Whatever affliction that caused Rodney Hood to regress as a player when he was hand-picked by Jabroni Lames to help take the Cavaliers to the finals in 2018, I’m pretty sure he’s cured of it. No longer is Hood playing with superhuman levels of passivity. No longer is he refusing to enter games despite the pleas of his teammates. No longer is he bursting into tears every time LeBron approaches him at his locker and tells him, “You gotta just play your game bro”. No longer does he spend hours drafting the letter that he’ll give his coach when he’s finally decided to retire from basketball forever and become a sustainability-minded chicken farmer.
The Hood we see now is aggressive and confident, just like the Hood that was on the Jazz for a few years before Jabroni Lames poached him and destroyed his soul. Or was it the ruthless Cleveland media that destroyed his soul? Anyway, his soul was destroyed and barely clinging in tatters to his corporeal form, but now his soul is reborn and Hood is a sixth-man scoring machine who has taken some lessons on swagginess from the kings of swaggy shots, Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum.
Maybe getting destroyed by the Cavaliers organization was a necessary thing in Hood’s career. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes or something. He learned what it was like to be at a low point and it gave him the fuel necessary to again reach the high point. That sounds sappy but I can totally relate. When I ran out of Pop-Tarts this morning (poor planning on my part) I spent three hours lying on the floor of my kitchen with the empty Pop-Tart box cradled in my arms. It was then that I realized how dear Pop-Tarts are to me, and I made a special trip to the convenience store to get more of them. Only through that pain did I gain the strength to do the things necessary in life. That’s a lesson anyone can learn from.