After the Cleveland Cavaliers won the 2013 NBA draft lottery, the ownership of the team made it pretty clear that they didn't want any part of the 2014 tankapalooza
"We were hoping regardless of what pick we got that this would be our last lottery," Dan Gilbert said at the time. "We thought originally after everything had to be reset that it would be a three-year process. You never know. It could be four. We thought three years, but having No. 1 and 19, we've got a pretty good chance of this being the last one for a while."
Unfortunately for the Cavs they picked Anthony Bennett with the first overall pick and Sergey Karasev with the 19th. The two players have combined for 5.8 points per game this season and have certainly not proved as effective as Gilbert would have liked.
The Cavaliers have stuck with their guns however and traded away the troublesome Andrew Bynum for Luol Deng in a move which they hoped would see them move up the standings. However, the Cavs dropped nine games in January and fell behind even the most mediocre playoff teams in the Eastern Conference.
But with seven games remaining in the season, the Cavaliers can dream of the postseason. They sit 2.5 games behind the Atlanta Hawks with just the New York Knicks in between the two teams.
In the remaining seven games, the Cavs face a host of winnable games including one against the Hawks and one against the Milwaukee Bucks, the worst team in basketball.
Of course, a playoff berth is by no means a certainty and grabbing that eighth seed would mean facing off against either the Indiana Pacers or the Miami Heat in the first round. But for Cavaliers fans, it would mark the first postseason appearance since the departure of LeBron James and that is progress.
