for a second, though, I think he makes a valid point overall. After fooling myself for so long that baseball players were just bigger because of modern advancements in weight training and muscle isolation workouts, I refuse to allow myself to be that naive again. He’s right that basketball players do look drastically different today. And I want to say that it’s because basketball players only recently started to lift weights. In the 80s, it just wasn’t commonplace, and today it is. That has to account for some of the difference, but there’s just no way I can believe that nobody in the NBA is performance enhancing in some way or another. You really need to read the whole article to get the whole grasp of Blake’s point, but I applaud him for not being afraid to post his opinion, an opinion that I’m sure has crossed many basketball fans’ minds.

As for him bringing up Ben and LeBron, I don’t think he was insinuating anything specific with those 2 players as much as he was just using them as prime examples of the physical specimens that NBA players are today. But let me ask you guys this question….suppose next month Sports Illustrated breaks a story accusing LeBron of using PEDs. How would you react? Would you be shocked? Would you be defiant? I don’t think in ANY way LeBron is performance enhancing, but I’d be lying if I said I would be 100% shocked. I don’t think I can ever be shocked by a professional athlete’s off court conduct ever again.
[The Needle and the Damage Done]

This is going to be a short edition of Coast To Coast, but I have to include this video. I don’t remember seeing this live, but this is pretty hilarious:

I guess you can’t say LeBron is ALWAYS the perfect teammate.
[LeBron James Farts on the Bench]