Cleveland Cavaliers: Tristan Thompson Re-Signing About Fit, Identity

If you hadn’t recognized it by now, Dan Gilbert is all in, which makes the slogan of the Cleveland Cavaliers truer than ever before. It’s not just the players and coaches who are ready to make a championship happen, it’s the entire organization.

With Gilbert’s wallet coughing up its final cache of greenbacks, the Cavs managed to reach an agreement with Tristan Thompson, the lone holdout from last year’s team that made a Finals run. The deal is reportedly a five-year, $82 million contract that is fully guaranteed.

That makes Thompson the fourth-highest paid player on the Cavs behind the Big 3. He took to Bleacher Report’s “Uninterrupted” to announce how excited he is about the deal and how he’s ready to get back at it. His final words in the video, however, are the most salient: “Unfinished business.”

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Those two words, in a nutshell, are what spurred this re-signing into motion. Make no mistake, Cleveland didn’t have to sign Thompson before the season started. They didn’t even have to sign him at all. They could’ve waited and waited until Thompson and his agent Rich Paul began to search for an alternative.

As mentioned, however, Gilbert wants to win. He’s tired of monkey business. Evidently, the Cavs never wanted this situation to take place from the get-go. They wanted Thompson to accept the $80 million deal they had offered him earlier. But he didn’t, and the franchise had to roll with the punches.

Gilbert managed to find a way to come to an agreement that worked for both sides, and get the deal finished before even the start of the season. His side held the power and yet he was willing to buy in. Looking at his Cavaliers team, he knew that there was still a final puzzle piece missing, and having paid for every other conceivable thing in front of him, he went hard after Thompson.

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Regaining Tristan is not just about who he is as a raw player. I still stand by the fact that Thompson is not a max player. But while Gilbert can see Thompson in that way, he also sees him as something more pertinent: that final puzzle piece. The one that only fits in his particular puzzle.

For the Cavs, having Thompson around is about his fit as much as anything else. Alone, he is worth something completely different than he is with the proper crew about him. Indeed, would Thompson fit with any other NBA team as well as the Cavs? It’s difficult to imagine that he would.

As a (now) fourth option, the pressure will never be on his shoulders. The Big 3 are still the ones who will be expected to lead this team to greatness. But Thompson compliments their combined offensive force with a mobile, defensive tenacity and athletic prowess that makes him their ideal partner.

Thompson can allow Kevin Love to play fourth quarter minutes by backing him up on the defensive end. He can switch onto smaller players if need be and stick with them. He provides second-chance opportunities perhaps better than anyone else in the league, and is able to move more freely when the defense is focused on the likes of LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and Love.

He provides young, healthy legs that allow some of the older guys more rest.

Tristan Thompson fits with the Cavs. Perfectly. And to Gilbert, that’s what matters most. It’s not that he’s a standalone max guy, it’s that in the Cavs’ dynamic he can be considered one.

Of course, with the re-signing come the more obvious pluses as well.

Suddenly, Cleveland no longer has to rely as heavily on Anderson Varejao’s unstable legs (thank goodness), their small-ball lineups can return to full power and the fact that Thompson’s only 24 years old leaves oodles of time for him to improve over the next five years (adding a mid-range game, improving free throw shooting and continuing to develop on defense would be ideal).

And yet, Thompson’s return wasn’t entirely centered around the ideology of fit. He was also just as big of a factor when considering team identity. LeBron spoke recently about how Thompson’s circumstances were beginning to become a distraction, and it quickly became apparent to everyone on the planet that things were shaky in Cleveland.

When LeBron is displeased, the basketball world notices. So too does the team he leads. Before all of this madness with injuries and contracts began, the Cavs all mentioned (and still do) how focused they were on making a return trip to The Finals.

Almost all players who spoke about last season’s finale mentioned that the thought made them angry, and that that raging fire was going to be what drove them to fight their way back.

Then the Thompson debacle came into full bloom and the cracks began to show in Cleveland’s rock-solid identity. They started, already, to forget their purpose. James has seen it (and been part of it) before, when the Cavs were distracted nearly to death in 2007 (the season after they made The Finals) with Varejao being in a similar position to Thompson.

That team went 9-11 in the absence of Varejao, not just because they missed his presence on the court, but because his off-court issues hung over their heads like a thick fog.

A team without an identity is sporadic, messy and unstable. LeBron knows that, and Gilbert (who, of course, was also present in 2007) knows that. It takes only something as seemingly small as Thompson’s former contract situation to cause a club to internally combust.

So now it becomes clear why Gilbert made certain to get this deal done before the beginning of the regular season. He doesn’t want a repeat of 2007. He wants a team that’s zeroed in on their goal as a single, unified entity.

Gilbert has done all he can now. He has brought the entirety of his team back from last season. With this final re-signing, he has also completed his puzzle and given back the Cavs their misplaced identity.

The Cavs have got their money. Now it’s time to work on paying Gilbert back. Winning the Larry O’Brian trophy for him would be a good way to start.