Watching The Cleveland Cavaliers, In The Waiting Room

Since the final day of February, the Cleveland Cavaliers have won six of the eight games they've played, including two against potential Eastern Conference semifinal opponents and another over a probable semifinalist from the West. Within that same span, they have also engaged in the flimsiest and most modern of the controversies this NBA season has supplied to date. Last Sunday, the day after Cleveland handed the Boston Celtics a 17-point loss, LeBron James tweeted a pair of motivational statements, presumably directed at teammates. His words seemed like they might have been ripped off from refrigerator magnets in the break room of Gatorade headquarters, electrolyte koans:

It's this simple. U can't accomplished the dream if everyone isn't dreaming the same thing everyday. Nightmares follow. — LeBron James (@KingJames)March 6, 2016

Structure and Consistency creates Perfection. U shortcut, u come up short! Straight Up. — LeBron James (@KingJames)March 7, 2016

The next morning, Kyrie Irving responded with one of his own, this at least self-awarely appended with "Sounds so cliché, but it's the bold truth."

Control what you can control. Sounds so cliche, but its the bold truth.
Good Morning!!

— Kyrie Irving (@KyrieIrving)March 7, 2016

The evening after Irving's foray into Twitter inspiration, the Cavaliers lost at home to a Memphis team that was missing just about every relevant player, and James expressed his frustration to reporters after the game. "I can sit up here and say that we're a team that's ready to start the playoffs tomorrow," he said, "but we're not."

Taken together, the passive-aggressive tweets and the aggressive-aggressive postgame presser led to much speculation about just how bad the vibes were in Cleveland. Pundits showed up on television to wonder if the infighting might diminish the Cavaliers' standing as favorites in the East. Some broached the subject of whether James would be willing to leave Cleveland again, which is less useful as a serious inquiry about the future than it is as a signal of the troubles of the present. Then the drizzle of bad press died out predictably, via the usual means. The quotes weren't so severe they couldn't be walked back a little, and the team wasn't so glum it couldn't throw together a few salving wins.

The cluster of episodes did, however, demonstrate the fundamentally unsettled circumstances of this Cavaliers season. If things go according to plan this year—and, social media handwringing aside, they largely have to this point—Cleveland will play exactly one fortnight of relevant basketball. That will come in the Finals, after the formality of winning the weaker Eastern Conference.

This makes the bulk of the year—the part we're in now, which takes up 95 percent of the team's time but does zilch for them in terms of public judgment—a sour luxury. The relative ease of their path to the Finals means they'll likely get a shot at avenging last year's loss to the Golden State Warriors, but in the meantime they can only suggest future achievement without actually doing any real achieving. The season is a splendidly appointed waiting room. In this lull, anything less than dominance scans as a disappointment.

Because of the team they are and the position they're in, it is almost impossible to watch the Cavaliers without trying to forecast ahead. No game, and no player within it, exists unto it- or himself. Every glinting crossover or triple-clutched layup from Irving adds two points and a matching dose of worry about his ability to function off the ball and get shots for his teammates. A Kevin Love jump hook divides the basketball-watching public between those who would like to see more of him and those who would prefer less.

Even James's historic versatility, which has been seen as a virtue for his entire career, becomes a cause for some concern with with enough conjecture. What gave the Warriors fits last summer were not shifting attacks from different angles but rather James on the block, lowering his shoulder and pounding the ball flat, again and again and again. This is the kind of thing you tend to think about half-watching the Cavs win another game by the score of 94-87.

To some degree, this is just what the regular season is like for every contending team. March wins don't mean much if they don't also portend some more in May, so fans look out for signs of what might help or hamper down the line. But the Cavaliers ratchet this up to an unprecedented degree. No team in recent history, save perhaps for James's last one, has adopted so bold a goal with such hasty preparation.

They are trying to win a title not only as a matter of professional ambition and civic duty, but also as a means of resolving the narrative arc of the most celebrated player of his generation before he slides too far past his prime. They have been assembled and re-assembled at a frantic pace—Love and Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith and Timofey Mozgov and Tyronn Lue and Channing Frye—with this objective in mind, just as another team has set itself apart as one of the best in basketball history. They are anxious, or at least they seem to be.

The Cavaliers remain a very good team, and they practice a of basketball that, divorced from the hum of desperation surrounding it, has plenty of charm. In clobbering the Clippers in Los Angeles on Sunday, they showed that off. James rammed his way down the lane, pulled up for jumpers, and flung passes on 40-foot diagonals. Tristan Thompson spent twenty-some minutes shoving away at DeAndre Jordan, Irving strobe-dribbled, Love hit a couple of nifty hooks, and Smith caught a current in the third quarter, knocking down a series of increasingly ill-advised, and therefore increasingly triumphant, threes.

At their best, as they were that afternoon, the Cavaliers are cohesive but refreshingly distinct, like a clock that draws its charm from the ease with which it might be disassembled. There is very little telepathic, magical, or otherwise inexplicable to be found here. Watch the Warriors, and you wonder how they did what they just did. Watch the Cavs, and you know.

In an alternate universe where their players did not have the names and histories they have in this one, this Cleveland team could belong to a totally respectable lineage. Judged only by their play, they have a sort of retro-futurist feel that makes them useful in a season that has been defined thus far by one squad so clearly marking out the coming direction of basketball. They are yesterday's Team of Tomorrow, so they have no choice but to try to try to wrestle the game back to the recent past, and to knock out some of its new bright lights. This is a fine pursuit, one that both vets the NBA royalty and occasionally produces a defiant championship or two of its own.

But these Cavaliers have been designed to avoid "occasionally," or "maybe," or any kind of qualification about their impending success. Their story is already told. They need to win a title, and they probably won't, at least this season. So they play a lot of good games and some pretty bad ones, and after the bad ones they give stressed-out quotes to people happy to take them, and after the good ones they bide their time until they get to find out if it amounts to anything.