Can Isaiah Thomas rise again?

HE'S A HERO back home. Regardless of how the basketball world might view him these days -- as a man disbelieving of his own basketball mortality, as the undersized malcontent who fractured the locker room in Cleveland, as a backup with a questionable future -- Isaiah Thomas is adored in Tacoma, Washington. His fandom is spread equally among the people in his city, across races and socioeconomic classes, from the blue-collar neighborhoods downtown to the bucolic boroughs along Puget Sound.

"Isaiah puts us on the map," said the city's mayor, Victoria Woodards, from her high-rise office overlooking the downtown docks. "Tacoma represents the good parts of his life, the people and the places who…