LeBron fever hits Hub: Paxson likes James' maturity

["Stephen Beauregard" <sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

LeBron fever hits Hub: Paxson likes James' maturity

by Steve Bulpett
Monday, July 14, 2003







People toss the term around often when they're talking about LeBron James.




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They can't deride his wondrous basketball abilities, so they talk about his
``posse.'' They say the kid is good, but he comes with this ``posse,'' and it
comes out sounding like garbage from people who don't really know - frankly,
people who see a young African-American millionaire and think something must
be fishy.

Jim Paxson doesn't get it.

``His best friends are his high school teammates, and all of them are going to
college to play basketball except one, who's going to play football at Ohio
State,'' said the Cavaliers' chief of basketball operations. ``The other two
guys around him are his Uncle Randy, who's kind of making sure he keeps his
commitments and does what he needs to do, and Maverick Carter's another former
teammate that's a little bit older. And he's got his mom, and she's been
great.''

In other words, if this is James' ``posse,'' we should all be so lucky.

``I'm not sure what people expect, but he's 18 and he's mature,'' Paxson said
of James, who makes his Reebok Pro Summer League debut with the Cavaliers
tonight (8) against the Celtics at UMass-Boston. ``He handles things in a way
that I don't think my 17- and 19-year-old could handle, and he seems to have a
good sense of who he is. He knows that basketball is the most important thing,
and that's where he's got to establish himself - on the floor. He doesn't seem
to let all this other stuff out there bother him.

``He went to a small Catholic school in Akron, and considering all the
notoriety, he just seems a lot more well grounded than people expect.''

While the top pick in the NBA draft is grounded just weeks out of high school,
all around him seems to be taking off. Interest is up for James' presence at
the Reebok Pro Summer League, and things are positively mood-altering back in
Cleveland.

``It's been crazy,'' said Paxson of the response to James. ``We were so far
down in season tickets that there was a long way to go, and I'm not going to
tell you we're going to be completely sold out for next season, but the
process has started and he's had a huge impact. Now the team needs to get
better and start winning, and I think if that happens, the combination of him
being here and us winning will be incredible for the franchise and the
season-ticket base.

``We're a few weeks from the Browns starting training camp and all the talk
radio stuff is about us. No one's asked about the quarterback controversy, the
linebackers or anything else. It's Cavaliers, some Indians and some Browns. So
that part of it's been nice.''

So has the part where the franchise went with a plan and persevered through
some tough seasons to get in this position. Paxson credits Cavs owner Gordon
Gund for having the nerve to weather the storm.

``He understood three years ago that the only way to get to this point and
have a chance to build it back up was to go this route with the tax coming and
the commitments we had salary-wise,'' Paxson said. ``He's been a 20-year owner
and I'm happy for him because he's excited again. When you've had a franchise
this long and the last four years were tough financially, you know, he's taken
a beating and it's nice to see things heading back in the right direction for
him and our fans and the organization.

``There was no guarantee we'd get the No. 1 pick. If we were trying to lose
games, we would have lost every one of them - and we almost did, but not
quite. I just thought that we probably needed to take one more step back and
put ourselves in a position to, if you got lucky, have a shot at the kid - but
you'd still get another good young player. And starting this year we had the
ability to start adding some pieces and hopefully create some value with some
of your young guys and turn that into players. The best thing I've done is
kept Gordon out of the (luxury) tax at this point and saved a lot on payroll
for a team that would have been mediocre. So we went to the bottom this year
and got lucky. Getting LeBron just accelerates our process of getting better.

``But even better is that we're set up salary-wise that in a couple of years
as LeBron is hopefully taking some strides to becoming the player we hope he
becomes, we'll be able to add a significant player. So we have some very good,
young players and we also have the flexibility to continue to improve around
these players as we go forward in the next four years.''

The on-court improvements take their next step this week at UMass-Boston.

Thanks,

Steve
sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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