Cavaliers are in a position of trust

He isn't looking happy today, after his Cavaliers followed their beating by the Lakers with a loss Tuesday at Indiana in which the Pacers outscored them 3-2 in the final 0.8 seconds. In the bigger scheme, however, Cleveland coach Mike Brown has been almost exultant throughout his team's breakout season.

"He was his own worst critic, and he would beat himself up a lot trying to make this team better,'' center Zydrunas Ilgauskas said. "He's still the same way -- he'll hold you accountable for everything, he's still very detail-oriented. But he just smiles more this year.''

Who really cares if Mike Brown is smiling? When it happens at a high-pressure franchise like Cleveland, the coach's humor turns into a symptom of good times to come.

"It's just a feeling of trust that you have with this group,'' said Brown, who in his fourth season with Cleveland has become a favorite to win Coach of the Year. "It's at a level that exceeds -- that definitely exceeds -- the level of the previous three teams.''

This is one of those chicken-or-egg things. Are the Cavs happy because they're a 39-11 championship contender? Or are they nearly even in the East with the defending champion and top-seeded Celtics as a result of their happiness? Brown believes the latter question is more relevant than the former.

"What [GM] Danny [Ferry] and I were beating our heads about this summer was, when you're talking about a championship team, what do you need?'' Brown said. "You need a good team, you need a superstar, you need a couple of stars around that superstar, you need consistency -- all of the normal things. And the thing that everybody says you need is chemistry. But what is chemistry? I don't know.

"Finally I came up with [the perspective that] chemistry is trust. At our precamp dinner that you have before the season opens, that's all we talked about. I had a 10-minute speech on trust, how trust equals chemistry. I had it on the board, had the formula laid out just like an equation. That's all I talked about. We ate, and that's it. No X's and O's, no we're going to do this here or win this many games or we've got to win the division or conference. We've just got to find chemistry. It means trust.''

The Cavs' moves have been made over the years like a trapeze artist leaping from one bar to the next. They became the rare worst team to land the No. 1 pick in the lottery (and the rights to LeBron James) ... They were sold to a young, take-charge ownership group that learned the business the hard way while trying to hire Larry Brown as team president even as he was still coaching the Pistons to the NBA Finals; Brown arranged for the hirings of Mike Brown and Ferry (and isn't it obvious now that Larry knew what he was doing?) ... In the following years, LeBron expressed frustration at the archaic, walk-it-up offense as Brown emphasized a foundation of defense ... Teammates came and went as Ferry continued to turn over the roster in that search for the kind of talent that results in trust. Now they appear to have it, or at least something very close to it.

"We police ourselves, we don't let anybody step out of line and we make sure that everybody does what they're supposed to do,'' Ilgauskas said. "It starts with LeBron, because if he falls in line and he follows all the rules, then everybody has to fall in. It starts with Ben [ Wallace], who won a championship, and Mo [Williams] and me and everybody else. We have good veteran players who have not had any problem in the past with anybody. We don't have any knuckleheads.''

The season sweep by the Lakers on Sunday in Cleveland demonstrated that the Cavs may be a tier below Los Angeles in overall talent (without forgetting that the Cavs have established a three-year trend of elevating their play in the postseason, a continuing likelihood as they keep growing as a team over the second half of the season). Ferry continues to investigate trades before the Feb. 19 deadline that could advance his team in their ultimate races with the Celtics, Lakers and four-time champion Spurs