Superstitions, Qualifying Offers, and Swan Songs: While We’re Waiting

Happy Tuesday, WFNY!

As I arrived to my office on Monday morning, I turned off the podcast I was listening to and I flipped on the local sports talk station. It was Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio, and they happened to be talking to Joe Thomas. “Oh, cool!”, I thought. So I sat in my car and listened to the interview. Then they started talking about Joe’s consecutive snaps streak and about how he’s never injured. And I started to get pretty nervous.

Mike and Mike¹ are notorious for their ability to jinx things. On more than one occasion they have single-handedly derailed an Indians season by showing up and throwing out the first pitch. They have their “stone cold lead pipe locks”, which are sure to go wrong. Greeny has taken to referring to his predictions as the KOD, or Kiss of Death. So no, I didn’t like them talking to Joe Thomas about his relative healthiness.

“Ah, that’s just stupid and silly superstition,” I told myself. So after the interview, I confidently walked into the office feeling good about hearing a fun interview with one of my favorite athletes. And then, halfway through my work day, I hear that Joe Thomas was injured in camp. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.”

I’m pretty sensitive when it comes to sports superstitions. I’m not a superstitious person in my real life². I believe in karma to the extent that by doing good things for others, you put yourself in a situation where others are more likely to do good things for you in return, but I don’t believe in karma as a cosmic force. I think of myself as the ultimate pragmatist. But when it comes to sports? Forget about it. I try to conjure up every last inch of cosmic benevolence I can. Every positive return yields a positive plan for the future. When things go well, I’m a creature of habit and consistency. When things go wrong, I try to change anything and everything from seating arrangement to food to drink to pregame music to clothing.

This has all been magnified by what happened with the Indians this year. No amount of rational logic can convince me that Sports Illustrated isn’t largely to blame for what happened this year. Don’t think we don’t all remember Joe Carter and Cory Snyder. It kills me to think that Kluber and Brantley are the new Carter and Snyder. I still remember the Troy Smith SI cover that came just weeks before Florida completely dismantled the Buckeyes in the National Championship Game.

I hate the Sports Illustrated cover jinx. I know in the deepest part of my soul that this is all nonsense. But I also know I get sick anytime my teams are on the cover³. Just like I got sick listening to Mike and Mike talk to Joe Thomas about never being injured. Thankfully, the injury doesn’t appear to be too serious. Hopefully Joe will be fine. But still, can we all stop talking about how Joe Thomas is never injured? Oh crap! I just mentioned it myself. Hmm, ok, lets move on to some other topics….

*****

Making sense of Tristan Thompson

A lot of news came flying out of the Tristan Thompson camp on Monday. Well, I should put “news” in quotation marks. A lot of PR stunts came from the Thompson camp. Yeah, that’s more like it — because what we got wasn’t any actual news. Tristan hasn’t done anything. He didn’t sign the one year qualifying offer. He didn’t say this season will be his last with the Cavaliers. Literally the only thing that happened was Rich Paul decided to try to gain some leverage in the negotiations by talking to the press and making wildly speculative threats.

And look, I don’t blame Paul. He’s Tristan’s agent, and it’s his job to get Tristan the best deal he can. I know many rolled their eyes at Paul’s strategy with Eric Bledsoe last year. And then he got Bledsoe the highest contract of any restricted free agent last year. I think sometimes people overlook Rich Paul because he’s a fairly new agent and because he’s LeBron James’ friend. But make no mistake, Paul has shown himself to be a shrewd negotiator and a more than capable agent. It would be a mistake to roll eyes at his strategy with Thompson now.

But having said that, the bulk of the leverage still lies with the Cavaliers. Just because Dan Gilbert has all the money in the world and is willing to pay luxury tax bills, it doesn’t mean the Cavaliers should just blindly spend and give everyone max deals. Future flexibility will always matter, and locking into a bad long term contract now can have very real ramifications in the future when circumstances are a little different than they are today.

So the Cavaliers are doing the right thing also in applying their leverage in the form of patience. Letting Tristan sign his one year qualifying offer isn’t the end of the world. The Cavaliers can afford to wait on a long term deal with Tristan. I personally think it would do them a ton of good to take another season to see how Thompson plays with Kevin Love on the active roster. It’s quite possible that Thompson’s value is maximized in a world without Kevin Love. And Love isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

And even though Rich Paul says that if Thompson is forced to sign the qualifying offer that it will be his last season in Cleveland, that isn’t set in stone. The reality is, the Cavaliers will still have his Bird rights. They will still have LeBron James and an opportunity to play for championships every year — all reasons for Tristan to sign long term in 2016 instead of 2015.

If I were a betting man, though, I would bet a deal gets done in 2015. While I can see the logic in the Cavaliers wanting to push back their most severe tax bills by a year, signing Tristan now will make his contract a better relative deal in the future. As the cap explodes over the next five years, Tristan’s deal will be easier to swallow every single season. Locking him in now will very likely cost the Cavaliers a lot less in the long run.

This is all part of the game right now. There will probably be even more posturing yet to come. As long as the ultimate goal is shared by both parties (meaning, as long as Thompson wants to stay in Cleveland and the Cavaliers want Thompson signed long term), a resolution exists somewhere in the middle. A deal will be done. And as of right now, I have no reason to believe that a deal isn’t the ultimate goal of either party.

*****

New music of the week

Oh, hi there, hip hop. I see you! I have never been the biggest fan of rap music. I’ve just always been a person who prefers rock music. But good lord what a year this has been for hip hop. Kendrick Lamar dropped another masterpiece on us earlier this year. Earl Sweatshirt had a triumphant return. Vince Staples put out an incredible record. While I personally don’t like Drake, I know a lot of people loved that album.

My favorite album of the first half of 2015 was A$AP Rocky’s new album, “AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP”. I’m not sure I’ve ever connected as deeply with a rap album as I have with “ALLA”. It’s rare for two days to go by without listening to that album at least once. I love it so much.

All of this is to say, 2015 has been the year of hip hop for me. And this week’s new release falls right in line. I know Scott talked about this yesterday, but I simply cannot ignore this album this week. I’m talking, of course, about Dr Dre’s swan song, “Compton”. If this truly is the final album we get from Dre, what a way to go out.

It’s funny that someone who just released only his third album would be considered such a giant in the rap game. But that’s because Dr Dre is not a rapper. He is a producer. That’s always where his greatest legacy will be among hip hop insiders. But to the general public, his greatest contribution will always be “The Chronic”.

I’ve argued before that “The Chronic” is easily one of the most important and influential albums ever made. Ever. “The Chronic” was really the album that brought rap to the suburbs. I grew up in a small middle class town mostly full of European (German) descendants. When I was in school, I think there maybe five African American families in town. There were a handful of families of Hispanic descent. But overwhelmingly, it was a white town. I’ve sometimes joked that we didn’t grow up with much racism because there’s no diversity in my hometown. It’s hard to be a racist when you don’t even know people of other races. But I’m getting off topic here.

The point is, I didn’t grow up with friends who listened to rap music. We didn’t know much of what rap was. We knew of Sir Mix-a-Lot because we thought the “Baby Got Back” video was great. I remember being tangentially aware of Ice Cube and hearing some things about N.W.A. I remember there being controversy over the Ice-T song “Cop Killer” in 1992. But that’s about it. We knew rap existed, but it seemed like nobody really listened to rap. But then, in late 1992, Dr Dre released “The Chronic” and everything changed.

It took a while to permeate our little subsect of the globe, but by late 1993 or early 1994, suddenly everyone in my school was talking about Dr Dre. “The Chronic” was the album you HAD to get. Not a day went by where you wouldn’t see someone in the halls of my school wearing a shirt with the cover of the album on it⁴. Dr Dre was EVERYWHERE in my school. And once people started listening to Dre, they wanted to listen to other artists. Which led to Tupac. And Snoop. And then it spread to East Coast artists like Biggie and Puff Daddy.

One album seemed to change everything we thought and knew about rap. It made rap accessible to us in middle class white America, while still staying true to his own life experiences. It opened up a whole new world to me that, quite frankly, I didn’t totally realize existed.

So I wanted to believe Dr Dre still had something left in the tank. But I was skeptical. The longer that “Detox”, his supposed follow up to “2001”, was delayed, the more it reminded me of Guns N Roses’ “Chinese Democracy”. I was terrified of it. So when I heard that Dre had scrapped it, I was kind of relieved. But then he also announced he was releasing his last album, an album inspired by the N.W.A biopic. The album, “Compton”, would be both a soundtrack and a stand-alone piece inspired by the real life happenings behind the movie.

I was intrigued, but I was still a little skeptical. But when I listened to “Compton” for the first time, I was relieved. The album is great. Not great on a level of Kendrick Lamar or Rocky, but great as a fitting farewell to the most important figure in rap music in my life. On “Compton”, Dre plays to his strengths. His production is as tight and focused as ever, while still having his signature West Coast flair to it. And rather than doing most of the rapping himself, he instead does what he does best, which is let his proteges do the rapping, thus introducing even more great talent to the music world.

So if this truly is it for Dr Dre, I couldn’t be happier with the way he is going out. Now, if only we can do something about getting this album on Spotify………….

*****

That’s it from me, folks. Thanks for reading and I hope you guys and gals all have a great rest of your week!

1. Mike Greenberg, in particular [↩]
2. Though, to quote the great Michael Scott, “I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious.” [↩]
3. Ohio State being on the college football preview bothered me until I learned it was a regional cover. I don’t think the jinx applies to regional covers. Because that wouldn’t make any sense and would just be silly. Right? [↩]
4. Until someone in the administration decided kids shouldn’t be wearing shirts that said “chronic” on them, and started outlawing the shirts. Which only made us want to wear them even more [↩]