The Beginner’s Guide to Antawn Jamison

Antawn Jamison has been a lot of things over the course of his basketball life; a homegrown hoops hero, Chapel Hill icon, blue chip prospect, promising young NBA stud, under-appreciated star, award-winning reserve, under-appreciated All-Star, helpless witness to a franchise collapse, three-time tradee, helpless witness to another franchise collapse, and finally, wise old veteran.

Naturally he knows what he’s talking about when he’s talking about, well, anything.

Nowadays a 34-year-old member of the Cleveland Cavaliers, he’s putting his bountiful experience to good use, helping a young rejected roster heal from the wounds of LeBron James’ departure and embrace the blank canvas that awaits them.

“This stage of my career is about knowing the ropes, especially this year,” says Jamison. “It’s just doing a lot of teaching. Trying to help these young guys go through this transition at a difficult time.”

The transition from Eastern Conference contender to dispirited team on the mend has been a frustrating one. After an unexpectedly solid start to the 2010-11 campaign, reality set in for theCavs who had just seen the foundation of their franchise transported across the country. That’s where Jamison, once brought in as a final piece in the LBJ NBA Champion puzzle, has been able to thrive.

“Guys realized it was tough but just tried to get through it,” says Jamison. “We understood that there were still games that needed to be played. The most important thing was that we still got to have fun.”

“In the middle of the season when we were losing, it was difficult for everybody to have fun and still go out there and compete at a high level, but now guys understand that nobody is going to feel sorry for us.”

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In the final weeks of the season, the tone in the Cavaliers locker room changed. Just as Baron Davis brought energy to the Q after his autumn in California throwing lobs to then-Los Angeles Clippers teammate Blake Griffin, J.J. Hickson emerged as a confident, competent big man to whom new lobs could be thrown.

Though the wins never exactly started pouring in, the attitude improved from “24 losses in a row” to “24 hours at a time”. Injured for much of the second half of the campaign, Jamison was able to provide a veteran’s voice both on the bench and off the court.

It wasn’t always this way for Jamison, though.

In the 1998 NBA Draft, Antawn Jamison was drafted fourth overall by the Toronto Raptors and immediately traded to the Golden State Warriors for pal and former North Carolina Tar Heels teammate Vince Carter.

Carter would soon go on to take the 1999 NBA Rookie of the Year award, monopolizing ESPN highlight reels and putting the Raptors on the map while Jamison toiled through mediocrity in the Bay Area.

The Golden State Warriors of 1998 were not the Golden State Warriors of 2007, or even 2011. Back then, nearly a decade prior to the return of Don Nelson, the historic Dallas Mavericksupset and the infamous Andrei Kirilenko crowning, the franchise was still reeling from the aftermath of their star player attempting to strangle their head coach.

In the late 1990s there were no heroic post-moped accident comeback stories to cheer for, no time traveling commercials featuring little Stephen Curry. In the late 1990s, Stephen Curry waslittle Stephen Curry.

Back then, when Jamison first donned an NBA uniform, the Warriors were simply just there, happy to lay low with no further choking incidents to sully their name.

For five years, Jamison battled valiantly to make his new franchise a success for the first time since the days of Run TMC. He was fresh out of college, a draft entry after only his Junior season. He was young (remember, 1998) and thrust into the spotlight on the other side of the country from where he grew up.

It wasn’t easy.

Between his second and fourth seasons in the NBA, his Warriors won a total of 57 games, five less than the Chicago Bulls did in 2010-11. In the 2000-01 campaign he averaged as many as 24.9 points per contest with 8.7 rebounds while the Warriors placed seventh (remember, 2001) in the Pacific Division with 17 wins.

What Jamison was capable of, and what his team was capable of, were two entirely different things.

“When you’re getting started out, you’re still learning. You’re trying to understand not only the game but what you can do as an individual and so forth.”

Until his liberation by the Mavericks in the summer of 2003, Jamison would continue to dominate without so much as a pat on the back by the league or the media.

It was in his first and only season with Dallas – alongside Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash and Michael Finley – that he settled into a role that contributed directly to team success. For his efforts as a reserve on a competitive Mavs roster he was awarded the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year award.

After a first-round Dallas exit, Jamison was packaged in a deal to the Washington Wizardswhere he, reunited with former Warriors teammate Gilbert Arenas, would emerge as not just surprisingly capable, but a legitimate NBA presence.

From 2004 until a midseason deal in the 2009-10 season, Jamison, Arenas and Caron Butlerput the Wizards on the map. The notoriously woeful franchise, with one playoff berth in the previous 16 years, was on the rise, benefitting greatly from the infusion of fresh talent and a calm-headed Jamison that could drop 20 and 10 on command.

From the moment Jamison arrived in D.C. until the wheels officially came off the Gilbert Arenas’ sanity train in 2008-09, the Wizards were serious Eastern Conference threats, perennially poised to make noise come spring.

Only they didn’t.

Sure, four consecutive post-season appearances were a luxury Jamison could get used to, but three consecutive first-round exits to the Cleveland Cavaliers were an omen of things to come.

The Wizards faltered, and part-way through the 2009-10 campaign, after diligently attempting to adjust to his collapsing conditions, Jamison was officially sent to the Cavs to help his then-rival James earn a championship.

Here Jamison teamed up with veterans Shaquille O’Neal and Zydrunas Ilgauskas to give the James-led Cavaliers a sense of maturity and wisdom that only he and his Owl-from-Winnie-the-Pooh furrowed brows could provide.

The hastily stacked Cavs, however, never managed to go as far as people expected them to. With a front court consisting of O’Neal, Ilgauskas and Jamison (not to mention the aforementioned J.J. Hickson, Anderson Varejao and LBJ himself), that they fell in the second round of the playoffs to a young Bulls team was disappointing. It was the latest in a string of such disappointments that the charismatic Jamison hasdbeen tolerating for the majority of his career.

To say that things got better when James left, however, would be a lie.

Fortunately for Jamison, although he’s about as far from a championship as he’s ever been in his career, he’s exactly where he belongs.

Over the course of his 14 years in the NBA, Jamison has been on the receiving end of basketball misfortune more than most could bear, but it’s his ability to thrive in such situations that make him such a valuable, if subtle, component of his generation.

Like police officers in troubled neighborhoods, registered nurses or beat writers for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Jamison thrives when things are most upsetting because that’s the type of person that he is.

Not everybody could handle the daily trials of such public servants, but Jamison does with a smile, helping everyone alongside him every step of the way.

“The one thing that still hasn’t changed is the fun of the game,” says Jamison, “The way I approach it. Every game I want to win, to go out there and compete at a high level.”

No wonder the young Cavaliers were able to make such mental progress adjusting to the turmoil of the 2010-11 campaign, they’ve been learning how to do it from someone who’s mastered it over the past decade and a half.

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