On the Draft Party, the Draft, and Part One with Sandy D

I meant to get up here sooner today, but I just wanted to thank everybody who made it out to Mullarkeys last night for the Cavaliers Draft Party.  I had a lot of fun, and it was awesome that as many people were able to make it as came through the door for all the festivities.  I tried to thank about as many people as I had a twitter handle for first thing this morning, and for those non-twitter users I think I got to most of them by text message, but if I missed you just know I really appreciated ringing in 2011 Cavs Draft with everybody over in Downtown Willoughby.  Hopefully we can do something like that again in the future.

I did also want to send a big shout-out over to my boy Glenn Moore specifically too.  Broadcasting live on location with a pro like Glenn was great, and the updates and insights from Daryl Ruiter reporting live on location as well as Joe Lull and Rick from Waiting For Next Year added a lot to the party.  It was also a great move by Glenn to invite the Crush Girls, and even nicer of them to stop by.  I'll definitely be at opening day downtown when the Crush begin their campaign for the Lingerie Super Bowl, and highly recommend everybody else do the same.

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As far as my reactions go with respect to the players drafted and the moves both made and not made, I plan to dive more into that over the weekend.  I would say briefly that I do think as the days go by we will step back and look at this draft for what it was, as opposed to what it wasn't.  In the very beginning, before we all started diving deep into youtube clips, the inner-workings of Chad Ford's brain, and the mock draftology of basketball, I felt like this draft would be a success if the Cavaliers were able to draft Kyrie Irving.  I also said that anything that happens from there would be a bonus, but Irving would represent a winning night.  The Cavaliers got Irving, and I'm standing by that take at this point in time.



Now I say that because I too fell into that same trap of beginning to almost force this draft to maybe produce more than its talent pool was capable of.  Maybe.  I'm trying hard here to like the Tristan Thompson pick.  My impressions of Tristan over this past year at Texas were not good ones.  I covered him down at the McDonald's All American game, was around him and Kyrie and Sullinger and all those guys for the media availability portions, and in turn followed almost all of them all season.  I didn't like what I saw from the kid down at Texas.  He's a Cavalier now though, and I trust that Chris Grant's team did more research than the browsing I did into his career, and I'm going to approach this with an open mind.

So as far as all that goes, I'll get back into that more this weekend as I mentioned.  I'll probably get into the fact that I was with Jay Bilas too, screaming mad that David Lighty didn't get taken, but I'll leave all that for later. 

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For the moment though, I did want to post a link to a two part series I'm doing with my good friend Sandy Dover over at SLAM Online.

 

Part One went up this afternoon, talking about the current state of the Cavaliers, and where they go from here.  Check it out over at the San Dova Speakeasy, really appreciate Sandy reaching out to collaborate with me on it.  Click right here to check out part one, and keep an eye out for part two, coming soon!  

Have a great weekend.