CLEVELAND TEAMS

Here’s J.J. Watt sporting some Ohio State gear after he lost a bet with John Simon. Watt destroyed the Buckeyes when he played for Wisconsin and the Badgers sure could have used him last Saturday as the Buckeyes rolled his former team on their way to the College Football Playoff. Nice!

A deals a deal…@JJWatt found out the hard way. GO BUCKS! pic.twitter.com/10nNzXQa5u

— John Simon (@johnesimon54) December 10, 2014

Well that was a buzzkill.

Lebron James is a great player, but we’ve all known for years that he doesn’t always react well to pressure. We all remember the Boston meltdown here in Cleveland, even if the national media chose to ignore it. Then of course we had Lebron’s Finals “performance” against the Dallas Mavericks.

Of course, we’ve also seen Lebron when he gets angry and plays like a beast.

Lebron lets the moment get to him sometimes, and unfortunately that happened again last night. With all the hype and hero-worship centered around his return, Lebron had a lot on his mind and it showed. He was terrible last night. He couldn’t shoot and rarely got aggressive on the offensive end. He had eight turnovers!

Of course, this is a new team, and Lebron thrives on working with and setting up his teammates. They’re still learning how to play together, so the inevitable mistakes just made Lebron even less comfortable as the night progressed.

It’s one game. This team will learn how to play together, and the only thing that matters is how they play together next spring in the playoffs and hopefully the Finals.

The journey begins tonight, and Nike kicks it off with a pretty awesome Lebron James commercial focused on the city of Cleveland.

Lebron has been all business so far and has focused more on the challenges ahead versus the idea of being home. But with this ad he reiterates the ultimate goal – a championship for the city of Cleveland.

Bill Simmons returned from his ESPN suspension with his annual NBA rankings, and this comment caught my attention:

[E]very 2015 Cavs home game is going to be appointment viewing. Even the ones against Philly and Utah. Everyone forgets how fantastic their home games were in 2009 and 2010, how much energy ripped through that building every night, and how LeBron always seemed to feed off his hometown peeps. They went 39-2 at home in 2009 with inferior talent, a clueless coach and a roster that couldn’t do 40 percent of the stuff that this 2015 Cavs team can do. These LeBron 2.0 home games are going to be a borderline religious experience. I really believe that. It’s just one of many reasons why they’re our 2015 League Pass champs.

The “clueless coach” line cracked me up. I still can’t believe I actually supported the idea of Mike Brown coming back here in 2013. While he was clueless in 2009 as Simmons pointed out, some of us didn’t realize just how bad Brown could be as a head coach until last season, which is one of the worst coaching jobs I’ve ever seen in Cleveland (and that’s saying something!).

In his article, Simmons also raves about David Blatt, so let’s hope he’s right about that one. So far Blatt is living up to his reputation as an innovative coach.

All week long the national media was heaping praise on the Cleveland Browns. And after that impressive win last week against Pittsburgh they deserved it.

But much of the praise got way out of hand, with Mike Greenberg from Mike & Mike proclaiming that the Browns would be 6-2 after facing three bad teams starting with the Jaguars. Given the unpredictable nature of the NFL, that prediction was suspect at best, and even bordered on the ridiculous when you consider that before the season started guys like Greenberg were predicting the Browns would be so bad that Johnny Manziel would be starting by the bye week.

The Browns had been very good through five games, but we know they’re not an elite team. The Browns aren’t good enough to beat any NFL team, even a winless NFL team, when they play as poorly as they did today.

Here are some observations from today’s comedy of errors:

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