J-Speaks: Cavs Introduce I.T., Crowder and Zicic

As the month of August concluded, the back-to-back-to-back Eastern Conference champion Cleveland Cavaliers off-season consisted of hiring a new General Manager in 34-year-old Koby Altman; re-signing Kyle Korver and signing guard Jeff Green; veteran guard Jose Calderon, and former MVP in guard Derrick Rose. Then like a bolt of lightning, the team’s All-Star starting floor general Kyrie Irving ask for a trade and the Cavs granted his wish by dealing him to their conference rival. The good thing is that they not only got some solid players in return, they also got two very important assets that will help them at the end of this upcoming season. As far as the players they got in return, they were introduced by the team at a press conference at the close of this week.

On Thursday, the Cavs led by their new 34-year-old GM Koby Altman and head coach Tyronn Lue introduced their newest additions in guard Isaiah Thomas, forward Jae Crowder, and center Ante Zicic, who they acquired from the Boston Celtics on Aug. 22 for Irving. The team also received the Brooklyn Nets’ 2018 First-Round pick.

“This is an extremely exciting day for the Cavaliers; our organization and the city of Cleveland as we welcome the newest members of our Cavaliers family,” Altman said as he introduced Thomas, Crowder and Zicic.

“This is a great day for our franchise in terms of adding these players to our team. These guys are going to add a whole lot to this franchise.”

This blockbuster deal though was in jeopardy because when Thomas, who ranked third in the league in scoring with a career-high of 28.9 points per game this past season took his physical and his left hip that he injured back in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals back in the spring that ended his season had not heeled. The C’s included a 2020 Second-Round pick in the trade and both teams agreed to the trade.   

Before the new Cavs players, Coach Lue and GM Altman took questions, the players were formally introduced with jerseys. Thomas, who wore the No. 4 in his time with the Celtics will be wearing the No. 3. Crowder will continue to wear the No. 99 as he did with the C’s, and Zicic will wear the No. 41.

Once the Q&A began, one of the first questions asked was to Thomas and it was how his hip was doing and if there was a timetable on when he will be ready to play for the Cavs.

Altman addressed the question by saying, “To be fair to Isaiah, we’re not going to address any specifics on his hip injury. We’re also not going to put a timetable on it.”

He also said, “We’re not going to rush it, at all. This is not going to turn into the Isaiah Thomas hip press conference.”  

Despite walking the tight rope around the health of the newest member of the Cavs team by Altman, Coach Lue revealed that Thomas will miss the beginning of the season, which means that the two-time All-Star floor general will still be rehabbing that hip for the first five to six weeks at least. That means the point guard duties for the Cavs will be on Rose and Calderon.

Altman also said that the Cavs are very fortunate to have the best doctors in the world at the Cleveland Clinic as well as the best performance team in the NBA that has a well thought out and established plan that Thomas has already started, with the goal of getting Thomas back and being able to play at the level that made the Celtics a 53-win team and the No. 1 Seed in the Eastern Conference in 2016-17.

Specifically, the man that has been referred to as I.T. the last few years addressed the question by saying he has been getting treatment on that hip each day, while also doing a lot of strength work in the weight room.

“Like Koby said, we have a plan set, and we’re just going to attack that plan, and get me back to 100 percent as soon as possible,” Thomas, who this past season averaged career-highs of 46.3 percent from the field, a career-high tying 37.9 from three-point range, and shot a career-high of 90.9 percent from the foul line, ranked second in the league said.

Even though he was not present for the presser of the new additions, one very important name that was brought up was four-time MVP and three-time Finals MVP LeBron James and it was asked by ESPN’s Dave McMenamin if Thomas, Crowder and Zicic had any interaction with him since the trade 19 days ago.

Thomas, who will be a free agent at the end of this upcoming season, said that James has communicated with him, and Crowder and how excited he is about what they can bring to the table and how they can help the team get back to The Finals for the fourth year in succession.

“To speak for myself, I’m excited to play with the best player in the world,” Thomas said. “I’ve been in situations before where things been a little tough, and we’ve haven’t had the best players, but we just kept fighting, and worked with what we had. Being put in this situation on the court is everything. To play with the best player in the world. To play with a guy like Kevin Love, and J.R. Smith, and Derrick Rose, and to be coached by a guy like Tyronn Lue, whose played in this league for a long time, it’s like I said in my ‘Players Tribune’ piece yesterday it’s like a match made in heaven. It’s a scary thing if everything is able to click with the guys we have coming in and the guys we have on this team. I’m excited, and I can’t wait to get going.”

In that piece Thomas did in the “The Players Tribune,” he talked how he found out about the trade when Celtics’ President of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge called him as he was driving home from a Seattle, WA airport from celebrating his one-year wedding anniversary with his wife Kayla in Miami FL.

At first Ainge could not reach Thomas, but when he did, Ainge told Thomas that he had traded him to the Cavaliers for Irving.

“And that’s when, like—man. You ever been on the phone and someone says something…and then all of a sudden, all you can think about after is, I don’t want to be on the phone anymore? Not even in a rude way. Just, like, your willpower to have a conversation shuts down. That’s what it was like for me in that moment,” Thomas said in his piece.

Thomas understands being traded because, he was dealt twice in his career. Once by the team that drafted him with the No. 60 and final pick in the draft in 2011 by the Sacramento Kings, which ironically is the same draft where Irving was chosen No. 1 overall by the Cavaliers. The Kings dealt Thomas to the Phoenix Suns on July 12, 2014. The Suns then traded him to the Celtics at the trade deadline on Feb. 19, 2015.  

This time however, the trade Thomas said caught him off guard, but also woke him up in answering the question from Comcast SportNet New England’s A. Sherrod Blakely. That the NBA is a business, and that unless your name is LeBron James, Kevin Durant, or someone of that caliber, you can be dealt to another team in a heartbeat.

“I prayed on it. I thought about it. I slept on it, and I’m thankful for this opportunity,” he said. “I’m blessed to be able to be traded to a situation where realistically we can win a championship next year. I couldn’t ask for anything better.”

Even with that, the trade still hurt from being dealt by the C’s, but the trade can serve as a good lesson for all NBA fans.

Thomas said that it made him think back to last off-season where Durant decided to sign with the Golden State Warriors as an unrestricted free agent and how people ridiculed him and called him a villain just because he wanted to join a team that had a better chance at winning a championship.

He wanted his trade to show that no matter how much you do to help your prior team win, like playing through the playoffs with a heavy heart after losing your sister to a tragic car accident which happen to Thomas young sister Chyna before the start of this past postseason, you can still be dealt.

The NBA is a business and teams will do whatever they need to do to win, especially win a championship, which the Warriors did back in June for the second time in the last three seasons, when they beat the Cavs in five games.

“I want them to see how my getting traded—just like that, without any warning—by the franchise that I scratched and clawed for, and bled for, and put my everything on the line for? That’s what people need to fix their perspective,” Thomas said in his piece.

“And like I said, there’s no hard feelings. But, I just hope that the next time a player leaves in free agency, and anybody wants to jump on him or write a critical story or a nasty tweet about him, maybe now they’ll think twice.”

The other thing that Thomas can be excited about this trade besides teaming up with LBJ is that two of his teammates from the Celtics in Crowder and Zicic are with him on this new chapter in their respective careers.

In Crowder, the Cavs have a sharp shooter, who averaged 13.9 points and 5.8 rebounds this past season with the Celtics, while also shooting career-highs of 46.3 percent from the field and 39.8 from three-point range.

The former Second-Round pick by the Cavs, No. 34 overall in 2012 also can guard the oppositions best perimeter player and brings a toughness and tenacity that every title contending team needs.

His new opportunity was the last thing on the mind of Crowder because his mother, Helen Thompson, who had been battling cancer passed away just minutes after he told her of the trade.

“There was a lot going on that day, obviously” Crowder said at the presser on Thursday. “The good thing about the whole ordeal was I was able to whisper it to my mom before she passed. I was with her. I just told her, ‘We’re going to Cleveland.’ Five minutes later, she passed.”

With all that lies ahead for the Cavs, and what they want to accomplish, the question is will the team have enough time to get it all together when Thomas does come back.

Coach Lue feels the team will have enough time to put it all together and have the team prepared when we get to spring time and the postseason.

“When you add in an All-Star. A guy who was up for MVP. Fifth in the MVP votes, and you add LeBron James who can play with anybody in the world, it’s not going to take long for those guys to click,” Lue said about Thomas, and James meshing together.

“I think we’ve added the right pieces to this team and Koby has done a great job of doing that, and our main goal, and main focus is being healthy when the playoffs start…We know once we hit the playoffs and we’re healthy, we’re going to be a tough team to beat.”

Before this trade, the Cleveland Cavaliers were a team that on the surface had a look of a team that could make through the East, but were going down hard in The Finals to the Warriors again and that would be it for James. This trade has put the Cavs in position to be at the same level as the Warriors if they make it back and meet them in The Finals for the fourth straight season. It has also put them in position if things do not work out that they are in position to reconstruct their team in a better way than they were when James left the first time back in the summer of 2010.

No matter which way the pendulum swings, it will be full of excitement and it will begin for the Cavs and the Celtics when they meet at Quicken Loans Arena in Northeast Ohio on Tuesday night, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. on TNT.

Information, statistics, and quotations are courtesy of 9/6/17 NBA.com article, via “The Players’ Tribune,” “Isaiah Thomas Opens Up About Trade, Shows Love For Boston in Letter;” 9/7/17 Introductory Press Conference for newest Cavaliers Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder and Ante Zicic, via Cavs.com; 9/7/17 ESPN.com article, “Cavaliers Mum on Isaiah Thomas’ Hip Injury During Introduction,” by Dave McMenamin; 9/7/17 www.sports.yahoo.com article, “Jae Crowder Says His Ill Mother Passed Minutes After He Told Her He was Traded,” by Kurt Helin;  www.espn.com/nba/player/stats/_/id/6472/isaiah-thomas; www.espn.com/nba/player/stats/_/id/6581/jae-crowder; www.espn.com/nba/statistics/player/_/sat/free-throw and http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Thomas_(basketball).