Welcome Cory Hughey to the CtB Staff!

Right on

We here at Cavs: The Blog are expanding to meet your needs.  We’re pleased to welcome Cory Hughey to our staff – and we’re cutting him loose right away.

Cory’s been an active voice at CtB for years.  He’s published over 1000 comments, which means he’s probably submitted over 3000 (since we just recently exterminated the comment monster).  And I’ve enjoyed each and every one of them.

Here’s one of my early (over two years ago) favorites :

“Also to the Gilbert bashers on here all of the sudden: Dan Gilbert is a self made billionaire who went to a state school and Mickey Arison is a trust fund baby who dropped out of college.”

Perfect.

Cory’s been toiling away with Kevin, Nate, and I over at gotBuckets.com for some time now.  He’s written some excellent pieces this summer.  I appreciated his take on the Kyrie Irving contract situation:

Is Irving worth a potential super max-contract (5 years, 30% of cap)? Maybe not based on last season’s production, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t be; the guy was one of the most ridiculous 19-year old offensive talents in NBA history. Every contract is situation specific. Cleveland isn’t a cosmopolitan destination that NBA players flock to.  Teams like the Cavaliers have to make the bet that their young, two-time all-star will develop into a top-10 NBA player. The NBA is also a business. Avery Bradley just got $8 million a year and he couldn’t sell a seat at TD Garden if he threw in a personal foot massage. Irving is one of the more marketable young stars in the game, a seller of seats, jerseys and cereal…someone was going to pay the man big money and the Cavs were the team with that opportunity.

And on the Shawn Marion acquisition:

Buoyed by the luxury of getting vets to sign for the minimum, APM and RAPM data at gotbuckets.com confirm that Marion should be a strong value to the Cavaliers on his salary of $1.4 million. SWAg considers that Marion was responsible for 8.5 wins over the past two seasons, while SWAgR says he added over 2 wins last season to the Mavericks.  Even with an almost assured minutes drop-off, at $1.4 million, the Matrix provides a nice value acquisition for the Cavs of at least $1 million per win, and also another veteran presence on what was formerly one of the League’s youngest teams.
As LeBron and Cavaliers General Manager David Griffin transform Euclid Beach into the South Beach of the Midwest, Marion will portray the role that Shane Battier mastered the past two seasons as a stretch four / wing hybrid who can spell James from the obligation of always having to guard the opponents best wing or big forward. Marion can still capably defend three positions, as illustrated by both APM and RAPM ranking him as better than all but about a third of NBA players on D.

Cory lived in Los Angeles for the last few years (before recently moving back to NEOhio).  Apparently Cavs: TheBlog was a home away from home for him during that time.  He’s stated and I quote: “The blog was a life saver for me.”  I think we all know that if something can save just one life, that something will all be worth it.

So here’s to Cory, as he adds his talents to our staff and helps CtB become a home away from home for other displaced Cavs fans.