Cavalier attitude is different now

Against which team, the Cavs don't know. ''I wish we did," sighed rookie coach Mike Brown, who has not gotten sufficient credit for guiding his team to the fourth-best record in the East and doing so despite not having his second-best player (Larry Hughes) for more than half the season. ''But it's out of our control."

So Cleveland is content to let the regular season sort of come to an underwhelming conclusion, which means sitting James so he can rest his sore left ankle and keeping an eye on the others. The Cavs can afford such luxuries, given that they have been on a roll since the All-Star break, which, as James pointed out last night, was the time they went south last year.

''We're very comfortable," James said before last night's game. ''We're very happy with our performance, especially after the All-Star Game. We're feeling good about ourselves." The Cavs are 18-11 since the break.

The Cavaliers haven't won a playoff series since 1993, when they were still playing in Richfield, Ohio, and Lenny Wilkens was their coach. They will be favored against whichever team they meet in the first round, in part because of the humdrum level of the competition and also because they've had themselves a pretty successful season. Going simply by wins and losses, this assemblage has the chance to be the fourth most successful team in franchise history.

That's pretty remarkable, given the mess the Cavs were in this time last year. There had been an ownership change and the new boss decided he didn't want Paul Silas around anymore. Brendan Malone took over for the final 18 games -- and won eight. Cleveland was 10 games over .500 just before the All-Star break and finished 42-40, losing the eighth playoff spot to the Nets via the tiebreaker.

Now, had they made it, they would have been cannon fodder for the Heat, as were the Nets. But the disappointing finish led to wholesale changes and produced Brown, new GM Danny Ferry, and some difference-makers via trade/free agency, including Hughes, Donyell Marshall, Flip Murray, and Damon Jones.