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Brian Windhorst and a team of ESPN’s Insiders sort out life and the news from in and around the NBA world.
A few minutes before the Cleveland Cavaliers’ home opener last month, owner Dan Gilbert addressed the players in the locker room.
He spoke about the excitement for the season before turning serious and telling them about his oldest son, Nick Gilbert. NBA fans might remember Nick from the 2011 draft lottery, when he was the team’s on-stage representative and good-luck charm. When the Cavs won the lottery that night, getting the right to draft Kyrie Irving No. 1 overall, the 14-year-old Nick declared, “What’s not to like?”
Nick has neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on nerves. For Nick, they’ve always grown in his brain. He has fought them throughout his 26 years, and the battle has been daunting.
Dan, who has been in a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 2019, told the Cavs players Nick needed three different brain surgeries in the past two months.
“He’s a fighter,” Dan said, which was shown on the team’s YouTube series “The Road Back.”
“And he’s fighting.”
The team has dedicated the 2022-23 season to Nick, and players have been wearing a bowtie decal on their warm-ups, a nod to Nick’s trademark neckwear. The bowtie he wore at the 2011 lottery, the Cavs believe, was the reason they won the lottery again in 2013 and 2014 and jumped up to draft No. 3 in 2021, when they landed young star Evan Mobley. It was present at all of them, even when he wasn’t there.
Uniting around Nick is another bond for this Cavs team, which has slowly and deliberately been building an admirable team-first culture over the past several years that has been core to its 8-2 start.
It’s not a new concept, of course, but wanting it and actually selling that culture are very different realities. Coach J.B. Bickerstaff has sold it to his team, and it’s maybe best personified by an honor after victories that he designed to be a unifying force.
Midway through last…
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Source : espn
