Cleveland Cavaliers Fire Mike Brown

I really wanted to include a question mark at the end of that headline. Sure the Cleveland Cavaliers lost nearly 50 games this season. Sure they couldn’t make it to the playoffs where the No. 8 seed was six games under .500. All things equal, the Cavs firing Mike Brown makes some sense on the surface. 

That’s just on the surface.

But this is a team that showed marked improvement from a 2012-2013 campaign that saw it win just 24 games and pick No. 1 overall in the 2013 NBA draft. What exactly did the brass in Cleveland expect from a team that was running youngsters Tristan Thompson, Kyrie Irving and Dion Waters out there on a nightly basis. The only thing that this organization could have expected was gradual improvement.

That’s exactly what the Cavs did under Brown in 2013-2014. They won nine more games than in the previous season, while Irving turned in an All-Star campaign and is now the face of a franchise that hasn’t had one since LeBron James bolted for South Beach.

Now that the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors, two attractive head-coaching destinations, are looking for a new man to roam the bench, Cleveland enters the coaching market with very little to offer potential candidates. Brown might not be the best coach, but it’s going to be nearly impossible for the Cavs to find an upgrade this offseason. At the very least, he was leading them in the right direction.

Then again, this report could be 100 percent false. There is a decent chance, at least according to ESPN, that the Cleveland Browns actually fired Mike Brown.

Now that just opens up an entirely new can of worms. A can I am not really willing to touch in this article. Thanks for that one, ESPN.

Photo: David Richard, USA Today