For Cavaliers fans, the strange bedfellowing
of last year's NBA Finals continues this summer, just with a different potential
paramour. The question is, what kind of relationship can we really have when
our newest crush barely knows we exist?
Last season's wooing of the Dallas
Mavericks was all hand-holding and restaurant desserts, admittedly. The wounds
of The Decision were still fresh, and Clevelanders happily climbed into Mark
Cuban's bunk as his team sent the Heat back into the swirling vortex of evil
from whence they came.
The Cavs for Mavs movement was a
fun and ultimately cathartic frolic for a fanbase one ugly season removed from
the departure of That Guy in Miami Miami 's ouster, made
doubly lovely by James's undeniable role in his team's defeat.
It doesn't seem like that, though.
Because we already did the "Cavs for (Team Playing Against Miami) thing
last year. It's like a joke that's funny the first time you hear it, but loses
its punch each consecutive time it's uttered. We need some new material.
It's not about the national media perspective
of Cleveland ,
either. Moral arbiters like Jeff Van Gundy are always going to chide Clevelanders
for rooting against James, as if any other city that was treated in such shabby
fashion wouldn't fire invective at the rat for all eternity. (It's hard to take
a semi-entertaining oddball like Van Gundy too seriously, though. He's like the
doddering uncle who rambles about the "Zionist banking conspiracy" at
Thanksgiving dinner. You want to be offended but can only laugh, because hey,
That's just Unky Jeff doing his zany Unky Jeff thing. Now, pass the stuffing.)
Cheering for the Thunder is fine.
Plenty of folks outside of Cleveland
will be doing the same. Publically hitching our star to another city's team a
second year in a row is something else, however. Oklahoma City getting a parade does nothing
for the Cavaliers or Cleveland. Creating Twitter feeds and intertwining logos
of the two teams, as if the cities are truly in this thing together, comes off as
a little bit silly 12 months after the Cavs for Mavs movement briefly ensnared
our hearts.
The Cavs have a huge draft coming
up, a budding superstar of their own, and a fairly long way to go before
they're in the same position as the Thunder. Fun is fun, but living vicariously
through another city's team will only take us so far.