Hughes' position switch paying off for Cavaliers

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CLEVELAND -- Larry Hughes is an experiment. Well, his position is. The Cavaliers' shooting guard-turned-point guard is in the second month of his transition from player to playmaker and, as in any experiment, you are bound to have a multitude of results.

In the first quarter of Game 2 of the Cavaliers and Wizards series Wednesday night, Hughes feathered a perfect pass into Cleveland center Zydrunas Ilgauskas. Ilgauskas didn't finish the play, but he did recover the rebound and drew the foul. Two points, Cleveland.

On the very next possession, Hughes fired a pinpoint pass to ... no one. His intended target was Ilgauskas, but unfortunately Big Z zigged when he should have zagged and the ball bounced harmlessly out of bounds. Turnover, Cleveland.

"But," insists Cavaliers coach Mike Brown. "Larry makes a whole lot more good plays than bad."

The Larry Hughes Point Guard Experiment has been a game of trial and error since early March, when Hughes took over the starting point guard spot from Daniel Gibson. Hughes' switch to the point wasn't a case of Brown spotting something in a film session; rather, Brown liked what he saw from a Hughes-Sasha Pavlovic-LeBron James lineup and opted to make it his starting unit when Gibson, who had taken over for Eric Snow a month earlier, suffered a toe injury. Inserting the 6-5 Hughes also gave Cleveland one of the biggest backcourts in the league.

"I'm no genius," says Brown. "Sasha was the sixth man when Gibson got hurt. I just liked how they played together so I made it the starting lineup."

Brown says he did not take into account Hughes' brief run as the Philadelphia 76ers' point guard, a position he filled with limited success during his first two seasons. There, Hughes earned praise from Sixers coach Larry Brown for his defense but never meshed with Allen Iverson and was eventually replaced in the lineup by Snow. Less than a year later, Hughes was shipped out of town.

There have been no such struggles this season. Shortly after Hughes took over the starting spot on March 3, the Cavaliers rattled off eight consecutive wins. His trademark defense began to show. In Hughes' first three weeks in the starting backcourt, Cleveland held opponents to 41.8 percent shooting, the lowest percentage in the league during that stretch.