Jose Calderon has become the Swiss army knife of players for the Cavaliers. As the team has dealt with injuries and inconsistency, Calderon has provided a spark in the lineup, on the bench, or any role he’s asked to fill, per USA TODAY Sports.
The 36-year-old has appeared in 53 games for the Cavaliers, starting 30 of them. His numbers are modest as he’s averaging 4.2 PPG 2.1 APG and 1.4 RPG in less than 16 minutes per contest. However, he’s always prepared to help the team, which is an invaluable commodity for a veteran team that underwent a midseason makeover. His teammate, LeBron James, is one of his biggest supporters.
“You got to have one or two guys like that on every team, someone who has kind of like zero ego, zero notion of entitlement,” James said. “Listen, his whole thing is like, ‘I’m going to stay ready. I’ll stay ready so if my number is called,’ and he goes out and produces and that’s big for our team because you never know when someone is going to go down.”
Check out more Central Division notes below:
- Terry Pluto of The Plain Dealer revisited the offseason trade that brought an injured Isaiah Thomas to the Cavaliers and shipped Kyrie Irving to the Celtics. Pluto writes that it would have probably made sense for Thomas to undergo hip surgery last season as he will miss the next four months due to hip surgery. Thomas never got acclimated to Cleveland and was shipped to the Lakers. Pluto also looks the deal for the Celtics and several other aspects of the deal.
- Bulls center Robin Lopez was fined $25,000 for abusing game officials and failing to leave the court in a timely manner after he was ejected in the fourth quarter of the team’s loss to the Heat on Thursday, the league announced.
- Mark Strotman of NBC Sports Chicago looks at the Bulls’ odds of falling to a top three pick in the 2018 NBA Draft and which players would make sense as targets.
Didn’t read Pluto’s article, but I wonder why he felt the need to rehash it. Irving wanted his own team and thus wanted out. Irving forced the issue with the owner, “Trade me or I’ll sit out a year!”. Of the options available and with an hours old GM, he did the best he could for the team.
Cleveland later parlayed the players from Boston and got a haul for them making that an extremely successful completion of the flat earth Irving fiasco.
Those trades shifted the course of the season as Cleveland was stagnant with all those old guys and now have a spark going into the playoffs. Don’t know if it’s enough time as the injuries have piled on this season. However they are in a much better place than before the trade.