CLEVELAND — There was a voice in the gym the Cavaliers hadn’t heard before, not like that.
A braggadocio, a brashness, a certain audacity that seemed to bounce off the walls, whether it was in the fan-cooled practice facility the team has in suburban Cleveland or at New York University, two of the places players gathered in September to play pickup before the start of training camp.
One among them was scoring on floaters, on step-back 3s, in the midrange and at the rim, a player who missed all but two games the season before with a confounding ankle injury that eventually required surgery.
Most of the Cavs weren’t used to seeing Ty Jerome ball out like he was, and they certainly were not used to, nor prepared for, the trash talk that flowed from his mouth.
“Slow down, buddy,” Darius Garland said Sunday night when asked for his initial reaction late last summer to the Jerome he saw, the same Jerome we all saw tear the Miami Heat limb from limb in Game 1 of a first-round playoff series.
“He was talking his sh– and he was backing it up, so you can’t really say nothin’ to him,” Garland said.
Ty Jerome lets Andrew Wiggins know he just made a 3-pointer in the fourth quarter Sunday. (David Richard / Imagn Images)
The biggest star on the Cavs’ roster is Donovan Mitchell, who happens to have known Jerome longer than anyone else in that Cleveland locker room. Sure, Jerome and De’Andre Hunter were college teammates at Virginia, but Jerome and Mitchell grew up in the shadows of New York City and were on the same AAU basketball team as 8-year-olds. They also played Little League baseball together.
So when Mitchell says, like he did Sunday night, that “this is who he’s been, this isn’t a shocker” … OK, fine. I suppose Mitchell can say that, having known Jerome for the last 20 years or so. But for the rest of Jerome’s teammates, for his coaches, including Kenny Atkinson, the head coach who was an assistant at Golden State when Jerome was on the roster there, for anyone who watches the Cavs play on a regular basis, the production and persona Jerome shows on the court is a little new — or at least it was when he started doing it.
Took a little getting used to.
“They laugh(ed) at him because he was at first kind of like a bit player,” Atkinson said about Jerome’s teammates. “He was still doing the swag stuff … and they were like, ‘Who does this guy think he is?’”
Now all the Cavs, the Heat, anyone who’s watched Cleveland play this year or cast a vote for Jerome as the league’s top sixth man, they all know who Jerome is.
And no one is laughing.
Jerome was Star 1A in Cleveland’s 121-100 win over Miami in Game 1, scoring 28 points — 16 in the fourth quarter — in the first playoff game of his career. The only player who may have outshined him was Mitchell, who extended his streak of scoring at least 30 points in Game 1 of a playoff series to seven, tying Michael Jordan for the longest such streak.
But, obviously, with a streak like that, to say nothing of the rest of Mitchell’s impressive resume, what Mitchell did against the Heat was expected.
Jerome has indeed enjoyed a stellar season, easily the finest of his career, but still no one can be quite sure what to expect from any playoff debut. There are butterflies to be tamed, pressure to be coped with and nerves that can get in the way of a jump shot.
If I told you that Jerome’s performance against Miami was just 2 points shy of Kyrie Irving’s playoff debut performance (30 points against Boston in Game 1, 2015), how would you react? Or that Kevin Love, another Cleveland franchise legend, shot 5-of-14 in his first playoff game, whereas Jerome was 10-of-15 overall, 5-of-8 on 3s and 6-of-7 shooting in the fourth quarter?
And all the while, as the shots were falling and the Cleveland crowd was roaring, Jerome was taunting Heat defenders with the “too small” hand gesture, pointing at players on the opposing bench and at random folks in the crowd. This has been the Jerome experience all season, but it is nonetheless remarkable that it continued in the first NBA playoff game of his life.
“Solid, solid Game 1,” Jerome said.
A half-hour before Game 1, it was announced that Jerome is a finalist for NBA Sixth Man of the Year, joining Boston’s Payton Pritchard and Detroit’s Malik Beasley. Jerome’s case is he averaged 12.5 points, shot better than 50 percent from the field and nearly 44 percent from 3-point range (his 87 percent foul shooting cost him the 50-40-90 milestone), and he has all the more enticing of a candidacy because he had never played like this in his previous five NBA seasons.
Selected 24th in the 2019 NBA Draft, Jerome averaged 10.7 points in 23.9 minutes over 33 games for the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2020-21. Otherwise, he’d played fewer minutes, produced less and wasn’t nearly as flashy on the floor. He joined the Cavs last season but in Game 2 suffered what was first considered an ankle sprain that never healed. Eventual surgery forced him out for the rest of the season.
While Jerome was watching the Cavs play (all the way through the Eastern Conference semifinals) and otherwise had so much time to think, he decided he would reconnect with his more confident side, the side Mitchell says has always been there. Last year’s thoughts turned into this season’s action.
“You get time to reflect on where you need to take the next step,” Jerome said. “Going into the offseason, your back’s kind of against the wall. You don’t play any games. I don’t really have a huge body of work in the NBA. And you kind of have one last shot, in a way, to make it right.”
To his point, Jerome entered the season in the last year of his contract. Whether he would have faced NBA extinction, no one can answer such a hypothetical, given how he’s played. But it is clear that in his mind, Jerome had no choice but to become the player he turned out to be.
In four of Cleveland’s first five games, Jerome scored at least 13 points. He followed up a career-high 29 points on Nov. 20 against New Orleans with a 26-pointer on Nov. 24 against Toronto and set a career best with 33 points against Philadelphia on Jan. 24.
All the while, Jerome seemed to fuel his own fire by looking for the nearest opponent or hot dog vendor to talk to after seemingly every bucket.
“Seeing a guy come off the bench like that and go crazy like he goes crazy, it’s pretty cool to see,” Garland said.
“He’s made for these moments,” added Max Strus, the Cavs’ starting small forward. “He’s made for the spotlight.”
Jerome was just one example, albeit a great one, of the Cavs’ exemplary guard play in Game 1. Mitchell, as mentioned, dropped 30 on the Heat. Garland added 27 points on five 3s with five assists, and Atkinson pointed out that Garland met the challenges Miami tried to present him with when Cleveland was on defense.
Atkinson said the Cavs are nearly “unbeatable” when they get that kind of performance from Garland. When Garland and Mitchell and Jerome play that way? There’s no slowing down, buddy.
(Top photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images)