The Cleveland Cavaliers are The Good Place of the NBA

We here at The Step Back really love two things: the NBA and great TV shows. One of our new favorites is The Good Place which led to a random discussion on our email thread. Which led to this exchange between myself and Andrew Tobolowsky.

Matt: Ok, Andy so we started talking in our Step Back email thread yesterday about The Good Place and it naturally shifted to who the NBA version of the Good Place is. I recommended the Cavaliers and quite a few people agreed so now comes the hard part.

Which player is which character?

The natural place to start feels like Eleanor so what are your thoughts here? Is it LeBron James or is there another answer?

Andy: Thanks, Matt, for agreeing to let me help you get to the bottom of one of the pressing issues of our time.

I think LeBron is the obvious answer, but I wonder if you’ll indulge me here with an outside the box suggestion: Kyrie Irving. I know he’s no longer a Cav, but isn’t that clearly because he recognized what would seem to most people to be The Good Place was actually The Bad Place? A very Eleanor thing to do. Now, he’s ceaseless in his quest for the “real” Good Place, but also keenly skeptical of the world around him, as for example, in his belief, real or not, regarding the curvature of the Earth. And, more than most other NBA players, he has a serious devotion to being himself in all circumstances and getting those fried shrimp. What do you think?

READ MORE: Andrew DeClercq, faith, and the NBA

Matt: Kyrie is a really interesting idea, and one that I honestly didn’t even think about at first but your reasoning is sound. I would add to it also that he would seemingly get bored by lessons about what is “good basketball” like Eleanor does with the ethics lessons. Yet, at the end of the day, he learned from those lessons and at least changed who he fundamentally was a tiny bit.

That said, despite how good this comparison is, I now can’t stop imagining Jason saying Kyrie’s “Oh, if you’re very much woke, there’s no such thing as distractions.”

Now that we settled on Kyrie as Eleanor, who is LeBron? I feel like there are a bunch of ways that can go.

Andy: I’m going to throw something out there. I bet you have a great idea yourself. But what if LeBron is Shawn, the head demonic figure who only ever telecommutes into the world of the show?

For one thing, LeBron is the most powerful being in the universe of the league, but for a lot of us, it’s possible to keep him out of sight, out of mind a lot of the time. Because it’s the East, everyone would have to die before they failed to make the playoffs, and because he’s LeBron, what the team looks like in the regular season has very little relevance for how scary they are once the playoffs start. So to me, when I think of someone who mostly lets lesser beings play, telecommutes in when he feels like it, but could at any point destroy the entire world, I think LeBron James.

Matt: I like the Shawn comparison but I keep coming back to LeBron as Janet. Whenever the Cavaliers really need something like a big shot, or great pass, or an idea of who to sign, or even someone to draw up a really good play in the huddle, they just call for LeBron and he provides it. It makes the rest of the Cavs lives so easy and they don’t really appreciate it much, kind of like how only Jason showed Janet any love when she was rebooted. LeBron also seems not human at times on the basketball court and I’m not 100 percent sure LeBron handles personal relationships and social interactions like a real human.

Finally, like Janet and (SPOILER ALERT) the Bad Place, LeBron doesn’t actually belong on the Cavs. But like Janet, he was essentially kidnapped by being born so close to Cleveland and so he is stuck.

Andy: Matt, it’s impossible for me to find fault with your argument. Nobody does as good an impersonation of a human being as Janet besides LeBron.

But here’s, I think, what the people really want to know. Who on the Cavs is Chidi? Is it even possible for a basketball player to be that humble and uncertain?

Matt: Anyway back to Chidi, this one is really hard. My first reaction was Channing Frye because he is the wise teacher who needs to teach the rest of the group lessons they cannot learn by themselves. Considering the credit he gets for fixing the Cavaliers chemistry when he arrived that fits.

But that only came about because I couldn’t think of someone humble and uncertain. Who did you have in mind?

Andy: As for me, my first instinct was Kevin Love or Jae Crowder. Kevin seems pretty diffident, and Jae has a mastery of the subtle aspects of the game in a way that approximates the esoteric expertise of an academic like Chidi.

But then I thought, what if the answer is Jose Calderon? The thing about Chidi is, it makes less sense that he’s in the Bad Place than anyone else. He seems like a genuinely good person who’s a little in his own head. And the thing about Calderon, too, is that when you look at his stats you think, man, this guy belongs in the Good Place.

Did you know that Jose Calderon dished more than eight assists a game in four different seasons? And none of those years did he have more than 2.2 turnovers a game? Did you know that he shot better than 40% from 3-point territory seven times? In the ball-moving, arc-living modern NBA it seems like a guy who really distributes and is a deadeye from deep MUST be good. Instead, he’s usually been pretty bad. Much like Chidi.

Matt: That is a great call. Although, it does upset me a bit that we won’t have Calderon around to be the next restaurant owner who serves only pork dishes.

So we have Eleanor, Chidi, and Janet already. That leaves a few other connections to make. I feel Jason is probably is the easiest so we can save him for a bit.

Tahani is pretty tough. I can’t think of anyone on the current Cavaliers whose motivations may be what harms them. They don’t really have anyone playing for a contract or anything. I would have said Dwyane Wade but he just accepted a bench role. Is it Derrick Rose? But are his actions (his play) good enough to justify it?

Andy: Dwyane Wade is, to me, a great choice. He went there because he believes he still throws the best parties and has the biggest diamonds but the reality is, he’s a very old 35 and LeBron’s parties have magical uniforms and shrimp fountains. And if they win the championship – real unlikely obviously – he’s going to be falling over himself to get the mic from LeBron to talk about his own experience. Wade, like Tahani, could be a great teammate by being a good teammate but both of their desires to be great instead is part of what may make them bad.

Matt: Yeah that makes complete sense. The lack of self-awareness is a quality that fits both so perfectly well.

So I am going to head to Michael next and I want to get your thoughts on this idea. Dan Gilbert is Michael. It starts with the idea of wanting to create something and get the credit for him. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Gilbert keeps letting general managers go after only a few years. That way the only thing that remains constant is Gilbert and people can’t just ignore him like we do with so many owners. Kind of like Michael who can’t accept the failure of his master plan because he wants credit for reinventing The Bad Place.

Then I would not be surprised at all if Gilbert has actually created and run the Cavaliers as a way to torture LeBron James. Maybe there is some deep-seated jealously in Gilbert that, despite the fact that he spent so much money on the Cavaliers which allowed them to win the NBA Championship, he will never get any credit because of the local legend in James. So between that and James leaving for Miami the first time Gilbert just wants to make him miserable while James thinks he is in paradise. But James has started to figure out the plan and is now trying to escape (forget that we decided Kyrie as Eleanor for now).

Thoughts?

Andy: Gilbert is such a Michael! He looks like the benevolent archetype of the world just because he managed to be there when LeBron was drafted and somehow didn’t piss him off too much for him to come back. But if you pull back the curtain you realize none of the higher-ups like him or trust him and they’re letting him do his weird thing for now but they expect it all to come crashing down. Which it well might. If LeBron leaves in the offseason, he’ll just have a way too expensive Tristan Thompson and the mouldering hulks of guys like Wade and Rose. It will be Team J.R. You feel that shiver in the air? That’s TEAM J.R.

So that leaves us with Jason. It’s hard not think of J.R. Smith for this role. There’s that meme making the rounds, with J.R. squinting and saying something really confused. That’s like pretty much Jason’s stage directions in every scene, right?

Matt: Yeah Jason as J.R. was the easiest call of all. And it isn’t that J.R. is dumb because I think that is far from the case. It is just that J.R. is a loveable goofball who isn’t ever quite sure of what is going on around him.

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Also he has probably been a professional amateur DJ at some point in his life.