Links to the Present: Finals Edition

As LeBron James celebrates his fourth NBA title and fourth NBA finals MVP performance in Florida, the Cleveland Cavaliers are not simply watching. The Cleveland team lies in wait for the new champs, and the rest of the association. What have the Cavs been doing to get ready for next season?

Foremost, practicing, in an “in-market bubble” which took place in downtown Cleveland at the end of September. A small amount of footage was released, the main takeaway being that Dylan Windler appears to be in good condition and on track for a genuine debut in the 2020-21 campaign.

An extended article on the Cleveland bubble experience published by Cavs.com played up expectations for Darius Garland. Here’s the anchor quote from Coach Bickerstaff:

There’s a different Darius Garland in the building than the one that we saw leave Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in his last game. There’s been a commitment on his end. He looks different. Physically, he looks different. He made the decision to stay here in Cleveland and work with our strength and conditioning group because he wants to commit to his body. There’s a doggedness there when he defends, he wants to prove a point. I can’t say enough positive things about Darius.

So the coach is pleased, and Garland has a few more months to work on his game. Prior to the reconvening in Cleveland, J.B. Bickerstaff made podcast appearances on the Woj Pod (on bubble exclusion), on the Baseline (on racial justice), on the Mismatch (on the Milwaukee Bucks’ wildcat strike), on Locked on Cavs (on racial justice and Cleveland sports).

Not present in the Cleveland bubble were Matthew Dellavadova and Tristan Thompson (free agency), Cedi Osman (overseas), and Andre Drummond (personal matter). Cleveland’s only bona fide superstar, Kevin Love, made an impact by working with the team for a few days and then stepping out. So the whole of the young core was there, Windler got some run, Darius Garland is supposedly a different man, and they seemed to have some fun.

Chris Fedor was reliably wowed by it all, comparing Sexton to Donavan Mitchell:

ICYMI: #Cavs Collin Sexton put on 10-15 pounds of muscle and has people thinking Donovan Mitchell. Kevin Porter Jr. has tweaked his shooting form a bit. Dylan Windler is healthy. Darius Garland is shifty and throwing down lobs. Cavs bubble has started https://t.co/7O1t9UUiYR

— Chris Fedor (@ChrisFedor) September 24, 2020

If the Sexton-Mitchell comparison seems wildly optimistic, do consider the stat line from one of the more remarkable games of the truncated Bickerstaff era. On March 3, 2020, the Jazz faced off with the Cavs. Donovan Mitchell had 19 points, 9 rebounds, 4 assists, 4 turnovers, and no steals, but Sexton notched a superior 32 points, 5 rebounds, 3 assists, 1 turnover, and three steals.

On Windler, Chris Fedor said he’s hearing that Windler is frequently asked about around the League as a possible trade chip. However, considering the source, this seems less like a bona fide scoop than the front office trying to create excitement around a player who has yet to log a single NBA regular season minute.

Moving back to a proven three-point savant, the Bubble and the NBA Finals, may I turn now to JR Smith? Smith’s shenanigans have surely launched thousand memes, which need not be recapped here, etched as they are on every reader’s mental retina. But JR’s presence isn’t the only resonance from LeBron and the Cavs’ 2016 title, or of Cavs seasons past.

Some Cavs fans might have breathed a sigh of relief at the end of Game 5, when Danny Green failed to sink a wide-open three in the final seconds. Readers may recall that Green was drafted in 2009, behind the Cavs’ first choice, a spectacular player (and, unfortunately, a bust) Christian Eyenga. This short piece from April 2020 describes how Green saw LeBron in the playoff run that ended up imploding against the (juiced and Dwight Howard-centric) Orlando Magic. As for Eyenga and the Lakers, at least he once beat Kobe Bryant off the dribble and posterized Pau Gasol, leading to one of the great dunks in the history of “the Q” as well as a rhythm cross-step utterance of “Throw — the hammer — down!”

Speaking of Kobe Bryant, the Finals, and the pantheon, does it seem strange that one of the top writers still employed by ESPN has a “Michael vs. LeBron” piece lined up to drop as soon as the title is won? Does anyone actually carefully read such articles about LeBron vs. Kobe vs. Michael Jordan? Or, are these articles intended merely as digital chum for hoards of trolls who quickly post links as a means of drawing other trolls into nonsensical battle? Perhaps the editorial assumption is that the average reader is in greater L.A. and drunk most of the time? Perhaps the stories are sucked immediately through algorithms into a vortex of click farms where they are festooned immediately with comments largely sourced from a combination of Kyrie Irving platitudes and NBA player/executive burner accounts? Would a rational person want to read such a microwaved hot take? Is it possible to reflect on a series on its own terms, or are NBA fans doomed to relive the 1990s until the association is ultimately swallowed up into the Ozamandian sand dunes of oblivion?

If the 1990s were so great, why not a long investigative piece (which can serve as a prototype for a Netflix series) about Brian Windhorst? Specifically, we might explore how the young Jason Lloyd was Brian Windhorst’s nemesis at Kent State, since Lloyd was holding down front page column inches about the NCAA tournament while the young Windy, having not yet found his muse, toiled away with indestructible fervor on news items about campus memorial gardens and late winter frost.

Not that “The Last Dance” was anything other than undisputed work of art about a greatest player of his era. But apart from the occasional flash of nostalgia at men wearing suits with huge triangular shoulder pads, readers today might be better served by seeing a documentary about the NBA season just passed. After all, it might be that the first part of the 2019-20 season was the actual last dance of in-person stadiums full of actual fans that we are going to see in quite some time.

Along those lines, maybe the biggest story of the Finals, apart from the Jimmy Butler-LeBron duels, is the thing that didn’t happen.

ZERO positive tests in 3 months. @NBA

— Cassidy Hubbarth (@CassidyHubbarth) October 12, 2020

Props to the NBA for pulling this off. Perhaps someday we will have a numerical count of all of the tests performed over the course of the bubble, with some nice graphs going in the right direction for a change. Maybe the pre-pandemic NBA fixation with player analytics had something to do with faith in the science.

But what if the success of the bubble actually means that another bubble is more, rather than less, likely? Come December 2020, when faced with a probably still-catastrophic public health situation, the NBA has got to be tempted to fold into a slightly expanded all-League bubble, seeing as, the last time around, unlike literally everything else in 2020, it actually worked.

Dr. Anthony Fauci hasn’t said much about sports since July, but there has hardly been anything like an “all clear” for the NBA in Ohio from either Washington or Columbus, in spite of the current occupant of the White House’s generally kamikaze approach. Any prognosis for live sports in Ohio has to do battle with numbers– numbers like 25,000 Covid cases in Franklin County as of late September, over 18,000 cases in Cuyahoga County as of early October, and (by the time of publication) 5000 coronavirus fatalities in Ohio about seven months of pandemic.

Even with the economic incentives at play (gate revenue having been nil since March), there may not be enough momentum on the other side of the ledger. As Fauci says, “outdoors is always better than indoors” and we know where basketball is played. It’s very hard to see how the NBA is going to be able to pull off anything other than a repeat of the bubble experience at least at the outset of what is going to be the (literal) 2021 season rather than the (hypothetically) 2020-21 season.

Adam Silver hasn’t said as much, and is probably thankful that the Tokyo Olympics have come up as a distraction in the meantime. A media member who got a definitive answer from Silver about the impossibility of an in-person start to the coming season would be the journalistic equivalent of a chase down block. Silver doesn’t let it happen (nor with Rachel Nichols) but here is a snapshot of his public-facing thinking on the virus and next year:

But enough about all of that. Turning a discussion of LeBron’s new title into a discussion of the NBA coronavirus policy is a bit like writing about Ted Williams blowing up North Korean cities with the US Air Force in two of the major league seasons he missed. At the end of the day, you need to disconnect the athlete from the carnage — because who really wants to think about thousands of civilian deaths amid the appreciation of the artistry with the ball?

For Cavs fans, a glow around Northeast Ohio’s favorite son is warranted for his fourth title, even as an eye turns toward next season. We don’t know when LeBron and the Lakers will next take on the Cavs. Nor do we know how the Cavs will fare against or in comparison to the Warriors, their greatest Western Conference rival and a franchise so eager to compete with Cleveland that it even tanked so as to beat them to the bottom this past year.

Finally, as the season closes, Cavs fans can take comfort that there will always be a next season, and there will always be the Detroit Pistons. When it’s back on in January or whenever the season comes and wherever it is played, be it Toledo or Orlando, we can look forward to a true Clash of the Titans, namely Blake Griffin and Kevin Love, large men with knee braces, sore joints, and remarkable range and experience. There might even be an Andre Drummond sighting, and a Dwayne Casey longing at last for ‘Dre to launch a three pointer, or several, while JB puts yet more distance between the Cavs and the Beilein crater. For that moment and for that battle with Detroit, and for that looming clash with Golden State, for that scramble for the eighth seed instead of a lottery ball, hope beckons. The Cavs have to believe in 2021.

And meanwhile, back in this moment, LeBron wins again, JR Smith celebrates, and a mother receives thanks from her son, who has overcome his old — though not his oldest — NBA franchise. And though it is not exclusively for you, Cleveland, somehow it is. It is for you.