The road trip continues as the Cleveland Cavaliers travel to Phoenix to play the Suns. The Suns have been a super confusing/bad team so far. Steve Nash is still awesome and one of my favorite players in the league, but they don't have as many weapons as they used to. If Nash manages to bring this squad to the playoffs, it will be his biggest accomplishment yet, maybe. That'd be downright amazing.

Song Of The Day: One Love- Bob Marley

I just got back from my vacation in Jamaica a few days ago and I'm not ready to let go of the music yet. Enjoy.

Tonight's Overview:

Cleveland Cavaliers (4-5) at Phoenix Suns (4-5)

The Cavaliers struggled mightily in protecting the paint in this loss to the Utah Jazz earlier this week. Fortunately, the Suns don't really have many low-post scorers for the Cavs to worry about. Marcin Gortat is a more than capable center, but outside of him, I'm not too worried. Gortat is averaging just 12.7 points per game, and that leads the Suns. He is playing some pretty limited minutes, however, at just over 26 minutes per game. His shooting percentage of over 61% is among the best in the league. Gortat is skilled, but it's nothing that Anderson Varejao cannot handle.

While perusing the stats and roster of the Suns, I noticed that Alvin Gentry is something similar to what Byron Scott is doing. He's spreading the minutes around and making sure that no one is playing too many in this compressed season. Only Jared Dudley has played more than 30 minutes per game. Both teams are utilizing their benches a lot and it shows. The Suns are 4th in the league in bench points per game while the Cavs are 5th. The second units will have a big impact on this game.

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It's over. The miserable NBA lockout of 2011 is finally gone. We now have an NBA season upon us. We will, after all, get to see Kyrie Irving, Tristan Thompson, Baron Davis, and company donning wine and gold this winter. 

Games are scheduled to start Christmas Day and training camp will start December 9th. There will be a condensed free agency period in between now and then. It will be a 66 game schedule. Considering the alternatives, that's a pretty good outcome. I'll take 66 games over zero games any day of the week.

There are obviously many more details regarding the new CBA agreement and I will be sure to go over those and how they impact the Cavaliers in the coming days. For now, however, all that matters is that we are not going to miss the entire season. You are now free to get uncontrollably excited about Kyrie tossing alley oops to Tristan. 

The NBA's back. Let's go Cavs. 

I know it's not looking good for the NBA season, but all of the basketball bloggers at SBNation are carrying on as if there will be one eventually. Here's the necessary reading material in case the lockout ends in our lifetime.  Enjoy!

Southwest

• Mavericks - MavsMoneyball
• Spurs - Project Spurs
• Rockets - The Dream Shake
• Hornets - At The Hive
• Grizzlies - Straight Outta Vancouver

Southeast

• Wizards - Bullets Forever
• Magic - Orlando Magic Daily
• Heat - Sports Agent Blog
• Hawks - Peachtree Hoops
• Bobcats - Rufus on Fire
• The rest of the links after the jump....
  

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On Monday, the NBPA met to discuss the latest offer from the NBA owners. Derek Fisher and Billy Hunter announced that the NBPA has decided to file an anti-trust lawsuit against the NBA. YahooSports' Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted the following. Prepare for sadness:

The lawyers will file suit within next two days. No need to wait on decertification. Union is disbanded immediately.

David Stern said on SportsCenter: "We are about to go to the nuclear winter of the NBA"

Fun stuff, right? Well now that the players have decided to take the "nuclear" option roughly 4 months too late, the 2011-12 NBA season seems HIGHLY unlikely. This means that we will probably lose the entire 82 game season while millionaires continue to fight with billionaires. I expect several Cavaliers players to try playing for teams overseas as Kyrie Irving tweeted earlier this week. Needless to say, this is incredibly frustrating. More updates when we get them. 

After the NBA owners issued an offer that acted as an ultimatum for the players union, I was hopeful that the lockout would soon end. It seemed that the players were running out of leverage and would soon give in to the offer that the owners were suggesting. On Tuesday afternoon, the players union met again to go over the most recent proposal by the owners....and they rejected it. 

David Stern and the owners set Wednesday at 5 PM as the deadline for the players to accept the 50-50 offer. If the players were not to accept the offer (which they didn't), Stern claimed that the owners would drop the offer to 47-53. Player's rep, Billy Hunter, spoke about the ultimatum in today's press conference: 

"We're aware of who the hard-line teams are. We understand their position, but not intimidated by that...we're prepared to negotiate."

The general consensus from the players side was that they have made sufficient compromises on the economic issues and are now expected the owners to compromise on system changes. They cite the sign-and-trade and tax cliff (among others) as the main issues that were satisfactory in the most recent offer. 

The players expressed that they want to continue to negotiate with the owners and will try to meet again before the Wednesday deadline. It remains to be seen whether the owners' ultimatum was a bluff or not. If the offer does indeed drop from 50 to 47, the players union may have to pursue decertification. Hunter suggested that game could be cancelled through Christmas if the two sides do not come to an agreement on Wednesday. Decertification would set this back even further. 

This sucks. I want basketball. I miss Byron Scott's weird mustache and crossed arms. I want to hear Austin Carr's signature calls. Get a freaking deal done already. Love, Conrad.

Opening night of the NBA season is finally here! Wait, what? Oh that's right - the lockout. The NBPA and the NBA are still yet to come to an agreement and now comes the depressing part: we're missing games. The Cavaliers were supposed to travel to the TD Garden in Boston to face the Boston Celtics. Instead, they have not practiced as a team at all since last May. It's a damn shame, honestly. At this point, we just want basketball back and there's no telling how much longer we're going to have to wait. 

So what are we missing tonight? Forget, for a moment, that we do not even know what these two teams would even look like if the lockout didn't exist. If NBA teams had a proper offseason, trades and free agent signings could drastically alter the look of either of these teams from when we last saw them. As the teams stand now, there is still plenty that I would be anticipating. High my list would be getting to see Kyrie Irving going at it with Rajon Rondo. Rondo is generally regarded as one of the best defensive point guards in the league and would be an excellent, albeit difficult, test for our number one pick. I want to see Irving on the court and getting him out there against elite competition would be a great way to see where he stands. It would have been quite interesting to see how Byron Scott handles the apparent logjam at the position. We expect Irving to get plenty of minutes, but that would have to be managed with the minutes that belong to Ramon Sessions and Baron Davis. 

Among other things, I would be looking forward to how Omri Casspi looks. I haven't really watched many of his games in the past and am definitely interested in finding out what the Cavs got in exchange for J.J. Hickson. I want to see how Anderson Varejao and Antawn Jamison have recovered from their injuries. I want to see Tristan Thompson going up against Kevin Garnett. However, we don't get any of these things. Stupid lockout. 

What say you, Cavs fans? What are you most disappointed about missing out on tonight? How much longer are we going to have to wait to see our boys put on the wine and gold jerseys? Feel free to vent your frustration in the comments section below. 

Cleveland Cavaliers' number one draft pick, Kyrie Irving, recently conducted an interview with Dime Magazine. In said interview, Irving discusses his time at Duke, his thoughts on the NBA lockout, and his upcoming career with the Cavs. 

You can read the whole interview here. I pulled out some of the more notable excerpts after the jump. 

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I know this is wishful thinking, but if, by some miracle, we have an NBA season anytime soon, this preview will come in handy. Now, indulge me as I carry on my merry way pretending that the 2011-12 season is actually happening. 

Cleveland Cavaliers

2010-11 record: 19-63

Key roster moves: Addition of Omri Casspi, Kyrie Irving, Tristan Thompson; loss of J.J. Hickson

Team needs: Basically everything. More specifically, offense and defense.

1. Cavaliers' biggest needs in the off-season:

Where do I begin? I suppose the most glaring void is at the shooting guard position. The Cavs desperately need a consistent scoring threat. They need someone who can make scoring plays with the ball in his hands. The front office was unable to address this need in the draft because there was simply no 2-guard worth taking with either the #1 or #4 picks. If the Cavs have a chance to add a shooting guard through free agency or a trade once the lockout is lifted, that is an option they will probably explore. However, Cleveland is probably better off just waiting to draft a scoring threat in the 2012 NBA draft. There are plenty of high profile prospects in college basketball today so the Cavs should be able to grab a talented playmaker near the top of the draft. 

Furthermore, if the Cavs are able to trade some of their veteran pieces for young players or additional draft picks, they need to do it. Ramon Sessions, Antawn Jamison, Anderson Varejao, and Baron Davis are all guys that the front office should be actively shopping. We're rebuilding, let's go all-in. 

2. Cavaliers' biggest strengths and weaknesses: 

Strengths: N/A

Weaknesses: Yes.

I honestly looked for something that the Cavaliers did well last season and came up empty. There's not one facet of the game that the Cavaliers could claim to be above average in. Towards the end of the season, the players seemed to catch on to Byron Scott's offense a little bit better, but the reality is that they still sucked. On both sides of the ball, the Cavs were simply garbage. Their offensive and defensive ratings both ranked 29th in the league. Yuk. 

In order to address these abundant weaknesses, the Cavaliers need to establish an identity. They just got an influx of young talent in Irving and Thompson and they need to set a foundation. This is obviously a rather extensive rebuilding project and it will be made that much harder without some sense of direction. The franchise needs to stick to a plan on offense and allow the young players to develop within the system. The Cavs will be looking to simply add the most talented, young players that they can acquire and it would be incredibly helpful if there was some sort of structure to follow as they progress. I know that it's hard to have an identity when you don't do anything particularly well, but that should change this season. The team obviously needs to focus on the development of Irving and Thompson, so I expect to see a plethora of pick and rolls between the two of them. 

It will come as no surprise that the defense also needs a complete overhaul. However, getting Anderson Varejao back from injury will certainly help things out. Andy is an excellent post defender and should be able to help the young bigs play better D. Ryan Hollins, Samardo Samuel, and Semih Erden all showed flashes of potential last season. Once Antawn Jamison and Varejao went down, however, they had no veteran presence to help them on the court. The defense will probably still be bad next season, but it can't possibly be as bad as it was last year.

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