Exits: The weather where you are
This Cavs team has been together for two seasons, but still isn't quite sure where they should be.
When my brother moved to Japan I added NHK News to the morning rundown I croak for the little smart speaker to give me as I make coffee, and lately, check on the flowers and herbs in the pots and planter boxes on the balcony. While I wait to wake up I listen to the news from a day that’s already happened and feel closer to my family. It’s how I learned about the Noto earthquake on New Year’s Day, and how I heard about the Kochi Flower Arrangement Festival that I told my parents, in Kochi at the time, to go to.
The NHK portion of the news roundup is always the longest, on weekends it can run 20 minutes to the other networks’ comparatively brief three to five. There are the usual global headlines, followed by in-depth coverage of news across Asia, followed by national and then local Japanese news. There are occasional recurring segments, like ‘A Brief History of Japanese Landmarks’, there is always a weather report.
When I heard the weather report for the first time I was confused as to why it was giving me the latest in the skies over Iowa. I thought maybe it was geo-targeted to North American listeners. The next time, it focused on a storm system rolling over Madagascar, followed by a dip in temperatures for Southern France. What I’ve learned and look forward to is that the NHK weather report, for reasons that are likely what happens to be highlighted on the most recent televised news update that’s then clipped for digital feed aggregation, very rarely, if ever, has to do with the weather where I am. It’s a roving, auditory exploration, with the enthusiastic broadcaster cramming huge swaths of geography in reports that zoom in, out, then way back in with one breath (“From Zacatecas through the Rockies, and up to Red Deer”). Even if I wasn’t a keener for weather, there would be something quietly and briefly exhilarating about knowing what’s headed Seychelles way, or that Andalusians can soon look forward to rain.
A report came out recently that said the Cavaliers “don’t appear very motivated” to trade Donovan Mitchell, as well as Jarrett Allen, Evan Mobley and Darius Garland. To which I wonder, did we need a report? That’s basically the team.
What stuck out to me, in the way a misplaced set of keys appearing out of the blue will bring with them a settling sense of clarity, is that motivation is a good word to use for the latter half of the Cavs season — the absence of it.
They lost it, certainly lost impulsion, with the injuries that had Mitchell and Mobley out in alternating blips of the regular season. Before them, Garland for over a month in early winter, and after them all, Allen sat out for some of the Magic, and all of the Celtics series. The motivation in these stretches, the team all piecemeal and stuttering, was to stay competitive, keep it going.
The numbers aren’t so bad. Mitchell had the most precipitous dip from his career-best shooting and scoring the season before, but then he only played 55 games this year. The numbers for everyone else in the core the team’s unmotivated to trade either improved, or dipped according to the games they each missed. When I watched Cleveland this season — mostly in Toronto, sometimes on League Pass, once visiting Miami — they seemed to be waiting. Like they were checking around with each other to see who would go first. Individually, they knew what to do, together, they were hesitating.
The shelf life of a head coach is a strange thing. The forces are never external. The weather’s always happening on the inside. If it’s particularly volatile, like an unhappy, outspoken, very big star, or a big star and a self-conscious franchise, the weather patterns are easier to spot and in turn, predict. With the Cavs, especially after Mitchell played some of the best, free, confident basketball in his career these last two seasons, it’s fair to say we thought the forecast was good. This season, or toward its end, Mitchell apparently felt like J.B. Bickerstaff viewed the team as a group of young players on the verge, and not in that Goldilocks place of there. Mitchell’s also reported to be a leading impetus in Bickerstaff’s firing, so it feels safe to say Mitchell thinks they’ve arrived. None of it remedies the sense of waiting that permeated the group this season, who had strong game starts and 3rd quarter collapses and often didn’t looked like they remembered they knew how to turn things around until too late. Always looking down the line, especially in close contests, like Who has this?
In his season-ending press conference Cavs president, Koby Altman, told the room, “More data speaks to [how] this works than it doesn't. You can't win 99 games over the regular season, make it to a conference semi and be like, this doesn't work. This is just year two of this iteration, of this core being together.”
Altman’s right, data does speak to it. Like I said, the numbers aren’t so bad, and this team has only really been together like this for two seasons. As fast as NBA time runs, that isn’t a lot of it. What is worrying is how, watching them in jittery or stalled transitional sequences, or not revving themselves up through outside shooting slumps, unable to initiate urgency or an offensive spark, is like locking and holding eyes with someone who’s looking out their driver’s side window. Maybe they’re watching the weather, or catching your movement has jarred them back to the present where you’ve realized, before they have, that they should be driving.
Before the Cavs-Heat game in Miami I walked into the visiting locker room, hoping to chat with Allen. He was the only person who looked up when I came in, the room otherwise empty of staff, only players, and everyone looking down. Allen asked if I minded coming back after the game. I know the team was waiting for the game to start, but I’ve never been in a room so concentrated on the act of waiting, like they were willing the time down.
Greg and I spent a weekend in Cleveland once. It was an August long weekend and we were desperate to get out of Toronto, but hadn’t preempted desperation/thought ahead to plan anything in slight advance. We wanted to go somewhere we hadn’t been before. A roadtrip, we decided. We looked at Google maps. The idea of crossing the border made the roadtrip seem more legitimate. We’d both been to Detroit — Cleveland, we decided.
We didn’t have a car. We started calling around to the closest rental places and with not too many in Toronto’s west end soon discovered all the cars had been booked for the weekend. We really hadn’t thought of that? A few places asked in surprise. We couldn’t spend time explaining our spontaneity, we knew, or we’d lose our momentum. Finally we found a car, parked on a rental lot at the airport, they could hold it for us. Pacific Rim had just come out and I remember Greg said the sporty, ultra-compact, praying mantis green car looked like one of the giant fighting robot’s heads. We were on our way.
Driving to Cleveland we idled at roadside stops and cut from the highway toward Lake Erie to stop and eat fries at a restaurant on the water as seagulls wheeled over the piers and we both marvelled at how it felt like we were in Cape Cod, not Ohio. Football hadn’t started, the baseball team was out of town, and the city seemed deserted but still, when we got to Cleveland mid-afternoon, none of the hotels I started to call had vacancies. The room I finally found us was in a hotel that converted an old Deco tower, with floors ringing an open-air, ornate and very beautiful interior arcade. At the price, we promised we’d stay one night and find another hotel the next morning.
We walked down to the giant Claus Oldenburg FREE stamp sculpture, took photos of each other for how small we looked in front of the neoclassical buildings downtown, and watched an impromptu parade of lowriders bouncing high on hydraulics. We split a six-pack on an empty stomach, watching from our balcony a wedding down on the ballroom level of the arcade, and took a cab out to Now Thats Class, a venue past Ohio City where friends we knew had stopped on their tours. I remember we were very chatty to everybody and I tried to maybe “book” the band that was playing to come to Toronto. Greg insisted we could walk back to the hotel but after several blocks down a desolate Detroit Avenue a cab pulled over, asked where we were trying to go, and told us to get in. The next morning I called down to the front desk about a late checkout and Greg groaned from the other bed, “I’ll pay whatever they want, please.” We stayed another night.
I think the rest of what we did was get breakfast, walk around, go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and watch hotel TV. We brought back several cases of different bad American beer and had to balance them in our laps on the city bus from the airport to the subway, after we’d dropped the car off. We both felt like we’d been gone for weeks and when friends asked us what we did and why we went, we couldn’t really answer. What band did we see? We couldn’t remember. Did we go to a baseball game? No, but Greg took a photo of me clutching the tall bars at the gates of Progressive Field and peering in like I’d never pined for anything more.
It’s a trip we refer to as Our Cleveland Holiday, partially because of how much it ended up costing doing perceptibly not much but has, over time and recounting, turned to lore. It wasn’t about the place but then, it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.