Jarrett Allen: Comic book enthusiast, plant dad and the Cavs’ anchor on the interior
Kelsey Russo
Nov 9, 2022
In a beloved comic strip, a 6-year-old boy named Calvin tells his stuffed tiger Hobbes, “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy. Let’s go exploring!”
It’s one of Jarrett Allen’s favorite quotes from his most treasured comic strip. Allen has the collector’s edition of every Calvin and Hobbes comic and used to have a mural of the characters on his wall.
The comic has shaped the Cleveland Cavaliers center’s outlook on life in more ways than one.
“I love just going through life, just seeing things and learning about it, no matter what it is,” Allen told The Athletic. “Just try to go out there and try to touch it in some way and try to just enjoy it.”
Allen’s infectious smile and cool swagger have made the 6-foot-11 All-Star a Cavaliers fan favorite. He has quickly established himself as one of the NBA’s best defensive bigs, and the Cavaliers rewarded him with a five-year, $100 million contract in August 2021.
But Allen is also just like you and me. He’s the guy who shows up to All-Star weekend wearing a super casual outfit and asks the media, “What am I supposed to do, wear a $5,000 chain to a game?”
When Allen’s not on the court, he’s a plant dad of sorts, caring for Monsteras to Parlor Palms, Money Trees, Swedish Ivy and Tulips.
“I just grab a plant every now and then. I like the color green in my house,” Allen said. “Eventually I want to get into gardening. Probably when I’m older and I have the actual space outside to actually create pots, do the little seeds, start the seedlings inside and then when it comes time for growing season – you see I already researched it – move everything outside and get that going.”
Allen is dexterous in the kitchen as well, an interest he developed when he was younger. He experiments with different types of bread. He’ll often bake English muffins and Jewish breads like challah and babka from scratch. But nothing is off limits in his kitchen.
“I made some ciabatta the other day, homemade ciabatta, this garlic pesto sauce, bacon, tomatoes, chicken, it was a good little meal,” Allen said. “It’s just stuff that’s fun to make. I like measuring the stuff out and waiting for the time.”
Cavaliers assistant coach Antonio Lang, who works with bigs like Allen, Robin Lopez and Evan Mobley, said the 24-year-old isn’t afraid to get into DIY projects at home, too.
“He fixed an outfit the other day,” Lang told The Athletic. “He said, ‘Hey, ‘I’m gonna fix the bottom of my pants; I want you to see.’ So it’s always the interesting little things. I’ve learned so much stuff outside of basketball from him.”
That pair of pants? Allen watched a few clips on YouTube to fix a pair of jeans. He didn’t love the straight cut, so he tapered them by going on the inseam, measuring and sewing them.
“I think people really need to know how cool he is,” Lang said. “I’m always telling him that … I mean, the guy walks around with an Afro. No one wears an Afro; that should be cool in and of itself.”
Jarrett Allen (Ken Blaze / USA Today)
Lang found himself listening to CNN on a drive home one day when a conversation sparked by Allen about Mars left him wanting to know more. He brought tidbits from what he heard back to Allen.
“The thing that I love about him is I know what to expect with him on the court,” Lang said. “He’s always gonna give you his best regardless. But the thing that is really refreshing to me is the stuff that’s off the court that we talk about, like so many things. Like the young man got me interested in Mars. I never cared about anything outside of the Earth. Things like that.
“You can just talk to him about things that I guess you would say a normal basketball player wouldn’t talk about, like reading books. He tells me a good book that he read. A lot of like, nature types. So there’s a lot of things we kind of talk about that kind of fills the gaps because the season is so long.”
From traveling – he went to Australia and New Zealand this summer as a coach for Basketball Without Borders – to his love of learning, Allen embraces the appreciation for the small things in life.
Allen’s growth mindset was instilled by his parents, Cheryl and Leonard, at a young age. His brother, Leonard, who is three years older than him, also played a critical role.
“I guess me and my brother were competitive in different ways, not even sports, whether it’s who can eat the most cookies after dinner,” Allen said while laughing. “Just trying to improve stuff like that, who can win at Monopoly? It’s just trying to improve my skill set in anything.”
Allen’s love for exploring even molded his introduction to basketball. Jarrett, who was in middle school at the time, was hanging around one of Leonard’s basketball practices at Round Rock High, outside of Austin, Texes, when he found another gym and decided to check it out. There was a younger basketball team practicing, and the players invited Allen to join them.
“This is like sixth grade and I was like, ‘OK,’ and that’s how it started,” Allen said. “Sometimes I think it was meant to happen like that.”
When Allen was at Texas his freshman year, then-Longhorns head coach Shaka Smart would hold meetings with the freshmen regularly. In these meetings, Allen said Smart focused on teaching them about an aspect of life to grow as a person. From those meetings, Allen learned how to take care of his mind off the court.
“Sometimes he’d show Tom Brady or Usain Bolt, I don’t remember all of them, but there were certain things where they showed how they reached greatness, how they became excellent in every aspect of their life, even outside of sports,” Allen recalled. “And that in college kind of just piqued my interest to see how I can evolve off the court to help myself on the basketball court.”
“One of the great, great traits that Jarrett has is he loves to learn,” Smart told The Athletic. “He didn’t get so worked up like a lot of guys do, that he didn’t have all the answers at 18 years old. But instead, he took a growth mindset. And just tried to add to what he knew. And the thing about him, and I think this is a common trait of all the best players is, he learned really fast. You could work with him on something literally, a few times one week, and then you could see him put into action in a game the next week. And that’s rare.”
Allen entered college with that mindset in place largely because of his final three years of high school spent at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, a boarding school in Austin. The school was about 45 minutes from his house, so Allen didn’t go home very often. It had a college-like atmosphere in terms of the learning environment.
“It was really a lot of independence there to try to shape us into adults, to be ready for the world,” Allen said. “And just that independence being young, having to do college-level work at 15 years old, I do think that shaped me the way I am today.”
His high school basketball coach, LaMont King, saw an advantage in seeing his players every day. In addition to practice, they had meals together and held team bonding activities. King would also see Allen or his other players as they walked to classes. King lived on campus with his wife, who Allen affectionately called ‘Mama King,’ and had players over for meals. Allen described them as a “campus mom and dad” for his teammates.
“Our community embraced him,” King told The Athletic. “And, it wasn’t just me the basketball coach, but it was the advisor, people in the dining hall he really looked up to and stuff like that. So, it was definitely a little community. And it matched his personality well. He got along with everybody, the janitors and the cooks, everybody.”
Allen had a sense of comfort with King. There was an open line of communication between the two, whenever Allen needed to talk to King he knew the coach was available. Sometimes King also wanted to talk to Allen.
“Coach King on the basketball court, I used to always tell him, if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right,” Allen said. “You can work hard and have a lot of fun doing it too. So that’s something that we instilled in each other and I still hold on to that fact today.”
That phrase, ‘always have fun’ is still on King’s board at St. Stephen’s. They use the board to draw up plays, but that phrase – which Allen voiced after he was named captain his junior year – stuck with King.
Allen returned to the school where he was named a McDonald’s All-American for a home game in December 2019. On that day, Allen’s No. 35 jersey was retired in front of alumni and students. The jersey is still at the school.
Smart knew early on that Allen would play in the NBA. But it wasn’t a topic they spoke about frequently during Allen’s freshman year.
“I remember, before his freshman season even started, I asked him, I said, ‘You know, Jarrett, what do you want to set as a goal for this year? And, kind of where do you want to be coming out of this season?’” Smart recalled.
“And he said – I thought it was a great answer – he said, ‘I just want to focus on making this the best freshman season that I can. And then when it gets done, I’ll see where I am.’ And, again, that’s one of Jarrett’s real strengths is the ability to be present, be in the moment, not get too caught up in the past and the future.”
That mindset paid off for Allen. He played and started in 33 games during that 2016-17 season, averaging 13.4 points, 8.4 rebounds and 1.6 blocks per game. He shot 56.6 percent from the field and 56.4 percent from the free-throw line. Allen’s production in February was particularly impressive. Over eight games, he averaged 17.8 points, 7.5 rebounds and 1.3 blocks in 35 minutes en route to earning Big 12 All-Rookie and All-Conference Third Team honors.
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It wasn’t until the Big 12 Conference Tournament that Allen knew he had the potential to be an NBA player. He just wanted to play basketball and be a college student, but those conversations quickly changed.
Allen decided to test the draft waters in 2017, and he was selected 22nd by the Brooklyn Nets.
“There was no doubt in my mind,” Smart said. “I think there are some people through the draft process, and even before that, that maybe miscalculated the drive, and hunger and passion for being great that he had, and has, inside of him. That’s a great lesson. … You don’t have to be like a rah, rah, person to be extremely internally driven. And I’ve always really respected Jarrett’s seriousness for being great. And you see it now with the Cavs.”
Allen takes off his warmup jacket, balls it up and slides the jacket toward the baseline as the starting five take the floor. He runs off the court to fist-bump security guards, ball boys and PR personnel. He heads back toward the court and goes down the line of the coaching staff and his teammates, fist-bumping or hugging everyone along the way. When he gets to the scorer’s table, Allen turns and looks towards the top of the arena, where Cavs bilingual play-by-play announcer Rafa El Alcalde sits, and waves. They call it their space salute.
Allen then heads to the circle at the center of the court for tipoff.
It’s a pregame ritual he began in Brooklyn with the Nets, wanting to get everyone involved before tipoff. After he was traded to Cleveland in 2021, he continued that tradition.
“It just started with showing everybody love, I truly do think everybody’s a part of it,” Allen explained. “It’s just something I do to get everybody hyped for the game, and obviously it helps me feel more hyped for it, it gets me going.”
Jarrett Allen and Cavaliers assistant coach Antonio Lang (Jim Poorten / NBAE via Getty Images)
While many players around the league don’t always stay in their markets in the offseason, Allen liked the familiarity of Cleveland and worked out at Cleveland Clinic Courts during the summer of 2021 while awaiting a potential contract extension with the Cavs.
“I genuinely like Cleveland,” Allen said. “I like the coaches, I like playing here, playing for the team. So it really wasn’t that hard of a decision to come back here and work out.”
During that summer, Allen relied on Lang to take his game to new heights. After Allen took an allotted amount of time off, Lang was back in Cleveland working with Allen on July 1.
“One thing about him, he’s really set in his ways, which is good. So it’s my job to get him out of his ways sometimes,” Lang said. “But he won’t play in the summer. Only time he’ll play is when it’s organized, where he’s playing the right way. But he comes in, I don’t have to tell him to get his conditioning. He gets his conditioning.
“So he’s just rare, as far as knowing who he is and when he needs to work.”
Allen was traded to Cleveland in January 2021 as part of a four-team deal that sent James Harden to the Nets. Allen was in the final year of his contract and eligible for a new contract that offseason. His success in Cleveland, and the immediate chemistry on the court with Darius Garland, further cemented his long-term fit with the Cavs. In the first 44 games that tandem was on the court together following the trade, the Cavs had a defensive rating of 105.3, and an offensive rating of 111.9.
But there was an adjustment period for Allen.
“It did take some growing,” Allen said. “It’s not a good perception of Cleveland around the league, that’s just the honest truth. Nobody sees Cleveland as like, ‘Oh, I want to go there.’ But once I got here, it was like, I do want to be here. I thought that I just fit in well.”
Allen’s offensive game has taken a leap during his tenure in Cleveland. It’s not by accident. That was the Cavs’ collective objective for Allen during the 2021 offseason.
After the Cavs traded for Allen, Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff noted Allen’s ability to finish, how he caught the ball in the middle of the floor in pick-and-roll, and how he had great balance and footwork. If a player has good balance and footwork, then there is a potential to be a strong post player.
“I think through his career, he had a specific role and expectedly so with the guys that he was playing with,” Bickerstaff said last season. “There was a realization, I think, inside of him and with this group, that there was more there. And we kept talking about how he hadn’t reached his ceiling, he hadn’t reached his peak. And he was open to that. He put the work in and the time in to continue to improve his skills.
“But then there’s this quiet confidence about him, that he believes that he can dominate games while being who he is.”
Last season, Allen did just that. He dominated on both ends of the floor protecting the rim and being an offensive threat. He was named an All-Star for the first time in his career, and represented the Cavs during All-Star weekend. Despite Allen missing 17 games post-All-Star break due to finger injury, he ended the season averaging a double-double of 16.1 points and 10.8 rebounds per game.
He picked up where he left off in the early days of the 2022-23 season. Through the first 10 games, Allen is averaging 13.5 points and 12.2 rebounds per game. He continues to play an integral part of Cleveland’s early success with his rim protection and presence in the paint.
“He’s a Defensive Player of the Year candidate every single year,” Bickerstaff said during a recent postgame press conference. “And I think it’s time that we acknowledge that.”
When I posed the question, “Who is Jarrett Allen?” He paused to think.
“I like to think I’m just a normal person,” Allen said. “I don’t know how else to describe it, I’m a normal person. I play basketball. Obviously, I’m a professional at basketball. I love playing basketball. It’s not my life. But it is one of the biggest things I do right now. And I have a lot of interests.”
Those interests – from computers, space, NASA, baking, plants, Wes Anderson films, Pokemon and others – are what help him relate to so many people in his life. They ground him. It’s why the fans in Cleveland have fallen in love with Allen so quickly.
Those in his life, from his family members to the coaches in different phases of his career, know who Allen is. Quiet. Soft-spoken. A leader by example. Intelligent. Curious. Witty. Intellectual.
“There’s not too many guys who think the way he thinks at his age,” Lang said. “I definitely didn’t. So it’s always refreshing.
“I just think he’s a special human being. I think it’s just hard to find guys like him.”
