Football shmootball. In case you haven't noticed--and you definitely haven't if you only read our blog--the Cavaliers have been playing regular season games for quite a while now. Weird, isn't it? Apparently, they're 10-6, which is good enough for "Who cares, there are 66 games left" in the Eastern Conference. I could phone it in here and write what I've written many times before in this space: LeBron James is amazing, Drew Gooden is criminally underrated, Eric Snow stinks, and so on. Instead, though, I'll look at some of the surprises of this young season.

Zydrunas Ilgauskas has continued a scary trend from the past postseason and his production has fallen off quite a bit. Z's propensity for turnovers has shot up (11.9 TO-r in 2005 to 17.5 in 2006) and his shooting efficiency has dropped (.506 eFG% to .450). Thankfully, I'm only judging on a sample of 410 minutes--which is just about meaningless. Although, John Hollinger predicted a sudden drop-off in Ilgauskas's output anytime during the next few seasons in Pro Basketball Forecast 2005. I think Ilgauskas's decline is for real, but I have a hunch he'll push up his numbers by the end of the season. He's still one of the top centers in the East.

Mike Brown has already given up on David Wesley as an actual guard in the NBA. This isn't so surprising unto itself, but rather that it only took around twelve games to figure out. Kudos are in order for Coach Brown. I've been critical of his strange player rotations before, but it's refreshing that he won't kowtow to the veterany-goodness that Wesley is so chock full of. Unfortunately, Shannon Brown has been pretty bad in replacement so far. Though, Shannon is clearly the lesser of two evils at this point.

Conventional NBA statistics rate the Cavaliers offense as 19th in the league and the defense as 6th. However, ranking teams solely on points per game is misguided in obvious ways. Unlike in baseball, the chances a team has to score in a game aren't fixed--some teams play at a faster pace and thus have more opportunities to score. The Cavaliers play at a pretty slow pace (7th slowest in the NBA), which should lead to an underrating of the offense and an overrating of the defense.

Not to pick on Brian Windhorst, but he recently named the offense as the root of the team's temporary struggles. However, the Cavaliers score 107.8 points per 100 possessions--good enough for 10th in the NBA. The defense gives up 104.6 per 100 possessions, which lands them at 7th best. It's true that the defense is performing better than the offense, but the margin isn't that big. It's just that the Cavaliers offense is given so few possessions to work with, they often won't put up big point totals.

I don't have any clear-cut conclusions, but upon further examination, the success on both sides of the court comes from excellent rebounding. The Cavaliers are 3rd in the NBA at collecting offensive rebounds and the best when it comes to keeping the opponent from getting second chances. And you know who has been the best rebounder on the team so far this season? That's right: Drew Gooden, with Zydrunas coming in a close second. If there's anyone deserving of 35 minutes per game (besides LeBron, of course), it's not Larry Hughes. It's Drew Gooden.