The Cleveland Cavaliers Are Dialed In

“I like building little machines,” the Cleveland Cavaliers’ center Jarrett Allen once told a local reporter. He was describing the soil-humidity reader he’d crafted one weekend so that he could know when to water his plants. He grew up taking his toys apart, trying to soup up his Nerf guns. As a kid, he broke open one of his dad’s old computers to tinker with it. In high school, he built his own. This, apparently, raised flags during the draft process, in 2017, and he dropped down the boards. There were “questions about his commitment,” as the New York Times put it, as if a curiosity about the way things worked had nothing to do with basketball. The Brooklyn Nets snagged him with the twenty-second pick.