This time a year ago, it was starting to look like UVA Basketball alum Ty Jerome might be nearing the end of his NBA career, frustratingly, before it really ever had a chance to get started.
The same Ty Jerome, is now an NBA season award finalist, and last night, he scored 28 points off the bench to help the East’s top seed, Cleveland, to a 121-100 win over Miami.
How did we get from there to here?
“This is who Ty is. This is not a shock,” said Cleveland star Donovan Mitchell, who first played with Jerome on an AAU team when they were 8 years old, and also was a Little League Baseball teammate.
“I know everybody’s going to react like this is a shock that he’d been doing this for us all year,” said Mitchell, who had 30 points for the Cavaliers in the win.
Earlier in the day, Jerome, who averaged 12.5 points and 3.4 assists per game, on 51.6 percent shooting from the floor and 43.9 percent shooting from three, in the 2024-2025 regular season, was named a finalist for the NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award.
This, a year after he only got on the court for two games in the first year of a two-year deal with Cleveland, which is why he went into the preseason almost as an afterthought for new Cavs head coach Kenny Atkinson, who was hired over the summer to try something new with a talented Cleveland roster that chronically underperformed come playoff time.
ICYMI
With Jerome out, rookie Craig Porter Jr. emerged as the backup at the one spot in the 2023-2024 season, and seemed to grow into the role as the season went on, averaging 5.6 points and 2.3 assists in 12.7 minutes per game, and he shot 50.9 percent from the floor and 35.3 percent from three, both good numbers.
So, there was a Wally Pipp thing going on, and then there was the bigger issue with Jerome’s injury history – the 2019 first-round draft pick missed time with a right ankle injury as a rookie, had his second NBA season cut short with time missed to a left ankle injury, then his third ended with a groin injury that needed surgery, ahead of missing the final 80 games plus the playoffs last year with the latest ankle issue.
All told, Jerome had only been on the floor for 159 games across five NBA seasons going into fall camp, and with Jerome set to make an NBA-modest $2.56 million this season, it was being speculated that Jerome could be a candidate for a salary-dump trade-and-waive or outright buyout, which could have been the effective end of his NBA career.
Fast forward from the late summer to today, and the issue for Cleveland is, figuring out how to sign Jerome long-term.
ICYMI
Jerome has hinted to his interest in re-upping with the Cavs after the season, signaling in a pre-playoff press avail last week that he wants to return, even if it means that he would have to give Cleveland a discount.
From being maybe on his last shot at latching on long-term in the NBA, Jerome is now in a position where the $14 million-a-year that Cleveland could offer him is well below his market value in the offseason.
That issue is hopefully well down the line for Jerome and the Cavs, who as the top seed in the East are a favorite to be battling in the NBA Finals deep into June.
Jerome’s last playoff game, before last night, came way back in 2019 at UVA, when he had 16 points and eight assists in Virginia’s 85-77 win over Texas Tech in the 2019 national-championship game.
“It’s definitely special after last year, not being able to play the whole year, not being able to play the playoffs, just watching,” Jerome said. “It speaks to the time my teammates have empowered me and how my coaching staff empowered me since day one for sure.”
There’s the first of his UVA coach Tony Bennett’s pillars – humility – speaking there.
All the talk about Jerome being an inveterate trash-talker, that’s just a mechanism he uses to get himself going.
He knows how close he was to it being over and done with.
This time last year, he was watching playoff games from the sidelines.
Sunday night, he was scoring or assisting on 24 points in a second-half stretch in which the Cavs broke open a close game.
The time on the sidelines battling injuries gave him perspective.
“You get time to reflect on where you need to take the next step,” Jerome told reporters after the Game 1 win. “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.”
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Chris Graham
