An ode to Luke Walton

The Cleveland Cavaliers had a 27-point third quarter lead against the Miami Heat, a powerful, championship-bound team holding the second-longest winning streak in NBA history. And they lost by three. You may be thinking they lost because they didn't have their two best players (Kyrie Irving and Anderson Varejao), or that they lost because the Heat were too damn good. No. The Cleveland Cavaliers lost because they put Luke Walton on the floor, in the middle of a game, against the Miami Heat, presumably with the expectation that he would help them win a basketball game.

Truly, without Irving and Varejao, the Cavaliers are so horrifyingly bad that they must actually have people on their active roster who are worse than Luke Walton. Such a feat seems impossible, but it's the only explanation that makes sense. I can only assume that the players behind Walton on the depth chart are either allergic to touching an actual basketball or have been suspended by the team for trying to flee the city of Cleveland in the middle of practices, because Walton... well...

Look. I don't hold anything against the guy. If he ever reads this, I hope he realizes that I'm only criticizing him as a professional and that he should take solace in his millions and millions of dollars. In a league where you simply cannot win with white stiffs, Walton is the whitest and stiffest of them all. He literally cannot do anything well. Even big, dopey lummoxes are occasionally useful because they take up space, but Walton, at 6-foot-8, doesn't even do that.

There was a glorious moment in the game against the Heat, in the middle of Miami's gargantuan comeback, where the ball was given to Luke Walton at the top of the three-point arc. Walton was wide open. Simply by looking at his body language, it was obvious Walton had absolutely no idea what to do with the ball. He must have gone through a mental rundown of options and realized, maybe in an epiphany, that there was nothing he could do that would have turned out well. Should I shoot it? No, I suck at shooting. Maybe I can dribble into the lane? No, I suck at that too, and I have all the coordination of a dying hippopotamus, so LeBron would probably just block my shot. I do have some experience passing the ball, but holy crap, these other guys are almost as bad as I am! C.J. Miles? Omri Casspi?!?

I don't remember what Walton actually did with the ball, only than that it must not have turned out well, otherwise I'd have remembered. What I do know is that simply eye-balling how unimpressive Walton was doesn't do him justice. Statistically speaking, Walton was indeed the worst player on the floor in the Miami game, on a level that I think needs to be appreciated. Please behold what his +/- was in what was the Cleveland Cavaliers' biggest matchup of the year:

-34. Yes, the Cleveland Cavaliers were outscored by 34 points in the 16 minutes Walton was on the floor. Oddly enough, the most the Heat scored in a single 12-minute period was 34 -- never mind how much the Cavs scored in that period -- so for Walton to have been -34, it's almost as if the Heat went on an all-out assault whenever they saw him check into the game. Using the Per 48 Minutes metric, had Walton actually played all 48 minutes, the Cavaliers would have lost by 102 points -- which would have shattered the previous blowout record of 68 points that, randomly, was set by the Miami Heat in a 1991 game against the Cavaliers. (Spooky.)

This is not a savaging of Luke Walton. Nay, this is a celebration. This man is living the dream that all of us wish we could live. He's able to go out and play basketball for a living and make millions of dollars despite the fact that he's not very good at what he does. He's living proof that even a marginally-talented white guy can make a living playing basketball, so long as he has a famous basketball father who he can be compared to throughout his career.