World's finest

-- just ask him

If only everyone in the Cleveland sports scene had Damon Jones attitude.

The self-proclaimed greatest shooter in the world -- and as he freely admitted, it remains self-proclaimed -- didn't even advance past the first round of the NBA's 3-point Shootout last night. Just a bad night, said the self-proclaimed greatest shooter in the world, who is 35th in the league in 3-point percentage. Even Michael Jordan, who has six championship rings, has a bad game, said the guy with no rings. Just wait til next year when he has another chance, said the guy who has played 11 minutes in the Cavs last three games.

Just wait til next year? Wait, maybe everyone in the Cleveland sports scene does share Damon Jones' attitude. After all, we've been waiting for next year for the last 40 years or so.

If Damon Jones can proclaim himself the world's greatest shooter despite having never played for the same team in back-to-back years until he signed with the Cavs, maybe we have all kinds of greatests in Cleveland already. They just need Damon Jones' attitude to let the world know it.

Just think ...

Kellen Winslow Jr. is the world's greatest tight end. Just ask him, he'll tell you. He apparently did go to the Damon Jones Attitude Makeover School.

Keith Foulke is the world's greatest closer, despite no saves last year and his spring-training retirement this year.

Mark Shapiro is the world's greatest general manager, despite the fact that the Indians have just one winning season during his five-year tenure.

C.C. Sabathia is the world's greatest pitcher, as long as you qualify it to mean left-handed pitchers under 26 years old who have never pitched for more than one team.

Zydrunas Ilgauskas is the world's greatest center, among those who are from Lithuania.

Charlie Frye is the world's greatest quarterback from northern Ohio. Who hasn't crashed his motorcycle.

If only Damon Jones could get to each of these guys and let them know exactly how good each of them is. Then maybe we'd finally have players the caliber of Damon Jones, players who will do nothing but bring us non-stop championships.

The more things change ...

New York, Atlanta, Toronto, and Charlotte. Great vacation spots? Some of the largest cities in North America? Better places to live than Cleveland?

Or, all crappy teams that have defeated the Cavs this season? Actually, that, and all of the above. And maybe soon, all places that Lebron James would rather play than Cleveland, knowing our luck.

The Cavs' 101-98 loss to the New York Knicks Wednesday night -- at home, nonetheless -- marked the team's fourth loss to the dregs of the Eastern Conference. The Charlotte Bobcats (4-11), the Toronto Raptors (5-10), and the New York Knicks (6-11) have the three worst records in the East. Atlanta (6-7) is already 4½ games out of first in their division, the largest deficit of any second-place team. Combined, those four teams are 21-40. Take out their victories against each other and the Cavs, and they are 13-36 in all other games. Extrapolate a 13-36 record over 82 games, and you've got a 21-win team.

The Cavs have four losses against a 21-win team. Atlanta and Toronto are two of the next three opponents, which should make the Cavs as confident as a high-school freshman at his first dance.

Just when we finally thought we had a good team, the Cavs go and pull this on us. The best player of his generation playing ball in his backyard for a team that plays in what some call the worst conference in the history of sports. The Indians disappointed, the Browns went in the tank, but the Cavs were there waiting for us, waiting to build on the promise of last year.

But once again in Cleveland, it's not next year, it's last year. After Friday's game, Larry Hughes will have missed half the season. Zydrunas Ilgauskas is playing like he thinks it's still the playoffs. The Cavs can't turn up the dial against lousy teams. And God is laughing.

It's kind of funny -- here's the Cavs with a 9-6 record, a half-game out of the Central Division lead, just 2½ games behind the Orlando Magic for best record in the conference. They've defeated the Spurs in San Antonio, which happens as often as Rasheed Wallace says something nice about a referee. They're on pace to win just as many games as last season. They've got a presumably happy Lebron James locked up until the end of the decade.

And yet there's that Cleveland smell lingering around this team. Do we look at the 9-6 mark, which puts them in the top quarter of the league in any given year? Or do we look at the fact that 13 of the first 15 games were against teams currently with losing records, and wonder why that mark is only 9-6?

No one wonders what God's looking at. And really, after what's happened in this town for four decades, no one really wonders what the rest of us are looking at either.