Welcome back to another episode of Small Ball with Kenny Beecher, man.

I am so happy to be here to talk all things hoop with y'all.

Like I said, anytime the Bears walk out with a victory, I feel like I put together a

banger episode and the Bears got like a real win.

I mean, a bad team, but I'm like all the teams we had gone against that,

we had beat that were bad, we won by a touchdown, a field goal. We actually like put the

smackdown on the bad team and that made me feel really good. It gave me more time to go through my notes for this episode instead of, you know, standing up at the TV, hoping that a field go going to win for game. No, we was up. That's so much. I was chilling. Synergy. Basketball reference

all at the above. The bulk of today's episode, we're going to talk about what it means to be a contender. Do we give it to teams too early? And do we take it away from teams too fast? Now, the catalyst for this conversation comes from two different places. The first one is the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavaliers have not been as good as most people expected, and I've seen a lot of people

just say this team is not ready to win a championship.

And the second catalyst is Stan Van Gundy, because Stan Van Gundy used the C-word contender to talk

about the San Antonio Spurs in their win versus the OKC Thunder in the Cup semis to go to the final.

And it got me thinking about like, the

Cavs not a contender, Spurs a contender. So let's talk about it today. All right. Before the season

started, I posed a question on numbers on the board. Are the calves more like the team that started

off, this record's about to be crazy, 64 and 18, are they more like the team that finished the regular season at 15 and 8?

And I didn't have a real opinion.

I just wanted to have the conversation, right?

Because, I mean, they had one of the greatest starts in NBA history.

And then a lot of the times when a team is so great and they get to those last two months

and they struggle and it's 15 and 8. But struggle in comparison to that first start, the conversation becomes, well, they just got bored. They secured the number one spot. Why should they continue to play hard or why should they continue to try to win every single game? And I personally never really subscribed to that idea. And you saw once we got to the post season, whether it be because of injury or because of this or because of that, the Cleveland Cavaliers didn't even make it to the conference finals. Before the season started, they had an over under a 56 and a half. And I'm like, man, that's, even though they just won 64, there's something about that number that feels high. And what we're seeing right now, it may be going back to that original question,

maybe more likely that they are the team that finished 15 and 8 versus a team that started off

64 and 18. Like I said, some people are completely out on the idea of the cast before the season

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