King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Statement game in Boston for the Cavs. The statement: A loss. Plus Rocket to media he's done using: Drop dead.

Read more: Sports, Baseball, Media, NBA, Basketball, Major League Baseball, Roger Clemens, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, MLB

Feb. 28, 2008 | The new-look Cleveland Cavaliers went to Boston Wednesday night for a statement game against the Celtics.

The statement: "Wait a second. How did we get Wally Szczerbiak?"

The Celtics beat the Cavs 92-87, a score that was closer than the game thanks to some garbage-time action, including a 3-pointer at the buzzer. The Cavaliers retooled at the trade deadline last week, switching out half their roster, to make a run at a second straight Eastern Conference title and, more important, to make LeBron James happy.

James is palling around with Jay-Z, a part owner of the New Jersey Nets, who are going to be the Brooklyn Nets soon, and wouldn't the biggest basketball star in the world be a nice fit in the Big Apple. James isn't exactly shouting down the whispers that it's just a matter of time before he's going to be waking up to find he's king of the hill, top of the heap. But he had been barking that he needed help in Cleveland.

Adding Szczerbiak, Delonte West, Ben Wallace and Joe Smith and subtracting Larry Hughes, Drew Gooden, Cedric Simmons, Shannon Brown, Ira Newble and Donyell Marshall was general manager Danny Ferry's ambitious plan for turning the Cavs into a championship team, which would theoretically make James want to stay with his hometown team, a dubious theory.

Winning a championship could just as easily be a motivation to leave, content in having done right by the team he grew up rooting for from down the road in Akron.

"I didn't think we were good enough to win the championship," Ferry said Friday after the trades that made over his roster.

The Cavs still don't look like they're good enough to win the championship, though they're probably a little better than they were. Wednesday was a little bit one of those nights, with the Celtics' shots falling and the Cavs' shots not. Cleveland shot 38 percent, Boston a scorching 52. James also missed a few minutes in the second quarter with a sprained ankle.

"When you have an off-shooting night like this, it's tough to pull a game out," James said, "especially against the best team in the league."

Maybe that was the statement, although, like most regular-season games, the real statement was "Just another Wednesday night in February," as evidenced by James and Wallace enjoying a laugh together on the bench with two and a half minutes to go and the Cavs down by 14.

The Celtics are the best team in the league only if you consider the Eastern Conference to be the league, and maybe then only if you ignore Detroit. They've cooled down since their red-hot start and are only 18-9 since the start of the year, 15-9 since Jan. 9. When the shots are falling, sure, these new Cavs can hang with them. But would either team be in the top three in the West? At the moment, that wouldn't be a statement I'd make.

Next page: Clemens, his media tour over, turns on the media. Plus: Houston's post-traumatic overachievement