Cavaliers Get Angry, but Not Even : NBA playoffs: Haunted by a reputation for softness and taunted by opponents, they can’t seem to beat the Bulls.

Mark Price threw the basketball at an opponent once.

Of course, it was only Chuck Person, the Minnesota Timberwolves’ hooligan, and it was self-defense.

“I was comin’ down the court,” Price says, “and he kind of chucked me with an elbow and I just kinda threw the ball at him after the foul. It wasn’t really as big a deal as everyone thought it was.”

Brad Daugherty got into a fight once.

Of course, it was with Detroit’s Bill Laimbeer, who might have provoked Gandhi, and it’s not hard to figure out which of them started this one.

Hot Rod Williams got upset once.

Of course, it was only after a Sport magazine article said the Cleveland Cavaliers displayed “the toughness of hairdressers” in last season’s playoffs. It was the latest in a string of insults, succeeding last spring’s favorite, “marshmallows.”

So even if Price sings in his church choir, and Daugherty, Williams and Larry Nance like to fish and the roster is mostly soft-spoken guys from small Southern towns, it’s not true that the Cavaliers are too mellow, soft or passive to get angry.

They get angry, in their way.

“You get tired of hearing it, but what are you going to do?” Price asks. “People are going to say what they’re going to say. What are we supposed to do, put somebody in the hospital?

“We have players, and we play the way we play. You can like it or call it what you want. That’s the way we play.”

You wouldn’t confuse them with rough-and-tumble teams, such as the old Pistons or the new New York Knicks, or with the Chicago Bulls, another finesse team but a more successful one that has tortured Cleveland annually and gleefully.

This is the fourth post-season meeting between the Bulls and Cavaliers in the Michael Jordan-Mark Price era. They have followed two classic patterns: When the Bulls are favored, they win; when the Cavaliers are favored, the Bulls win.

The Bulls aren’t shy in talking about it.

“We’ve proved ourselves and they haven’t,” said Michael Jordan before this series, when players are usually trying to think up compliments for their opponents to avoid firing them up.

“I’m pretty sure that’s playing on that organization’s mind, in terms of changes and what things have to be done if they don’t do it this time.”

The Bulls won Game 1 when Jordan, single-covered as always by the Cavaliers, according to Coach Lenny Wilkens’ stubbornly held principles, scored 43 of his team’s 91 points.

They trounced Cleveland in Game 2, Daugherty providing the perfect metaphor for a wholly listless effort by everyone in a Cavalier uniform by missing a three-on-none breakaway layup.

“Just missed it,” drawled Daugherty, in yet another metaphor for Cavalier passion. “Missed lots of them.”

This is the team of the ‘90s?

Magic Johnson said that, in 1988 when the Cavaliers had a 40-14 start behind Daugherty, 24; Price, 25; and Williams, 26.

They had the best record in the NBA through mid-March, but they flattened out in the final weeks of the season and finished 57-25. In the first round of the playoffs, the underdog Bulls, who had finished 10 games behind them, upended them, winning Game 5 in Cleveland, 101-100, on Jordan’s 16-footer at the buzzer, now known in Chicago as The Shot.

Every spring, the Cavaliers show up in Chicago, turn on the TV in their hotel and see Jordan cutting laterally across the floor, away from Craig Ehlo, nailing the double-clutch off-balance shot and leaping to throw a roundhouse right in triumph.

Injuries cost the Cavaliers the next two seasons. The Danny Ferry trade cost them their one electric personality--Ron Harper.

“Ron was the kind of guy,” Wilkens says, “he came in the room, the room lit up. We haven’t had that since.”

With everyone healthy last season, they went 57-25 again . . . and lost to the Bulls again.

Something was missing. The Cavaliers were regular-season powers, with their precise offense that other coaches so admired. They were dead-eye shooters, who in the ‘92-93 season would become the first team to lead the league in all three shooting categories--from the field, from the free-throw line and from the three-point line.

They were good defenders, funneling opponents into their shot-blockers, Williams and Nance, who could do a job on an opponent’s shooting percentage.

Every season, the Cavaliers would be among the leaders in differential between their shooting percentage and that of opponents.

Every season, they would out-rebound opponents and commit fewer turnovers.

Every post-season, they would be gone in the first or second round.

Last spring, the word “marshmallow” came up, followed by “heartless” and “passive.”

This season, it was “hairdressers.” The local newspapers asked players for their reactions. The mild-mannered Williams called the author of the Sport piece, Jeff Weinstock, “a punk.” The mild-mannered coach, Wilkens, said he was getting tired of this stuff.

“Yeah, it does tee us off,” Ehlo says. “Because we don’t play that way. We play the game of basketball the way we’re coached. I don’t think it’s soft. I don’t think it’s anything other than finesse basketball, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.

“We’ve been successful with it, but maybe we need to be a little more aggressive to move up the ladder a little bit.”

Into this pristine setting wandered former Knick Gerald Wilkins. The Cavaliers signed him last fall for his supposed prowess as a defender of Jordan, to help out Ehlo.

Wilkins, a sharp dresser cast into a den of flannel shirts, was quickly nicknamed Doc Hollywood, after the movie about a cosmetic surgeon marooned in a small Southern town. “The Knicks?” Wilkins says. “They’ve a very confident bunch of guys. They really work hard. They really feel they can beat anybody--any day, any time. They play that way. They play real hard. They’ll bang with you. . . .

“The Knicks have to play that way. They don’t have as much talent as we have, so they have to do whatever it takes to win. But they play the physical part of the game. They get all the loose balls. They’ll come back on you when they’re down.

“I think that’s what the playoffs have come to. I think everybody’s trying to get that level, that you’re going to have to get more physical, put people on their butts. . . . I don’t think it puts us at a disadvantage. I think sometimes you got to show a little bit more--give the people what they want a little more sometimes. . . . I think in order to get to the level that we want to get to, we probably need to be a little bit more physical and bang a little more. We don’t have to change our game that much just to be a little bit more aggressive.”

The level they want to get to--you hear that all the time from the Cavaliers now, along with hints that they would like to play a more aggressive game, if only they knew how.

This season, Cleveland won 12 of its final 13 games . . . and was taken to five games by a Nets team missing its point guard and both centers and with its shooting guard hobbling around on a sore knee.

The talk shows in Cleveland burned up. There were calls for the Wilkens’ firing. Normally a Hall of Famer, second only to Red Auerbach in victories, wouldn’t be in trouble, but Wilkens and Wayne Embry, the general manager, have a cool relationship, so speculation of a split-up went around the league.

The ‘90s are moving along. Their decade isn’t waiting for them, and the Cavaliers know it.

“Seven years is a long time in the NBA,” said Price before the Chicago series. “We think we’ll do well. If we don’t, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some significant changes.”

In Saturday’s Game 3, Price pushed Scottie Pippen. Daugherty was called for a flagrant foul. Jordan played with a sprained wrist and the Cavaliers had a 12-point lead in the first half. The Bulls won anyway.

Say good-night, marshmallows.