New Look Cavaliers take on Charlotte Friday Night

The new look Cleveland Cavaliers will be in for a true road test as they take on the Charlotte Bobcats in the second game of a back-to-back. LeBron James and company will be without newly acquired Antawn Jamison for Thursdays contest against Denver. They will also be shorthanded as they traded away Zydrunas Ilgauskas and a first round selection in next year’s draft. However, Jamison is scheduled to make his first start on Friday versus the Bobcats.

Playing the Cavs in their first game with Jamison may be a good thing for Charlotte. There is usually a learning curve that most players deal with when going to a new team. Sometimes it takes a week, and sometimes it may take several. The hardest thing to get familiar with is generally the defensive philosophy. The Bobcats are a defensive oriented team that likes to get their opponents out of their rhythm. It may not be too difficult a task to do that against Cleveland Friday as the Cavs will have a hard enough time on their own.

Stephen Jackson is leading the Bobcats in scoring with a 21.7 point per game average, but Charlotte relies on solid defense to keep them in games. They are only allowing 94 points per game this season which is 3rd in the NBA behind Cleveland and Boston. Tenacious defense is how the Bobcats hold teams down offensively. It’s surprising that Charlotte doesn’t have more of a rebounding edge than they do, but they make it very difficult for teams to get open shots, which is why they rank so high as a team defense. Gerald Wallace pulls down an average of almost 11 boards a night, but there are no other Bobcats that get more than 7.

It will be hard to predict how quickly Antawn Jamison will gel with his new team mates, but if they allow him to do what he does offensively it shouldn’t take too much time. The Cavs length will be hard to contend with for many teams as they will now have 3 players that are capable of blocking shots and clogging up the paint. Jamison, Varejao and Shaquille O’Neal create a three-headed beast on the inside that rivals that of Gasol, Bynum and Odom for the Los Angeles Lakers. This may be one of the reasons for Jamison’s signing as he creates much more of a threat defensively than Amare Stoudemire.

We can expect Charlotte to be focused Friday night due to their embarrassing loss to New Jersey earlier this week. It sometime takes a loss like that to wake a team up, and the Bobcats have been napping for the last few weeks.

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