CANADIAN CONTENT
Brampton’s Tristan Thompson is a huge part of the Cavaliers’ future, and an easy kid to like.
CLEVELAND— The Cavaliers play downtown, but they practise in the edge city of Independence in an ill-named facility called Cleveland Clinic Courts.
They built it for LeBron James, in order to shorten his drive in from Akron by 10 minutes.
Today, all the organization’s survivors have to schlep out there every morning so that Dan Gilbert didn’t pay $25 million for nothing.
At the entrance to the football-field sized practice courts, there’s a memory wall. In a nice, Stalinesque touch, it includes only two pictures of James.
Lots of Brad Daugherty. A family album’s worth. Two pictures of the best player in club (and perhaps league) history.
The team may be working to erase the recent past, but the fan base here can’t forget the man until they’ve moved past him.
Winning NBA franchises generally fade out. After James left, the Cavaliers cut to black.
That’s left a charged atmosphere behind, and precious little patience for rebuilding (the Browns and Indians not helping much in that regard).
Exhibit A — Brampton’s Tristan Thompson.
Cleveland knew what they were getting when they took the lengthy University of Texas freshman fourth in the 2011 draft — an energetic defender, an athletic rebounder, a willing student and an offensive work in progress.
Less than a year after his arrival, the city’s already looking very deliberately at its watch.
Some in the media have already launched that most backhanded U.S. compliment — “Canadian” — in questioning Thompson’s lack of brutishness in the paint. Others haven’t been able to resist a sideby-side comparison with the player picked after him, Toronto’s Jonas Valanciunas.
“They are?” Thompson says when asked about the talk, bemused. “To be honest, I don’t read anything in the media.”
Then he launches unprompted into an appreciation of the nuances of Valanciunas’s game that suggests he’s been paying pretty close attention. He ends with this: “He’s a 7-footer. When you’re seven feet, you’ve got nothing to worry about offensively.”
Thompson is 6-foot-9. There’s a touch of wistfulness in his voice as he says it.
So you’re saying if I was seven feet tall . . . ?
It’s a playful question, but Thompson pretends seriousness. He looks me up and down, nodding approvingly.
“As long as you’d played hard and learned to rebound, you’d have been in the NBA.”
This is a hard kid not to love. In this one instance, a liar, but one that leads with his heart.
Thompson’s latest project is his shot, an ungainly, multi-platform delivery that rises up like a backhoe clawing at masonry.
The Cavs have been trying to both polish and quicken Thompson’s delivery. In the early going this season, he is amongst the league’s most blocked shot-takers. The Cavs brought veteran Zydrunas Ilgauskas (pictures on memory wall: 2) to help him sharpen his mechanics.
This is more than fine-tuning. It’s re-education.
“Balance. That was my thing,” Thompson says. “I was using more arms than legs. I’ve gotta get un- derneath my shot, jump — not just set and use all arms.” At the end of practice, Thompson spends long minutes trying a variety of free-throw approaches. First, ramrod straight. Then, with a slight dip in the knees. Finally, a deep bend. They get worse as they go along. The ball cannons back repeatedly off the front of the rim. You can hear Thompson thinking a great distance away. “You have to start from the ground up — feet, legs, arms, flick your wrist, don’t put your palm on the ball,” he says. “After that, you’ve gotta be confident.” Easy to say. Even at this level, hard to do. One basket over, rookie Tyler Zeller (a true 7-footer) is metronomically sinking free throws while carrying on an animated conversation with a teammate. After breaking his cheekbone in early November, Zeller has begun eating into Thompson’s minutes since returning. Thompson has started every game this year, usually alongside veteran centre Anderson Varejao, but at 21 years old, he can already feel the next generation’s breath on his shoulder.
Alongside defending rookie of the year Kyrie Irving and the No. 4 pick from this last draft, guard Dion Waiters, Thompson remains the future of this organization (if Zeller wants to be a starter, he’ll have to steal the job from that rebounding black hole, Varejao).
The question, of course, is when that future arrives. Showing unusual feel for the history of the game, Thompson plays league sociologist.
“The NBA’s changed. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was a stretch where guys were starting to come out when they were a little more seasoned. Now we’re younger. Guys from Europe are coming out as soon as they’re eligible,” he says. “You gotta be patient. It’s not ’03, when you had LeBron, Melo. Guys are going to take longer to develop . . . You might not have a bunch of hall of famers, guys like LeBron James . . . but we’ve got solid NBA players, guys who are going to play hard.” There’s that name again. Twice. Even when he’s been scrubbed from the official history, James still hangs over this club like a lingering smell.
Though perhaps he should be, Thompson doesn’t sound daunted. That’s what separates the pros from everyone else. He remains driven by the quality that first drew the Cavs to him — work ethic. His mom drove a bus. Though his son is now a multi-millionaire, his dad still drives a truck for a living.
“Some guys are glad to be here. Some guys want to be the best.” And you? A small smile. “I wanna give guys a hard time.”