If you know me personally or have read more than 50 words I’ve written, then you already know that I am an unabashed sucker for players who hustle, especially on a basketball court. I paid tribute to Anderson Varejao’s hustle in the previous edition of Game Illustrated. Today, that honor goes to another foreign Cavalier I hold near and dear: Matthew Dellavedova.

A pair of anecdotes to help illustrate—pardon the pun—my affection for Outback Jesus and those of his ilk:

My high school basketball coach stood about 5-foot-7. In his playing days, he was a classic, plucky point guard. He moved the ball on offense, got up in your shirt on defense, and collected floor burns like Beanie Babies circa 1998. If we were hoping to get any minutes as his players, that was the identity we needed to embrace. As a team, we could barely shoot a lick, and I was our biggest guy at 6-foot-5. We were loaded with talent in the way that Skip Bayless is loaded with subtlety.

But we could run, dammit. If we couldn’t win on talent, we would win on effort. We had entire portions of practice devoted to diving after loose balls. We practiced taking charges. We had no-rules rebounding drills. We took masochistic joy in running those practice-ending suicides. If we were going to win, it was going to be through attrition. We had to go hard until our foes got sick of it.

It’s all terribly corny, I know. But it resonated with me then, and it does now. To me, this is what basketball is about. If you’re going to be out on that hardwood endeavoring to win a game, why wouldn’t you go as hard as you can? Why entertain the possibility of thinking that you could’ve done more? When I see a person not sprinting back on defense, I see a person whom I probably would not get along with on a personal level. Ipso facto, Delly and I would be best friends.

Another tale, from a different time and place:

I taught English in South Korea for about three years. I taught dozens of students over that time. Some had a knack for English, some struggled, and some didn’t really care. Some roused rabble, while others were as rowdy as a cup of Earl Grey. Each was outstanding in his or her own way.

The student of whom I was and am most proud was a third grader with the English name of Judy. She was not outgoing—in any language. She wasn’t an outcast, but she wasn’t mega-popular either. She mostly kept to herself in those in-between moments of class when the aspiring comics tried out their latest fart jokes.

But that girl worked. She worked her ass off. She took extra notes in class—as a third grader. When most kids only worried about whether or not this would be on the test, she was jotting down asides about idiom usage and appropriate situations in which to employ the present progressive tense. She took better notes in elementary school than I did in college.

Lo and behold, as the months passed, Judy got better and better at English. She was always shy, but her little hand went up more as she improved. You could see confidence in how she held her Hello Kitty mechanical pencil. She read aloud faster. She guessed the meanings of words she’d never seen. She grasped fully what nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs were. She stuck her neck out there and answered questions that everyone else assumed impossible, winning impressed glances from other students when she turned out to be right.

And she did all of this because she tried so damn hard. It was a joy to watch her at work. My eyes are moist as I write this.

This all brings me back to Delly. Delly is like Judy. He isn’t that big or that fast or that good, in the conventional NBA senses of those ideas. He’s a solid ballplayer, mind you, and there’s no doubt in my mind that David Blatt is happy to have him on the roster. There isn’t a coach in the basketballing world who would refuse effort like this:

Young Matthew probably won’t play more than 18 minutes a game this year, and that’s okay. He’s a decent ball-handler and he can at least initiate the offense and get out of the way.

He can knock down jumpers at a decent rate, too. He shot 37% on threes last year, including a combined 44.8% from the corners. You could do a lot worse than sticking him in the corner while one of the Cavs’ more ball-dominant stars is on the court.

Most importantly, Delly will be a pain for opposing point guards. He’ll draw charges and harass enemies for 94 feet. It’s not fun for a player to catch an inbounds pass and immediately have a defender on him like Vegemite on toast. It may not result in a turnover, but burning an extra few seconds off of the shot clock is valuable, especially if LeBron, Marion, and some of the Cavs’ other pterodactyl defenders are on the floor. You can even talk yourself into the idea that facing Delly in practice every day is making Kyrie a better player.

And as a bonus, he gives us an excuse to watch Australian interviews (In the first 35 seconds, Austin Carr gushes over Delly almost as much as me). I love a good accent:

Ah, Delly. He seems like a good lad. He won’t be more than the ninth-most important Cavalier this year, but he’s going to be one of my favorites to watch. He plays the game how my coach played it. He plays how Judy would play. He plays how we should all aspire to live: all effort, full belief, caution to the wind.

The Cavaliers are a better team with him on it.