Cavs: the Blog - Cleveland Cavaliers TrueHoop Blog

The NBA season never ends; free agency starts today.

I wrote the following post prior to the announcement that Cleveland extended qualifying offers to Semih Erden and Luke Harangody.  Why did this happen?  In their age 25 and 24 seasons, respectively, managing to see the court in less than half of the outings for a team that proved victorious in one-third of it’s games, while posting sub-replacement level PER; these two men apparently are non-expendable.

Anyways, I’m just bitter because after churning out the following yesterday, now I need to eliminate two players.   I was not planning on watching Erden or Harangody in a Cavs jersey again.  DJ White and Scott Machado…you never existed to me.  Man, I hope Kevin Jones rules.  I’m running this regardless…let me know your preferred 2012 free agency strategy and targets.

______________________________________________

Derrick Brown dunks against Detroit

The Cavaliers roster is rounding out nicely; a team relatively full of legitimate NBA players looks likely to take the court next year.

With the incoming rookies, and a recommended pick-up of Gibson’s option, Cleveland owns contracts with 9 players for $33 million.  Baron Davis’s amnestied $14.9M still counts towards the required team minimum salary, so almost any combination on six players allows the Cavs to meet their CBA needs.  The nine current players are:

• PG = Kyrie Irving
• SG = Dion Waiters, Daniel Gibson
• SF = Omri Casspi, Luke Walton, Kelenna Azubuike
• PF = Anderson Varejao, Tristan Thompson
• C =  Tyler Zeller

To fill out a reasonable 2012 – 2013 roster, the following needs exist:

• Back-up and third Point Guard
• Fifth Wing, preferably including some size
• Fourth and Fifth Bigs, preferably another shooter

Since last year, Anthony Parker retired and Antawn Jamison left.  The Cavs need to wrestle with other teams’ offers to Alonzo Gee.  Let’s tackle that first:

Alonzo Gee - I am of the opinion the team should match most foreseeable offers for Gee; 4 years & $16M sounds about right.  Keeping Gee provides continuity benefits – a lot of new faces don the wine & gold next season.

Familiar faces rest at the end of the bench; I say bring one of them back, as rostering eight new players next season seems excessive.  As part of summer-league & training camp, a battle ensues.  Hypothetically, I’ll say that Samardo Samuels survives as the “Fifth Big”.  Luke Harangody, Semih Erden, Manny Harris and Donald Sloan – our time together sadly ends (obviously written yesterday.  Erden and Harangody will be back.  Also Kevin Jones is onboard, so apparently no Samuels?).

So, I’m looking at four free agents and am not making big splashes.  That sounds like front office strategy for the off-season.  Chris Grant and company exhibited amazing patience over the last two years, and appear to prefer that for one more off-season.  With the 12 guys mentioned above, plus the Boom-Dizzle contract, the Cavs salary obligations approach $55 million.  I like the team that is being constructed and think it prudent to give the Irving, Waiters, TT, Zeller group a season to mesh while the franchise evaluates future needs.  I go back & forth on this, but again rest on the side of the fence of keeping Varejao.  He’s awesome and it will be interesting to watch how he fits with this team, both as a player and a mentor.

If Cleveland signs four free agents to short-term contracts with total 2012 – 2013 salary under $10 million, they enter 2013 – 2014 with $20 – $25 million in cap space.  Even  assuming the Cavs compete for a play-off berth next year, utilizing their bevy of future draft picks, the team picks twice in the mid-first round of each of the next three drafts.  Saving cap flexibility for another season or two, while accumulating young talent, then luring one high-quality free agent to Cleveland immediately before extending the team’s 22-year-old All-Star point guard…well, all that cap space, a competitive team, and the stud PG may be the only bet to lure the premium free agent.  That off-season is not this off-season.

With that as intro, here are some favorite “money-ball” free-agent options to make the team competitive next year for cheap.

Back-up Point Guard

Rumors occasionally pop-up about Jonny Flynn, the former sixth-pick with a career 11 PER.  To me, bringing aboard a project back-up point guard sounds ill-advised.   Despite already being amazing, Kyrie Irving is only twenty years old.  No need diverting any developmental coaching from Kyrie.  Instead, perhaps a steadying veteran influence proves beneficial.

AJ Price played three seasons for the Indiana Pacers, never fully embraced as their back-up point guard, but accumulating 2200 minutes and a 12 PER.  Not an efficient scorer, he creates shots off the pick & roll, while giving solid effort on defense.  There’s not much exciting about him, as he turns 26 next season.  What he is though, is a tolerable back-up NBA point guard, who spent the last two years on playoff teams.  Over the next two seasons, the Cavs likely win 35 – 45 games per year.  For two years and $2.5 million total, AJ Price represents a proven, suitable second-string floor general.

3rd point guard

Scott Machado of Iona and Jordan Taylor of Wisconsin recently completed their senior years and went undrafted.  I say, try them both out this summer, and give a two year, $1.3 million contract to the more impressive player.  Only the first year at $600K is guaranteed.

Tall Wing

Derrick Brown is a restricted free agent that turns twenty-five next season.  Defending big shooting guards and small forwards poses issues for Cleveland, as Alonzo Gee’s height matches up poorly with say…Joe Johnson.  With career NBA average of 13 points per 36 minutes, on exceedingly-acceptable 55.4% true shooting, Brown serves as a great value pick-up to add size & athleticism. Nearly 6’ – 9” with a huge wingspan; last year he held opponents to a 12.1 PER, while playing over half his minutes at small forward.  In addition to coming from Dayton, I like this fit with the current team and would overpay in the short-term (easy for me to say).  For two years, what amount makes Brown decide to come home to Ohio, and forces Charlotte to not match?   I’ll say 2 years at $3 million per season.  For a player that always made league-minimum and is currently wearing that “worst-team-ever-stink”; hopefully that gets signatures on paper.

If unsuccessful there, how about Tracy McGrady for one year and $2.5 milllion?  An elite passing wing, over the last two seasons, he averaged 12, 6 & 5 per 36 minutes, while making 37% from deep.  With my stated goal of “adding NBA players of value while not committing long-term money”; McGrady fits the bill.  His last two contracts, he signed one-year minimum-salary deals.  With a doubling of his recent salary, maybe he signs with Cleveland for a year.

Fourth Big-Man

Cleveland signed Kevin Jones of West Virginia to a partially guaranteed contract.  He lead the Big East in scoring and rebounding last year, and for the sake of this post, he knocks off Samardo Samuels as fifth big.  For the record, I like this singing.

As my money-ball veteran free agent big man, I propose to chase DJ White, also recently of Charlotte.  Surely you say “why pilfer multiple players from the worst team in NBA history”?  Well, of Charlotte’s total 3.4 win shares last year; Brown and White accumulated over 90%.  Last year, White made 43% of his long twos, in-line with his career average.  A very respectable mark for a power forward – per minute, he shoots and converts these shots at a frequency equal to Lamarcus Aldridge.  Obviously that is the only place they are similar, but White rarely turns the ball over and has a career PER of 15.  For 2 years at $1.5 million each, he appears as a good fit for Cleveland, playing fifteen minutes per game at the four when Andy switches to Center.

Summary

For under $6 million a year, and with no contracts beyond 2013 – 2014; I added a suitable back-up point guard, a big & athletic wing, and a floor-stretching power forward.  Nearly pristine salary cap flexibilty remains, and a highly adaptable rotation can be formed for any opponent.  In this “punting on 2012 free agency, money-ball scenario”, the season-opening roster is:

PG:  Kyrie Irving, AJ Price, Scott Machado

Wings: Dion Waiters, Alonzo Gee, Derrick Brown, Omri Casspi, Daniel Gibson, Kelenna Azubuike

Front Court: Anderson Varejao, Tyler Zeller, Tristan Thompson, DJ White, Kevin Jones, Luke Walton

I count the reigning rookie-of-the-year, Anderson Varejao, two highly-regarded first-round picks, plus seven other 26-and-under players that have proven themselves legitimate NBA players in the last two years.  It’s not a contender, but is an honest-to-goodness real-NBA team, with no bad-contracts and lots of reason for optimism…for Cleveland Cavaliers fans, that’s a beautiful thing.

Personally, I’m crushed. After the fourth pick announcement came down, I felt my limbs get heavy, and I was subsumed by a despondent sensation. I couldn’t hear what Adam Silver was saying anymore. I think this pick is a death sentence. Some of you will disagree with me, and I encourage you to do so in the comments. But here’s my blunt initial take in bullet form:

–Things can change from now until the night of the draft, the consensus 1-2-3 in most scouts’ and experts’ mock drafts is Davis-MKG-Beal (with the latter two in some order). I think there’s a significant drop-off after those three players are off the board. I’m not going to delineate the abilities of each player here (you can consult Kevin’s excellent draft profiles for that), but each of them, I think, have potential to be special in their own way. And at the very least, they’re going to be solid NBA starters. If another team becomes enamored of Andre Drummond or Thomas Robinson, the Cavs could still draft Beal or Kidd-Gilchrist, but, at present, it’s not a likely scenario.

–So, Thomas Robinson? On a lot of boards, he’s the fourth-best prospect in this draft, and don’t get me wrong, I like him just fine. He presents a number of the problems for the Cavaliers, though. He plays the same position as Tristan Thompson, which means if the Cavs drafted him, TT would have to learn to guard centers. Or the Cavs would have to relegate TT or Robinson to the bench and find a center through the draft or free agency. (I’m speaking of the future. Obviously, Andy Varejao will be the starting center next season if nothing crazy happens this offseason.) Or Thompson becomes trade bait. See how this scenario gets complicated rather quickly? On top of that, this is a team with a rather bare cupboard outside of Varejao (who turns 30 in September), Thompson, Kyrie Irving, and Alonzo Gee. Thomas Robinson may end up being a quite good NBA starter, but I don’t see him ever putting up an efficient 19 and 10 on a nightly basis.

–Remember that conversation we had about Andre Drummond? Turns out that wasn’t rhetorical at all. It’s time to start scrutinizing UConn’s moody man-child. If Robinson’s ceiling and basement are only a few stories apart, Andre Drummond’s NBA potential spans galaxies. The Cavs need to take a really good look at him. Perry Jones III, too. In a draft where the Cavs desperately need to land a future All-Star, interrogating every strength and flaw of the boom-or-bust prospects becomes job number one.

–Chad Ford has the Cavs drafting Harrison Barnes. I’m not a Barnes fan—I think he’s a great shooter who’s not great at much else. There’s something terrifyingly Wesley Johnson-ish about his game. Ford justifies his Barnes projection based on the fact the Cavs loved him last year, but I wonder if Barnes’s sophomore season at UNC soured Chris Grant and co. on taking the young Iowan as high as number four.

Oh, and the early word is next year’s draft class isn’t good. So there’s that. (Obviously early word is just that, but I feel like I’ve just had a 50-pound anvil dropped on my psyche, and that’s the 5-pound barbell that’s conking it on the head as it woozily scrambles to its feet.) Do what you do, comment section.

Kyrie Irving is officially the NBA’s top rookie, KIA seal of approval and all. This is barely news, much like the Cavaliers drafting Irving with the first overall pick nearly a year ago wasn’t a surprise so much as a pre-ordained event that had not quite yet happened until, mercifully, he shook David Stern’s hand while wearing a Cavs cap, and we could finally excise the word “presumptive” from our discussions about him. The Rookie of the Year race circa February was closer than one might recall. If Ricky Rubio had a slightly better jump shot and healthy knees, the days leading up to this announcement might have held a few droplets of suspense. But it’s been over for some time. One pictures Irving fishing a champagne (or, sorry: sparkling grape juice) bottle out of a tub of lukewarm water this afternoon.

Of course, the Rookie of the Year award is sort of useless anyway. Irving joins an impressive fraternity of All-Stars, of past and future Hall of Famers, but in and of itself, the award doesn’t tell us anything other than that Irving was the best first-year player in the league. Which: duh. Perhaps I’m drugged by disillusionment as I saw LeBron lift his third MVP trophy with an expression that said, “Thanks for the award and all, but I know this doesn’t matter.” Most everyone in the building agreed.

In this way, awards are dually unimportant. They are not descriptive nor are they ultimately much more than living room cabinet decorations. They’re cool, sort of. If I were invited to Kyrie Irving’s home, I would probably ask to see his Rookie of the Year trophy. I would hold it for about two minutes, make an awkward joke about how he should paint his fresh-as-hell goatee onto the Jerry West logo, then we would resume talking about more interesting stuff. Because awards are really just the result of “Who’s the Best?” debates among writers and journalists, and “Who’s the Best?” debates are often an exercise in polemics. It’s entirely possible—and common, just read the various list- and debate-happy NBA sites and blogs out there—to have an extended argument about Tyson Chandler vs. Dwight Howard for Defensive Player of the Year without doing much besides listing resumés and tagging every other sentence with “in my opinion.”

Kyrie Irving is a special type of player—talented enough, young enough—who intermittently illuminates how inconsequential opinions about the NBA are in relation to the fluorescent streaks of skill that happen on the court. We can talk somewhat usefully about a lot of stuff, but talking about the moment when Irving dives into the lane off a pick, shows the ball to the best player in the league, then switches hands, double-clutches, and lays it in is futile. Seriously: try to be articulate about that thing. What’s great is that we get to talk about his highlights in incomprehensible shrieks and about Kyrie Irving as an electrifying talent like we did with Blake Griffin last year. He has only, as of yet, exceeded expectations. There’s no need to figure out his place in the natural order of point guards because we’re just so damned happy he’s here.

Which is why I can say Kyrie Irving reminds me of Derrick Rose without bothering to project if he’s going to be a better player in four or five years. Rose and Irving’s games don’t heavily overlap, but they are both characterized by their surface calm. Neither one of them are particularly demonstrative on the court; their visages crack only when something momentous has happened, and even then, we glimpse into them through hair-sized fractures. If you watch more than a couple quarters of a nationally-televised Bulls game, you will hear Mike Tirico praise Rose’s “professionalism” and how “he just loves to work hard.” These are, sure, admirable traits, but while I blandly admire Rose’s commitment to never saying anything interesting in interviews, I like him because of the instances in which his competitiveness boils him into human steam—the gentle nudge of an opponent or the sharp, short fist pump after an and-one. Rose is the laconic protagonist in a revenge thriller. He relishes these moments of invincibility, even if he uses the word “team” eight times in three minutes while talking to Doris Burke after the buzzer.

Irving is similarly calm, though his stoicism occasionally splinters to reveal a not-quite-boisterous joy. I get a sense that he loves nothing more than making an obnoxiously impossible lay-in or throwing a behind-the-head assist, even if he only does it once or twice per game. He doesn’t go out of his way to paint a Kandinsky with his body, but when he does, a grin leaks out as if to remind the world that, yes, through his veins run ice but also sugar and confetti. He’s like if a glacier could dance.

LeBron James, while dutifully lifting the MVP trophy over his head, appeared uncomfortably appreciative because, while his award doesn’t mean much, it feels like it should. That slight puzzlement on ‘Bron’s face is because we apparently took a wrong turn somewhere along the astral plane. Shouldn’t Sunday have been another legacy-cementing moment for one of the greatest players ever? Instead, it felt like a guy postponing his birthday party. But we find it difficult to celebrate breathtaking talent when it has not yet realized greatness. We will celebrate LeBron once he wins a title, but commemorating the remarkable season he just had feels, in the eyes of many… myopic? (I’m trying to crawl inside the mind of the Other here.)

But then myopia is what happens when one is truly engaged with a game. The thrill you experience when a man jumps clear over another man and throws down an alley-oop. LBJ is consistently amazing. It’s a shame we have trouble talking about how spectacular he is without appending elipses and caveats. We should remind ourselves to occasionally shut up and enjoy watching this freak play basketball. So too, should we celebrate Kyrie Irving, but that’s an easier task. Irving isn’t yet building a legacy; he’s just a delightful rook with fly facial hair. He’s also the fourth-youngest player in the NBA. He lead the league in crunch time scoring. And what does that mean for his future? I don’t know. That’s part of the joy of watching a young talent emerge. Irving needn’t mean anything. He is free to speak in the language of ambient music and lightning bugs. He’s the MVP of my heart. Do it to ‘em, Mr. Full Court.

Boobie Gibson is a strange, halfway sort of thing. He’s like a splinter over which a full inch of skin has grown. He is old enough now that Cavs fans no longer harbor delusions about what he could be, though what he is, exactly, is indeterminate, like we’ve been peering down the road for so long, expecting him to appear in the distance, a fully realized incarnation of our hopes for him, that we make a startled yelp when we look to our right and realize he’s been riding shotgun the whole time. Boobie Gibson, at this point in his career, functions more as placeholder than player. He is unique as a memory-conjuring figure. As a player, he’s interchangeable with a handful of smallish combo guards who can knock down an open three-pointer. His game is not dissimilar to Courtney Lee’s, though Lee inflicts painful memories where Boobie reminds us of the childhood of what was supposed to be a championship team. Do you remember when the Cavs lost to the Spurs in the NBA Finals, and you thought This team is much better than I expected, and they have so much room to grow? Boobie Gibson was part of that, one of the parts that was supposed to grow.

He didn’t, really. He’s not Ray Allen, it turns out. Instead, he’s an inch deep in the pad of our thumbs, buried beneath newfound hope but still visible. He’s still, persistently, a part of right now. I’m happy he’s here, though I’m not sure why. Here’s a game for you: try to come up with a Boobie Gibson memory other than him dropping 31 points on the Pistons in game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2007. Surely, you’re not thinking of anything that has happened in the past two years, over which Gibson has struggled to remain in Byron Scott’s rotation due to nagging injuries. You’re not likely to recall his performance in the 2009 Playoffs, when he played a total of six minutes during the first three games of the Eastern Conference Finals against Orlando. Maybe his regular season game-winner against OKC in 2010? His “Yessir!” head shake was in full effect after that one. Remember when he shaved a star into his head? That was pretty cool. Or at least mildly idiosyncratic.

Perhaps your aptitude for the Boobie Gibson Memory Game is higher than mine, but if someone were to ask me about him, I would have very few stories to tell. (Though, bonus track: here’s a clip of him play-fighting with Mo Williams. I really miss that team, you guys.) I would say only that I love him, and that it’s the same stale but curiously poignant love one has for things that spoke to them in high school. Then I would talk about his little brother-big brother relationship with LeBron and feel wistful.

The Cavaliers are entering their second summer of inspecting their roster, consulting the map Chris Grant has tattooed on the underside of his tongue, and pruning players accordingly. Boobie Gibson could be one of those players. (He’s got a team option for $4.8 million next year.) He likely won’t be expelled from the team for the boring reason that unless the Cavs splurge this offseason, he’s still going to be one of their ten best players. If you see a lanky dude with long brown hair holding a “Boobie Gibson is still on this team, and I’m pretty okay with it” sign at the Q this season, that’s me. (I’ll also be wearing “This hurts me more than you can imagine, but I really need you to suck, Jonas” body paint. I’ll be easy to spot.)

Empirically speaking, Boobie Gibson is the type of player you’re pretty okay with having on your team. He can knock down an open three about as well as anyone in the league and isn’t a disaster on the defensive end. He is capable, intermittently, of pouring in buckets as if possessed by a higher power. He will win your team between two and zero games per year. I worry about his ability to stay on the court.

Empirically speaking, Boobie Gibson is boring. But he is, persistently, part of right now. I don’t want him to leave, and I think I know why. If it’s all the same in terms of talent—are the Cavs getting anything better at the ninth spot of their rotation than a smallish combo guard who doesn’t miss open threes?—then we should embrace the difference between what Boobie Gibson means as opposed to what he is. Along with Anderson Varejao, he is the last remaining Cavalier who was present when Cavs fans’ dreams burned a bright shade of purple, when that feeling of This team has so much room to grow! was still palpable. Unlike Varejao, he is young enough (he’s 26) to participate in this new Post-LeBron Cavalier rebuild experiment. He cannot realize the unrealistic expectations we allowed ourself to bestow upon him, but he can help. If 31 year-old Boobie Gibson is the veteran on a Cavs playoff team, spelling Brad Beal for twelve minutes a game, and maybe giving a few “Yessir!” head nods after catching fire in the middle of a third quarter against the Bulls, I’ll be unspeakably happy. The dream died the day LeBron decided to leave for Miami, but the thing about dreams is they come back to you in fragments. Boobie Gibson is one such fragment; it would be ideal if the Cavaliers could rebuild the dream around him.

Antawn Jamison announced about a week ago that he will not be returning to the Cavaliers next season. I met this news by glancing out the window at a crow perched on a telephone wire. Then I walked to the fridge and made myself a roast beef sandwich. It’s unremarkable that a guy who will turn 36 in the offseason would rather play for a title contender than a team in year three of a rebuild that will extend beyond his career. Like, it’s literally unremarkable; it need not be remarked upon. Cars are useful. Water slides are fun. Antawn Jamison is old and would like to win a championship.

Jamison’s departure brings a formal close to an era, of sorts—a musty crawl space of time that bridges the end of LeBron James’s Cavalier tenure and the beginning of Kyrie Irving’s. He was the last player Danny Ferry acquired before Ferry and the Cavs parted company in June of 2010, and, in a lot of ways, Jamison was emblematic of Ferry’s ill-fated attempts at surrounding LeBron with sufficient talent. News of the Antawn Jamison trade was met with mild approval. He was the type of good-not-great, not-quite-worthy-of-being-LeBron’s-wingman player with which Cavs fans were very familiar. For his first week as a Cavalier, his name might as well have been Not Amar’e Stoudemire. (In some alternate universe, Amar’e for J.J. Hickson and a dumpster’s worth of draft picks was a real thing, the LBJ-Amar’e Cavs won a championship, and Scott Sargent happily changed the name of Waiting for Next Year to This Is a Blog About Cleveland Sports Teams.)

Jamison averaged 15-and-7 in the 2010 playoffs, though he was markedly better against the Bulls than the Celtics, and Cavs fans will remember Kevin Garnett devoured him in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. If LBJ hadn’t performed like a robot who had just fallen into a dunk tank an hour before tip-off in Game 5, Jamison might have suffered the same scrutiny Mo Williams faced after he seemingly missed every important open three against Orlando in 2009.

Then LeBron left, Mo Williams’s wounded soul was sent to Los Angeles, and Jamison became the best scorer on the worst team in the league. A year later he was the second-best offensive player on a team that was still really bad. As is his wont, he handled this predicament like a gentleman. Antawn Jamison—who has had a great career, mind you; we’re talking about a two-time All-Star—is defined by this gentlemanliness. He is difficult to discuss in any detail mostly because all we know about him is what we see on the court and his impenetrable good guy-ness. Have you heard an announcer mention Antawn Jamison without citing a.) his professionalism or b.) his arsenal of strange scoop shots and floaters?

I, too, have trouble escaping either of these things. I’m convinced, when his UNC team was getting blown out by Utah early in the second half of the national semifinal in the 1998 Final Four, that I saw Jamison, behind the play and out of frustration, briefly put a Utah player in a headlock, but I was eight at the time, and being eight is like waking up every day and ingesting a bag of hallucinogens. I would love to ask him if that’s a thing that actually happened if we ever ran into one another. Mostly because it’s the only remotely dishonorable thing I’ve ever maybe seen him do. But we will never cross paths, Antawn Jamison and I. If he showed up in my living room, I would feel like Adam the moment he ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized he was not clothed—an intense, searing shame. I’m morally naked, Antawn. Please don’t look me in the eye.

What can you say about Antawn Jamsion without sounding condescending or reductive? He is a person, after all. Imperfect, with indentations in his character. (Though I wonder if those indentations are perfect and symmetrical, like on a golf ball.) His blood surely isn’t the shade of taupe I imagine it to be.

Perhaps he is best conceived of as a man with aluminum skin. And I don’t mean that pejoratively—there’s perhaps teeming humanity beneath that reflective surface, but we lack access to what’s underneath.  All we—as fans, writers, whomever—can do is shout interrogative statements at Jamison’s exterior. And we receive in return nothing but ghost-mouthed iterations of our own words. A lot of athletes are like this to some degree—if you hate an athlete who hasn’t sexually assaulted or murdered anyone, it really says more about you than the athlete—but Antawn Jamison’s skin is as unfissured as anyone’s. Questions lobbed at him ricochet back toward our more penetrable hides. Maybe we learn something about ourselves. We learn almost nothing about Antawn Jamison. We should thank him, then, for his patience. It must be exhausting to be a mirror: everyone talks about themselves while they peer into you.

It would be disingenuous of me to say I don’t know anything about Antawn Jamison. I know he has emerged from this melting scrap heap of a Cavalier team still remarkably handsome, with a piercing smile that I hope to see more of when he plays in Dallas or Miami or wherever next year. I know he will bring his class, his articulate way, his still-decent jump shot to whatever future home he inhabits. I know he deserves the future success he encounters. May he have an excess of it. Farewell, Antawn.

Dick Clark died on Wednesday, which means there are a lot of obituaries of the TV Host/DJ/Ageless Relic splashed across the front pages of websites I visit daily. My favorite is the one Alex Pappademas did for Grantland. Pappademas argues that Dick Clark existed as an emblem of the mainstream at which self-styled leaders of the counterculture—your Lester Bangses, your John Lydonses—could lob their derision. Pappademas thinks Clark’s willingness to play the role of zeitgeist-producing megacelebrity is crucial to understanding his importance. In some sense, Clark helped facilitate the existence of a counterculture. After all, if you’re full of antipathy for mainstream culture, it helps to have a picture of somebody attached to your dart board as opposed to a piece of paper with the word “SOCIETY” written on it. The article is obviously more nuanced than that, but my point is that Pappademas’s obit does what most great obits do: it takes a magnifying glass to a famous figure, then pans out, plucks them from the abstraction they swim in, and aims to contextualize them.

So what would an obituary for Lester Hudson look like? He’s not dead, just now a tenth man in Memphis, but Lester Hudson: Temporary Quasi-Phenomenon is gone; that dude is never coming back. He appeared in only 13 games for the Cavaliers and played particularly well for a span of five days in which he hit up the Raps, Nets, and Bobcats for 23, 26, and 25 points, respectively. His other performances ranged from better than okay (15 points on 6-13 shooting against the Sixers) to atrocious (2-for-8 with four turnovers against the Knicks). The body of work is ultimately Sonny Weems-ish, but for a brief moment, the prospect of a nobody from the University of Tennessee at Martin being actually maybe kind of good was a reality. Develop a short-lived habit of taking over professional basketball games and you too can whip people into a frenzy that amounts to them having microwaved premonitions about whether you might be a poor man’s Kerry Kittles.

We never really had an earnest conversation about Lester Hudson being good. It was a nascent thought; then, by the time we had formulated it into words, it was no longer applicable. Importunate announcers tried to wrap their mouths around “Les-sanity” (which: if you’re going to insist on using “-sanity” as a “-gate”-like suffix, “Hudsanity” is much easier to say), and Dan Gilbert praised his temporary superstar between yawns as Hudson slalomed between D-League detritus against the Bobcats. The internet needed a new obscure name to render in caps and append with exclamation points so it chose Hudson. This wasn’t debate so much as noise. And the links made between Hudson and Jeremy Lin were, of course, lazy and tenuous. Like a 27 year-old journeyman putting up 20-point games for the Cavs is the same as the singular cultural moment in which an Asian-American Harvard grad sent 100,000 volts through Madison Square Garden.

But the fleeting Lester Hudson Moment means something regardless of the fact that the name Lester Hudson will likely mean nothing by this time next year. Hudson’s brush with pretty good-ness is a window into the psychosis of the depressed fan. Even a condensed season leaves the fan of a horrible team with too much time between the loss of a season and its conclusion. Games, in this despairing between stage, become glorified tryouts, and exceptional D-League players rotate through the rosters of lottery teams as if on a buffet conveyor belt. What is there to do but talk oneself into these blank slates? In your weakest moment, how great did you let yourself dream Lester Hudson might be? I bet it was embarrassing. But one lapses into fantasy when reality is the smell of decay. When presented with a wasteland, sometimes all you can do is draw happiness in the dirt.

Alonzo Gee—some also-ran who got cut by the Spurs, then the Wizards last fall—is, it turns out, a strong defender who can knock down a few jumpers on a fortuitous night. He is the lone functioning DVD player plucked from the scrap heap. The realization of this hasn’t been swift. I didn’t give myself over to Alonzo Gee in a fit of passion; it was more like breaking in a new apartment. At some arbitrary point, you open the door, walk to the fridge for a beer, fall into the couch cushions, and realize you’re home. So to say there was some eureka! moment in Gee’s Cavalier career is overstating it, but the night I fully recognized I really liked his game was when the Cavs played the Heat in late January. The team was shorthanded at the 2 and the 3, and that meant Gee was going to have to play a lot of minutes and check either LeBron or Wade the whole time he was on the floor. I thought I think he’ll do okay. He’s a tough dude. I harbored no grand notions; I just felt good about him. I have never had the same thoughts on, say, Christian Eyenga.

I don’t think it’s difficult to appreciate Trill AG—he’s a blue collar player who isn’t well-known enough for announcers to spoil him for fans by constantly mentioning his “relentless motor”—but context helps: for every Alonzo Gee, there are at least 30 Ben Uzohs. And maybe three Lester Hudsons. By which I mean most players suck right away. You can see they don’t have it. Lester Hudson had the decency to let us dream. Thanks for the memories, Lester. Thanks, additionally, for the hallucinations. You built a ferris wheel in our wasteland, and, while we actually needed a hospital or a power plant, ferris wheels are fun just the same.

A friend of mine recently went through one of those demi-divorces where he and his live-in girlfriend ended their relationship about a month before their lease was up. I’ve heard most of the story, and the rest exists in my head: two people, still sort of in love, but not really; trying to be adults about the whole situation; trying not to divide their friends; sharing a bed; having weird, emotional sex still, when they’re both drunk, for some reason; separating their stuff; trying to figure out what to do next; being emotionally exhausted; watching DVDs together; trying to be friends; remembering; talking; supporting each other over this thing they had built, then expunged. I wonder if they both felt an inarticulable anger for a month. Like, I don’t hate you, but I need to not see your shoes next to mine when I leave for work in the morning. I need a shower of flame to burn the smell of you off me. My friend told me some of this, in an unenervated tone, at a bar last week. His eyes were like gas lamps.

There’s some solace is being done with things, is what I mean. Even horrible things that leave you with a gut full of disquiet and day whiskey. Fortunately, no Cavalier fan has had to share a home with this team—your grocery bill would be insane—but I think we’re all ready for the season to be over. To count the bruises and move on. To write draft profiles, count ping pong balls, and never speak the name Ryan Hollins again. There’s not much edifying to be taken from the remaining seven games the Cavaliers have on their schedule. Samardo Samuels isn’t going to bloom into Kevin Love, and Kyrie Irving, whether or not he steps on the court again this season, is one of the best under-23 players in the league. We’re not learning anything or learning to love anyone. Rather, we’re sitting, cramped, maybe a little angry, in this middle space between realizing the end and its arrival. Before the shower of flame.

The shower of flame, by the way, is something I support. Here’s the only part of this dead relationship/dead season analogy that’s completely congruous: I just don’t want these people in my life on a daily basis anymore. Antawn Jamison’s contested pick-n-pop threes with 15 seconds on the shot clock incense me. The dejected face Samardo Samuels makes after he impotently fouls whomever he’s guarding makes me sad. The fact that Anthony Parker, when healthy, is the starting shooting guard of choice causes me to think I know more about basketball than three-time NBA champion Byron Scott. It’s not a healthy relationship. Can the Cavaliers head into the 2012-13 season with Irving, Tristan Thompson, Andy Varejao, Alonzo Gee, Luke Walton (because they, like, have to), Omri Casspi (again, contracts don’t always end when you want them to), and a new squad of also-rans? I have stared at this Rorschach test slide too long and need some new nobodies about whom I can think If that guy develops some chemistry with TT on the pick-and-roll, starts buckling down on defense, and stops turning the ball over so much, I think we might have ourselves a middling backup point guard! I can no longer do this with Donald Sloan. I’m sorry, Donald. I have peered into thine eyes for too long and now see only myself. And I would be a horrible NBA point guard.

I guess this marks the start of what’s going to be a deluge of eulogies in this space where I do these longform-y pieces once or twice a week. Because, outside of silly recaps and draft previews, there isn’t much else to do. The most productive thing we can do is recount our experiences with this team and try to wring whatever useful knowledge we can from them. So, y’know, I’ll be recapping the season. I’m making it sound dramatic when it’s not. But real talk: I’m sad this season has ended the way it has and annoyed it isn’t over already.

Epigram the 1st:

“Have you noticed how their stuff is s— and your s— is stuff?”
–George Carlin

Epigram the 2nd:

“Do me like the woman from my town would.”
–Drake

I traveled to Portland a couple years ago to spend a long weekend with a friend. Portland, if you’re unfamiliar, is like if NPR built a city, which is exactly as wonderful and horrifying as it sounds. We didn’t attend a Blazers game while we were there—I had just paid to fly 2,100 miles; NBA tickets weren’t happening—but Blazers paraphernalia is something you can’t miss in Portland. Or at least I couldn’t. As an NBA junkie, I’m sort of preconditioned to spot Blazers flags in bar windows, but I suppose you could miss such signage while spending hours in the city block-sized Powell’s Books, grabbing a food cart burrito downtown, or while resisting the urge to propose to a pretty twentysomething in a sundress. (You’re a very attractive city, Portland.) But one of the most interesting things about the city of Portland, at least to me, are the pockets of direly committed Blazers fans scattered across the city like so many snowy clumps of powdered sugar on a piece of artisan french toast. (You do breakfast correctly, Portland.)

Being a fan of a sports team is an identity marker for a lot of people—note how many Facebook and Twitter profiles mention a person’s allegiance to a specific team—but in Portland, being a Blazers fan is an especially unique identity marker because A.) Portland isn’t a sports town in the vein of Boston or St. Louis or Cleveland and B.) Portland doesn’t have a professional baseball, football, or hockey team. (Here I note the existence and rabid fanbase of the Portland Timbers, but being an American soccer fan is an identity marker all its own.)

Being a Blazers fan is, I think, being both a part of the city and apart from the city. It’s like being a fan of Z-Ro, but not Jay-Z. Sure, a lot of people like Z-Ro—they compose a not-insignificant portion of the rap nerd landscape—but it’s not like you could fill Madison Square Garden ten times over with Z-Ro fans. To be a Z-Ro or Blazers acolyte is to be part of a sizable subculture. Blazers fans are a proud subculture. They rep Portland as adamantly as anyone. Their identity is held in being both a minority within their city’s larger culture and an advocate of it.

I’m speaking in broad strokes, and, of course, cities aren’t monoliths. In fact, their unmonolithicness is sort of the point of them, but for the purposes of not having to describe the idiosyncrasies of every person within their borders, we try to define them with a handful of descriptors. We peg towns with an identity. Think Pittsburgh and industry, Los Angeles and Hollywood, Miami and strip clubs. There are filmmakers in Pittsburgh, blue collar workers in Los Angeles, and strippers everywhere, but we assign certain traits to cities because it’s convenient shorthand and not altogether false. It’s not like Pittsburgh is Mecca for avant-garde visual artists, and we’ve just been lying about it for decades.

I have lived in Chicago, a parochial city in its own right, for the past four years. Despite being a city with manifold cuisine, a theater district. a phenomenal downtown, myriad diverse neighborhoods—a rich cultural identity, is what I mean—some of its residents—natives, mostly; Chicago is kind of a midwestern LA in that it houses a lot of transplants—have a strange inferiority complex toward the coasts. They bristle at the mention of New York or Boston or Los Angeles. No city shall be as great as the one that invented the pickle-adornèd hot dog! It’s weird. Because Chicago’s an immense, sometimes beguiling city. I sometimes wonder why its residents—its advocates, really—can’t be satisfied with being a wonderful town in the middle of the country.

Because there exists no objectively great city or town. Where you live is a matter of fit, and where you’re from is a matter of what city your mother was in when her water broke. It’s sort of an arranged marriage: it will affect you, but you don’t have to develop affection for it. I’m from a smallish city in upstate New York, and I kind of hate where I’m from. It’s too small for my liking (both in terms of population and worldview) and most of its citizens would build a giant metal dome over the town if they could. They deserve to suffocate beneath a physical manifestation of their own insularity. Most of them, anyway.

I’m a Cleveland Cavaliers fan because of this town. There were no local sports teams, so I decided to root for my cousin’s favorite team. So here I am: a Cavs fan, but not a Clevelander. I’m trying to figure out whether or not this is important. Ostensibly, it’s not. I’m about as devoted to the Cavaliers as any fan of the team, and I’ve been to Cleveland a handful of times. If I had grown up on the shores of Lake Erie, I don’t think I would be extolling Cleveland’s virtues to non-residents at parties. I’m also just not wired that way. Some people like to define themselves by the groups they are a part of—fanbases, cities, country clubs—but I’m not one of them. One of my favorite things about living in a colossal city is the anonymity it affords me. I can go days without being recognized on the street by a friend or acquaintance. I can just a be a dude on the corner, waiting for the light to change; that recession into nothingness is comforting to me.

But this strong city-team-self triangle—I’m from Cleveland, I love my hometown, and I’m a huge Cavaliers fan—is a crucial part of fanhood for some people. It’s not something that can be easily dismissed. I’m trying to understand it from the outside. Cities—though they’re really just a mass of flesh, concrete, and steel—breathe. They are frighteningly organism-like. And what better way to celebrate that almost-organism than by watching your favorite sports team— ambassadors of your favorite city—assert their dominance over another city’s athletic ambassadors while in the company of fellow residents of your beloved metropolis. You can do this in places all over the country: they’re called sports bars and arenas.

The point at which this native-sports-fan-as-identity-marker thing becomes problematic is when people indulge in the fallacy that to truly understand their passion, you have to be from Sports Town X. I have heard some misguided Clevelanders engage in this nonsense. Which: I get it. People like exclusivity when they’re on the right side of the velvet rope. Clevelanders are almost never on the right side of the velvet rope. Their city is economically depressed; their sports teams have a history of futility; and they’re often on the wrong end of hacky jokes from Sportscenter anchors. My friend from Alliance once deadpanned “Surely, there is nothing worse than being from Cleveland.” What can you say to someone who condescends to you? You don’t understand. You’re not from here. Erect the ol’ giant metal dome over the Mistake by the Lake and embrace your antipathy for outsiders.

I’m not saying most Cleveland Cavaliers fans are like that. Nor are most Bobcats, Blazers, Thunder, Kings, T’Wolves, Grizzlies, or Pacers fans. But those angry, defensive thoughts happen; I’m perplexed by the people who think them. From what I can tell, one of the aspects of The Decision that most angered Clevelanders was the perception that LeBron had turned his back on Northeast Ohio. In deciding to play in Miami, he had not only abandoned the Cavs, but he had yanked his roots from Cleveland’s soil. He would rather live in South Beach, nestled against the bosom of a glitter-pocked stripper! absolutely no one thought after watching The Decision. But you see my point. Clevelanders didn’t just lose a great player: a native son spurned them. We can find the inverse of that sentiment in columns about the extension Russell Westbrook signed this winter with the Thunder. Sure, Sam Presti wanted to lock down one of the best young players in the league, but mentioned in almost every story about the signing: Russell Westbrook actually likes playing in Oklahoma City. The implication is that a player preferring to play in a small market is rare, which it is.

In a season that’s all over except for the crying and the Anthony Davis-related prayers, Cavaliers fans are tempted to look toward free agency, which I know will invoke some sore feelings from Clevelanders. Why should the Cavs have to overpay to lure free agents to their city? It’s where they live, after all; they like it. Regardless, all money being equal, O.J. Mayo would rather play in LA than Cleveland. As someone who moved from small town upstate New York to Chicago, I empathize, and if you don’t understand here’s a tautology: if more people wanted to live in Cleveland, more people would live in Cleveland. More people prefer Chicago, Boston, Phoenix, Dallas, etc. Why would NBA players be any different? There is the odd Russell Westbrook type, but most NBA players would prefer a swank apartment in SoHo to a McMansion on the outskirts of Sacramento. They don’t hate your stupid town. They just found one they like better. It’s got killer Indian food, and they can live near the ocean. Around such criteria do people make a stupid town a home.