Wine Colored Days Warmed by the Son

Robert Evans recants in The Kid Stays in the Picture that Paramount Pictures didn’t want to produce The Godfather because “Mobster films don’t play, that’s what these distribution guys have to say, and when you bat zero, don’t make another sucker bet kid.” Evans’ solution was that a gangster film could work, if it was told authentically. With that in mind, Evans approached relatively unknown Italian-American director Francis Ford Coppola to change the medium. After initial hesitancy toward the project, Coppola agreed to direct the film on the condition that it not be a film about organized gangsters, but rather a family chronicle, and a metaphor for capitalism in America. On the surface the NBA is a bunch of world class athletes throwing a ball through a hoop, but in reality it is world of individuals coming together as their own family to achieve supremacy, with capitalistic hurdles at every corner threatening that end game.

As personal as The Decision was for Cavs fans, LeBron’s defection to the Heat was strictly for business. The hardest part for us was the daily reminder in the standings just how right that business decision was for him. The low points during the dark ages only accentuated the wet hot dopamine dream that was our summer of 2014, as LeBron severed his ties with the Miami mafia to return to the Cavs to pull the strings as the godfather of his own Cleveland cartel. The Golden State Warriors and injury induced attrition exposed the Cavs’ lack of depth, and the goal this summer after retaining the core, was to field a reserve unit capable of maintaining leads. After initial reports that Mo Williams was on the verge of signing with Memphis, he opted to return to Cleveland on a below market value deal to be the leader of a fully stocked bench mob.

Williams received plenty of blame during his first tenure with the Cavs for failing to perform in the playoffs. Scott Raab, author of “The Whore of Akron,” weighed in on this very blog about it.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that Maurice Williams had no chance of being part of the next Cavs team to contend for an NBA title. (I also think that that’s about the kindest thing I myself can find to say about Mo, who proved beyond debate that he was not a wartime consigliere.)

Context is everything, and at the time, Raab was right. Many painted Williams as more fitting of the role of Fredo than Genco to LeBron during playoff turf battles. I never blamed Williams though. I blamed the Cavs front office from Danny Ferry back to Jim Paxson for putting the franchise in that predicament, by wasting years worth of assists to the point that the team needed to count so heavily on a second round pick on his third team to take the scoring and facilitating weight off of LeBron’s Brasi sized shoulders. If anything, Williams is one of the leagues bigger overachievers over the past decade, considering his physical limitations. Sixteen of the first round selections from the 2003 NBA draft are no longer in the league, and Williams is still chugging along playing meaningful minutes for a title contender.

Williams hasn’t just been keeping the offense warm for the return of Kyrie, he’s playing some of the best basketball of his long career. As much as we look forward to the dolce of The Kraken, Mo’s secondo is still releasing a midrange jumper before the defense sets. Through 10 games Williams is averaging a career best .598 true shooting percentage. His PER of 18.59 ties with Chris Paul for 14th at the position. You can throw out the small sample size disclaimer because the season isn’t even an eighth of the way played, but it doesn’t change what has happened thus far. Williams has exceeded expectations in a starting role, and in a month he’ll be feasting on reserves.

As much as I love Mo for his contributions on the court, and his demeanor off of it, I like him most because he took LeBron’s Miami business decision irrationally personal, just like many of us did. In a world of AAU buddy ball, he felt betrayed and he couldn’t fake happy. He refused to shake LeBron’s hand before the collusion three gutted the Cavs.  It affected Mo to the point that he briefly contemplated retirement. Outsiders will never understand our complicated relationship with LeBron as a native son, and the mountain of expectations we put upon him because of it. Mo was an outsider himself, who wanted to be a son of Cleveland for the remainder of his career. The trade itself was the best thing for the Cavs, and probably for Mo to get closure, but that didn’t make it pain free. Outsiders also will never understand how a player actually wanting to be in Cleveland means to our fan base. For the first time in Williams’ 13 year career, spanning seven different franchises, he’s finally in the right place at the right time, and in the right role as a capo of the second unit.

There are periods in my life that had a feel to them, in retrospect, that I long to experience again. Not a place, or smell, but a subtle and innate sense of the Earth’s magnetic field that encompassed that moment. When I have them, my breathing slows, and dopamine drips and brings me back in time. I can’t control when I feel those vibrations, and that’s probably a good thing. If I could, I’d put myself into a trance and spend my remaining days meditating in pleasures of the past. In a strange way, Mo releasing The Kraken, and hearing the instrumental version of “Speak, Softly, Love” strum after a Mo Gotti heat check gives me deja vu back to the warm optimism I experienced watching the Cavs in 2009 before my heart was hardened by The Decision and my liver blackened by the dark ages.