The Dean of Cleveland: How undrafted Cavs role player became 'the link that drives winning' on East's top team

In crunch time on Feb. 28, the Boston Celtics' Jaylen Brown was threatening to end the Cleveland Cavaliers' eight-game winning streak. The reigning Finals MVP had scored back-to-back buckets against the smaller Darius Garland, so he set a ball screen on the Cavs All-Star, hoping Cleveland would cede the switch. Instead, Brown's man, Dean Wade, ceded nothing. Wade cut off the ballhandler, Derrick White, then recovered back to Brown, forced him left and contested his shot. The Cavs got the stop, then extended their two-point lead and their streak.

Wade finished with only five points in 19 minutes. Unlike when he scored 20 fourth-quarter points including the game-winner against the Celtics last season, he was not the hero. There was no courtside celebration with the Kelce brothers after the buzzer, no ESPN podcast appearance days later. That offensive explosion, though, was an anomaly -- it was the third time in his career that he'd scored 20-plus in a game, and he's only topped 15 once since then. The way Wade shut the door against Boston this time was much more emblematic of his role.

"I call him White Blanket," Cleveland center Tristan Thompson said. "White Blanket, you can't score on him."

Thompson remembers when White Blanket had to shuffle back and forth between the Cavs and the G League's Canton Charge. "Man, they had him working like a motherf---er," Thompson said. "We was working him to the bone especially because we weren't good then. But he grinded. He's the prototypical work-your-ass-off-to-get-where-you're-at [player]." Six years into his NBA career, Wade is a "key contributor to our team," someone who can not just hold his ground against players like Brown, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Cade Cunningham. "He be givin' em problems."

The odds of anyone in Wade's position in 2019 -- an undrafted rookie on a two-way contract -- lasting in the NBA are slim. The odds of staying with the franchise that scooped you up are miniscule. Since 2017, when the league introduced the two-way contract, 829 such deals have been signed. Wade is one of six players to have signed a two-way as a rookie and remained on the roster for six years. (The others? Duncan Robinson, Lu Dort, Naz Reid, Amir Coffey and John Konchar.)

"When I was a two-way, I didn't even think about the future," Wade said. "You couldn't. There was just so much going on. So the only thing I really focused on was that day: what I was going to do, workouts that day, and then get home and then see what I could do on Call of Duty."

Because Thompson left the team in 2020 and returned three years later, Wade and Garland are Cleveland's longest-tenured players. More than once, the Cavs' communications department has had to correct media that has given the designation to Garland alone.

"I tell him he's playing with the house's money," Thompson said. "He should never question anything he does on that court because he earned this."

His six seasons in Cleveland have been a "crazy ride," Wade said. "I don't know if they just couldn't get rid of me or what, but I'm still sticking around." One does not, however, become an integral part of the team that owns the East's best record by accident. "He makes us better," Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said. "He makes us more versatile." Before a knee injury in January, the 6-foot-9 Wade started 26 games this season, mostly at the small forward spot, but the coaching staff is equally comfortable using him as a smallball center. He's not a big personality, not a highlight machine and not an awards candidate. He's just the type of player who can swing a playoff series.

"I was really worried when we lost him," Atkinson said. "I'm like, 'Man, this guy's kind of like the link that drives winning.' We've been able to sustain, but I'm just thrilled to have him back."

'We had some messed-up lineups out there'

Wade was a reliable defender in high school and college, but he wasn't this. "He's turned into an incredible wing defender," Clint Kinnamon, who coached him at St. John High School in the small town of St. John, Kansas, said. "He always had really good athleticism, but if you told me he was going to be one of the premier wing defenders in the league, I may have been shocked as a high school coach." After his four years at Kansas State, he and his agents sold teams on his ability to guard 3s, 4s and, once he got stronger, backup 5s. He could move his feet well for his a big man, but didn't anticipate being the guy his coach would call on to guard stars of all sizes at the next level.

"I was not thinking I was going to be a real defensive stopper type of player," Wade said. "I turned myself into that, but I never thought, especially coming out of college, that would be my role."

Wade joined a Cleveland team that was coming off a 19-63 season, its first after LeBron James had left for the Los Angeles Lakers. He was on the summer league squad that, under then-coach John Beilein, reportedly endured two-a-days in which both practice sessions lasted more than two hours. "When I got in the league, man, we were definitely in a weird spot," Wade said. Beilein and the Cavs parted ways during the All-Star break, 54 games into a five-year contract. This was shortly after they had traded for center Andre Drummond, whom they played in jumbo lineups next to Thompson that season and JaVale McGee the next. Wade and Larry Nance Jr. found themselves playing the 3 next to two non-shooting centers.

"It was crazy," Wade said. "We had some messed-up lineups out there."

Sometimes, for a developing player, a terrible team can be a terrific environment. "The front office has been amazing the whole time, through a rough start," Wade said. "I didn't know where it was heading the first couple years, but they promised, man: 'Stay the course, stay the course and buy in and good things are going to happen.'" As a rookie, the Charge put Wade "in a lot of different situations, and he was always successful," Nate Reinking, then their coach and now an assistant with the Cavs, said. He played a lot of center in switch-everything lineups, which meant he spent a lot of time defending small guards.

Early on, Wade paid attention to how Thompson, Nance and Kevin Love went about their routines. In Year 2, "I put my head down and was in the weight room a lot," he said. He needed to be able to take bumps if he was going to be a high-level defender, and he was determined to become a high-level defender because that would get him on the court.

"I think a lot of defense, especially with the athletes and the players we have in this league, it's a mental drive thing," Wade said. "If they wanted to, they could."

Wade took a jump, and, after logging just 71 NBA minutes in his first season, logged 1,212 in his second. As he got stronger and earned the trust of his coaches, he started to see himself differently. He wanted the opportunity to guard the best players in the world. 

"I took pride in that," Wade said. "I still take pride in that to this day."

Garland said that Wade "always has that chip on his shoulder from being undrafted and just not being a guy that people are looking at." He is never brash publicly, but you can see the chip whenever he's matched up with a big name, wholly locked in to his assignment.

'Honestly, he'd probably be in Germany'

Wade played for Kinnamon for nine years, starting as a third grader. Initially, Wade was "so shy," Kinnamon said, that he'd sometimes tell his mother, Trish, that he didn't want to go to the gym. Trish, who has coached volleyball, track and basketball at St. John, would "guide him over," Kinnamon said, and, once he got there, it was hard to get him to leave.

From when he was young, Wade "wanted to soak up any information that you had," Kinnamon said. He was "always coachable," and he wanted to please his coaches. He could be too shy on the court, though, so Kinnamon had to encourage him to shoot the ball and take it to the rim. 

"He did not ever want to appear to be selfish," Kinnamon said. 

That was still true when Wade was in the G League. Reinking told him that he didn't have to force things or do anything spectacular, but couldn't turn down shots. 

"It was more about just building his mindset to let it fly," Reinking said. "He had so much skill, but he's such a team guy."

Wade, who has made 37% of his 3s in the NBA, said has been hearing that he has to shoot more "pretty much my whole career," but less so these days: "I'm taking the right shots now." In high school he "was trying to get my teammates involved, be a good teammate," and after that he passed up shots "because I thought we could get better ones." His Cavs coaches, including Atkinson, have consistently delivered the same message, he said: "Dude, if you don't take the shots when you're open, that's the best shot we're going to get as a team, so be a team player and take those shots. We believe in you."

Brad Korn, who joined Bruce Weber's staff at Kansas State before Wade's sophomore season, said he and Wade related to each other right away. "Us small-town kids, I think sometimes maybe we don't dream big enough, almost," Korn said. "Like we're OK with being good, but we don't know that it's OK to dream bigger." A native of Plano, Illinois, Korn wanted Wade to understand his potential: He had a real opportunity to make the NBA, to never have a real job.

Korn worked with Wade individually for three years, but downplayed his role. "It wasn't like I was some guru," he said. "He had all the talent and ability. I just don't think he quite knew exactly how to apply it, or that it's OK that he can apply it." In his office, which overlooked the practice court, Korn put up a sign that read "DBAP." It was an inside joke about a phrase that Weber would use with Wade -- "Dean, be a player" -- but it was also a coaching tool. When Wade made a mistake in practice, Korn would simply point to the sign.

Wade is "a natural," Korn said. Yes, coaches have gone at him about being more aggressive -- though Korn himself only ever did it once, when Kansas State was trailing at halftime against its rival Kansas Jayhawks in Wade's senior year, a game it would go on to win -- but Wade's instinct to make the right plays is not a bad one, especially now that he's on a team stacked with scorers. "I didn't have to learn how to play off the ball [in the NBA]," Wade said, and that's one of the reasons he's found a home in Cleveland.

"We can't have it both ways," Korn said. He added, "If Dean went out there and tried to score every possession or every time he touched the ball, I mean, honestly, he'd probably be in Germany."

'He might've been a lottery pick'

On and off the court, Wade is low maintenance. He's "just a regular Joe that you can run into on the street and have a conversation with," Kinnamon said. Every summer, he returns to St. John, where his parents still live, and to Manhattan, Kansas, where he has a house.

Not only is he "a perfect fit for this team," as Reinking put it, Cleveland is "the perfect city for me and my family," Wade said. "A quieter city, a hard-working, blue-collar kind of city. The people really embrace the team. Even when we were bad, man, they were packing that place out." He would like to stay as long as he can.

If not for a last-minute phone call, though, Wade never would have even worked out for the Cavs. Two days before the 2019 NBA Draft, Wade was at Detroit Metro Airport, having completed what he thought was his final pre-draft workout, when his agent called and told him not to get on his flight home. Wade would instead go to Cleveland, but that flight that got canceled, so he stayed at the Westin in the airport. His bags were already checked, so he used the "little toothbrush and toothpaste" that was provided for him, slept a bit and took off the next morning.

"They picked me up from the airport [in Cleveland] at 7 a.m, my workout was at 8," Wade said. "I went straight to the gym on like four hours' sleep, same clothes as I had the night before."

Wade had a killer workout, then flew home to Kansas, where his family threw him a draft party he didn't ask for. "My mom didn't tell me," he said. "I was like, 'I don't want to have a draft party, I don't want to have a bunch of people here.' She invited my whole family and friends." Wade watched some of the first round, but then "kind of went and chilled, ate -- mom and grandma cooked everything." Before the draft was over, the Cavs offered him a two-way. The Minnesota Timberwolves did, too, but Cleveland seemed like a cleaner path to playing time. He told everyone the news, "and it was a blast from then on," he said.

That night, Wade "knew I probably was gonna go undrafted," he said. He'd had a stress reaction in his left foot as a junior, and he'd broken his right foot as a senior. "I didn't know who was gonna take a chance on, you know, a big that had foot problems in college."

Was Wade lucky to have landed in the right spot? It seems so, as it has certainly worked out for him. But the Cavs were lucky to sign him six years ago, too. "I don't know if I'm right, but if he doesn't get hurt his junior year, he might've been a lottery pick, honestly," Korn said. Kansas State got to the Elite Eight that season despite the fact that Wade barely played in the NCAA Tournament. What if he had starred on the national stage and led the team to the Final Four?

In the fourth quarter of the Cavs' win against the Milwaukee Bucks on March 9, Wade made two corner 3s and guarded Giannis Antetokounmpo on the other end. It was their 14th victory in a row (the streak snapped 16 last week), and Atkinson told reporters that having the flexibility to put Wade on the former MVP was "very important," as it allowed them to have another big man roam behind him. Wade is the rare role player who can contain the ball on the perimeter, protect the rim, make open 3s and maintain advantages on offense. Everything about Cleveland suits him, but the appeal of that skill set is that it would work anywhere.

"Dean's that guy," Korn, who now coaches Southern Missouri State University (SEMO), said. "He could go play for the Cavs, he could go play for the Knicks, he could go play for the Lakers, he could play for K-State, he could play for Kansas, he could play for SEMO. He's a plug-and-play guy."