Things were further complicated over the summer of 2014, when the franchise found itself embroiled in two different racism scandals. First, then-owner Bruce Levenson self-reported to the NBA a text he had sent in 2012 concerning the Hawks’ struggles in growing its fanbase. It included Levenson wondering why there was such a high percentage of black fans at Hawks games versus crowds at other NBA venues, and whether the team’s in-game presentation, which included heavy doses of hip hop music, was driving away white fans. As the league was in the midst of excising Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling over racist audio recordings involving a mistress (and Levenson was an outspoken critic of Sterling over that scandal), the Hawks’ owner fell on his own sword and agreed to sell his ownership stake in the team.
Soon after, audio tapes of a Hawks management conference call leaked in which then–general manager Danny Ferry was reading from a scouting report provided by a source at the Cleveland Cavaliers that disparagingly described potential free-agent target Luol Deng as having “some African in him, and I don’t say that in a bad way other than he’s a guy that may be making side deals behind you, if that makes sense.” The report also made a comparison to a merchant who sells counterfeit goods, and that Deng “has a little two-step in him—says what you like to hear, but behind closed doors he could be killing you.” Ferry soon was suspended indefinitely by the team and ultimately was replaced after the 2014–15 season, with Budenholzer taking over as director of basketball operations and assistant general manager Wes Wilcox bumping up to the general manager role.
Ferry’s removal was notable not just because of the way he delivered the report’s racist remarks about Deng on a conference call with team higher-ups, but because he had done a quietly outstanding job in building the Hawks’ roster. Atlanta wasn’t considered a major free-agent destination, but Ferry and his staff made a series of savvy moves in 2013 that were starting to pay off significantly.
• The team elected to match a four-year, $32 million offer from the Milwaukee Bucks for restricted free-agent point guard Jeff Teague, even though Teague’s progress had been somewhat halting during his rookie contract after being drafted nineteenth overall in 2009.
• They re-signed shooting guard Kyle Korver, who had been acquired the year before from the Bulls, and who described the trade to the Hawks from conference power Chicago as “a bit of a bummer.” Korver re-upped for four years and $24 million.
• They signed athletic-but-raw small forward DeMarre Carroll on a two-year, $5 million deal.
• They drafted German teenage point guard Dennis Schroder at No. 17 overall.
• They also signed versatile power forward Paul Millsap on a two-year, $19 million contract.
Perhaps most notably that summer, Ferry also hired Budenholzer, whom he had both played under and worked with as an executive with the Spurs. Ferry, after his first season as general manager, elected to move on from Larry Drew after three seasons as head coach, even as the franchise had made its sixth straight playoff appearance. There was a perception that the Hawks had run into a glass ceiling as a perennial lower playoff seed, and needed a new approach to bust through it.
The seeds of Budenholzer’s approach, cribbed from the space-and-shooting approach fashioned by the latest Spurs teams, started to get planted during his initial campaign in 2013–14, but a season-ending injury to de facto center Al Horford—the team’s MVP and a poor man’s Duncan in terms of his understated impact on both ends—helped undermine that season. Getting Horford back in 2014–15 was huge, but all of the players having a second season in Budenholzer’s system created a multiplier effect that made the Hawks into a surprising force.
Still, the lack of a supposed star was a storyline that was hashed out all season. The Hawks only had one thirty-point scorer the entire season (Millsap scored exactly thirty against his old team, the Utah Jazz) and, perhaps more tellingly, had a seven-game stretch in December 2014 where a different player led the team in scoring each game, and all seven scored at least twenty points. In January, when the Hawks didn’t lose a game in the midst of a nineteen-game winning streak, the NBA tipped its cap to the team’s construct when it named all five starters as the Eastern Conference Player of the Month.
In sum, the Hawks were an extremely balanced team where no one was sure whether they had the type of player who could single-handedly win playoff games, when scouting, familiarity, and extra rest cut down the advantages of a team with a fluid offensive system like Atlanta’s. Because they believed in the system and were getting the results, they were unapologetic about it.
“It’s really fun to play on this team,” Korver said. “Every time down the court, we all matter, because we play as a group. We all matter every single time. You might not shoot the ball, but you’re definitely at least going to set the screen or make the pass or make the cut that opens up whoever it is that’s going to get that shot. It just makes us play hard because you matter. Right? When you matter in life, you do a little bit better when you feel like you matter, and we feel like we matter. No matter who’s out there, we all matter.
“I mean, it’s easier on teams when you have superstars. I mean, they’re really good. And you give them the ball, and you say ‘make a play.’ And a lot of offenses are created to feed off that guy. We don’t have that guy, so we have to play a little bit differently. There’s different ways to do it, so this is what we do.”
It also helped that they had two very unique features: all five of their starters can shoot the three, and they have Korver, perhaps the most uniquely destructive offensive player in the league.
While Budenholzer inherited a top shooter (through the first twelve seasons of his career, Korver had made 43.4 percent of his nearly 4,000 3-point attempts) who was coming off an excellent first year in Atlanta, the new schemes the Hawks began running to maximize his strengths (and ability to help his teammates get shots) created an offensive monster.
Korver made nearly 50 percent of his threes in 2014–15, and many of those came off sub-variations of pick and rolls, with Korver first sprinting from a corner or settling into an action after setting a screen himself and receiving the ball on a handoff or flip. When these actions are run with a big player who can shoot, such as Millsap, Horford, or even with reserve big man Pero Antic, it puts opposing defenses in a huge bind. With many teams also having to try to defend these actions with big men that are not as comfortable guarding in space, there are no good answers.
Korver’s constant motion and ability to shoot on the move add another element to the Hawks’ success: he compromises defenders who have to track his every move. Per SportVU data, Korver is right at the absolute top of the NBA in terms of highest “gravity” score, meaning that his primary defender leaves him to help defensively less than any other player in the league. Even if Korver doesn’t get the ball on a possession, the defense is effectively stuck chasing him around and defending the rest of the Hawks four-on-four, which provides more space and creates additional headaches for the opponent in their defensive coverages.
“He creates so many opportunities,” Budenholzer said of Korver. “Really, the interesting thing for his teammates is he creates so much space and it makes it difficult, hopefully, for the defense to make decisions about taking away other options, taking away other opportunities—or if you take that away, Kyle may be free. It’s just such a game of space and shooting and attacking the basket and attacking the rim, putting pressure on the defense, and he probably does that, creating opportunities for his teammates because he’s such a good shooter. For himself, what he can do in terms of moving without the ball, coming off screens and sprinting in transition and rising up into shops, he’s just a very unique—not just shooter, but how he can move and catch and shoot and move with great speed and rise up.
“Probably the last thing I saw offensively was his passing. He’s really underrated as a passer. He comes off of screens, they try to take away the shot, he’s creating opportunities for other people. I
just think he’s a really good basketball player that sometimes is mislabeled as just a shooter.”
“He’s [also] an amazing screensetter,” Budenholzer added. “He loves setting screens. He loves getting his teammates open. So when you just kind of put all of that together, it’s a big part of how we’ve built our offense and our identity. He fits. Our other guys fit with him. He fits with them. He’s huge, and defensively, I think he’s really underrated. His length, his commitment to it, his understanding of rotations, being early to rotations, his work on the defensive boards. He’s really a complete player.”
Korver was not the sole reason for the Hawks’ massive jump, though. Teague, who had more or less plateaued over the previous three seasons as he grew into a starter’s role and point guard usage rates, took a huge leap forward. No one advanced metric tells the whole story, but when they all basically show similar levels of improvement with career-best rates, it’s telling. In the 2014–15 season, Teague easily had the best PER, box plus-minus, and win shares per forty-eight minutes rates of his pro career. He also was competently deputized by Schroder, who became an important, ball-dominant scorer off the bench on a team that didn’t have that much reserve firepower, and also was able to close out games when Teague was struggling or the matchup favored Schroder’s penetration skills.
Millsap, already thought to be a value at less than $10 million, may have been the “best” player on the Hawks while Horford, as the team’s anchor, rim protector, and nineteen-foot face-up jump-shot splasher, arguably was the most valuable. Arguably, because of the emergence of Carroll, whose offense evolved to such a degree to complement his defending and overall effort that he suddenly found himself among the league’s most effective “3-and-D” wings.
“He’s one of the ultimate competitors in our league, he plays so hard on every possession,” Budenholzer said of Carroll, who subsequently left the club in summer free agency to sign with the Toronto Raptors. “That’s probably more important than anyone, as basic and fundamental as it seems, so that stands out. He’s been growing as an offensive player. Everyone knows how good a defender he is and how he can impact a game defensively, but his shooting was improving, his ballhandling was improving. You could just see a player who was on the rise.”
Also notable was the team’s chemistry, which stemmed from a locker room where an unusually high number of players had spent three or more years in college and/or had come from outside the United States. Of the starters, only Teague, with two seasons at Wake Forest, fell short of either metric. Horford (originally from the Dominican Republic) and Millsap each played three NCAA seasons while Korver and Carroll both played four. Off the bench, there was defensive stopper Thabo Sefolosha (Swiss and a noted positive locker room guy), Schroder (German), Mike Scott (four years at Virginia), Mike Muscala (four years at Bucknell), Kent Bazemore (four years at Old Dominion), and Pero Antic (Macedonian). The Hawks also had veteran Elton Brand, another strong locker room guy who had played two years at Duke.
In composite, in a league with a high number of inexperienced and still-developing young American players, the Hawks didn’t have any. Instead, their locker room was filled with mature and high-academic types, and you could sense a different vibe from other NBA teams when you spent any time with them. They weren’t the only team that seemed to like being around each other, but there was a calmness that was palpable. And while the Hawks didn’t go out specifically targeting guys who weren’t one-year college players or from overseas, the guys they collected in order to play the style Ferry and Budenholzer wanted ended up being that way.
“We really value guys who are really unselfish, high-character guys, guys with high basketball IQs,” Budenholzer said. “I don’t like to paint with a broad brush, and if you’re one-and-done and have those characteristics, we’re interested. If you played in Europe and have those characteristics, we’re interested. . . . it’s not anything that we categorically don’t take, or we only take or anything like that. It’s just we have some things that we really value, and maybe it tends toward those kinds of guys. But we have a good idea what we’re looking for, and we know how we can hopefully find guys that fit with us.”
“We spend more time focusing on, and trying to understand, the character traits,” Wilcox added. “That’s our focus. Highly competitive, highly focused, hardworking, highly skilled, mentally tough, resilient, curious . . . these are the things that I think we have identified and that we try to add.”
The end result was one of the league’s most surprising—and surprisingly watchable—teams. The Hawks effectively locked up the Eastern Conference’s top seed so prematurely that they lost a bit of momentum down the stretch of the season, and they weren’t helped by a spate of injuries to key players, including the big one—Sefolosha having his leg fractured by a New York City policeman during a police-provoked altercation outside a club in the aftermath of an incident that involved the stabbing of Indiana Pacers forward Chris Copeland. While the Hawks made it to the Eastern Conference Finals, they didn’t impress very much on the way there, and then they were taken out in four straight by the Cavaliers, who themselves were shorthanded.
Regardless, 2014–15 was a landmark season for the franchise that, buoyed by new ownership, the resolution of the Ferry situation, and a rebranding as the Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club, was primed to move forward. Despite all the hype about trying to become “Spurs West” with the coaching and management connections to San Antonio complementing an unselfish and measured style of play, the Hawks really developed their own identity in year two of the Budenholzer era. It was fun, it was different, and it was an interesting test case on how to build a championship-caliber team. The fuller answers will be found in the seasons ahead.
The Cleveland Cavaliers and the Seven Faces of LeBron
It’s fair to say that no one on the Cleveland Cavaliers signed up for the season they ultimately had in 2014–15.
Head coach David Blatt, who had long excelled at multiple stops in Europe, accepted the job in late June 2014 without knowing whether he was going to have star point guard Kyrie Irving around. Irving was eligible for a five-year contract extension that would tack on to the remaining year of his rookie deal, but there were a lot of rumblings during the 2013–14 season that Irving might look for a way out of town.
On July 1 of that year, Irving, who came to Cleveland via the No. 1 overall pick in 2011 after the Cavaliers fell to a nineteen-win season after LeBron James left for Miami the previous summer, ultimately agreed to stay without knowing what help he was going to get after his first three seasons with the franchise yielded an overall record of 78–152 and no playoff appearances. He had no assurances at the time that James would mend fences with team owner Dan Gilbert and return to his quasi-hometown four years after his departure became very public and contentious.
Since James didn’t mention either 2014 No. 1 overall pick/superprospect Andrew Wiggins or 2013 No. 1 overall pick Anthony Bennett in his “I’m Coming Home” essay in Sports Illustrated that announced his plan to re-sign in Cleveland, it’s safe to presume that he was informed of/approved/requested the Cavaliers’ eventual August 2014 trade of the duo as part of a deal to land star forward Kevin Love from the Minnesota Timberwolves. He did not, however, sign up for a season spent finding different ways to motivate Love to fit in better, eventually including a thinly veiled shot on Twitter.
Love surely did not agree to join James and Irving in Cleveland to spend much of the season as a 3-point-chucking glorified decoy in an offense that didn’t look much like what Blatt liked to run.
And none of them—coach or players—signed up for the angst, jousting egos, and injuries that required a tireless tamping down of in-house storylines that went public, a midseason two-week injury break/vacation for James, and two key in-season moves to reshape the roster—all as they limped to an underwhelming fifty-three wins and the Eastern Conference’s 2-seed behind the Hawks.
From the outset, Irving spoke as if he
understood the overall deal, but there were still some gaps in his understanding of how things were about to radically change. He was about to get paid like the face of a franchise, and seemed eager to continue in that role after three years of a slow rebuild, all the while knowing that LeBron—and everything that comes with him—was back in town, and on a short-term contract, to boot. LeBron had realized in Miami as the roster fell apart around him due to age and injuries that he shouldn’t lock himself into a new long-term deal. Yes, there were financial considerations involved in his decision to take a one-year deal with a second-year player option, but it also kept pressure on ownership to make sure everything was exactly to his liking.
At the US National Team tryout camp in Las Vegas in late July 2014, Irving told assembled media that he had never wavered on re-signing with the Cavaliers.
“It was just confidence in our management, our coaching staff, the direction we’re going, I wanted to be a part of,” Irving said. “That was the leading reason why I came back. Just the opportunity we have in Cleveland with things going the right way. Whether or not LeBron was coming back, I was still going to sign. We got it done on that first day, we agreed to terms, and I signed on the tenth, and that’s the way it should go. They wanted me to be a part of the organization long-term, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Concerning LeBron’s return, Irving added, “At first, you can’t believe it. It’s more or less . . . I’ve been watching LeBron for a while now, and now that I’m going to be running alongside of him and be his point guard, it’s an honor. Hopefully, we can do great things,” but “the only thing that matters right now is what we do out there on the court.”
But there’s a marked difference between talk and action, especially when you are creating the highly combustible combination the Cavaliers were stirring together. You had a young, budding star who needed the ball in his hands; a six-year veteran standout in Love who was imported from a different losing situation and never had made the playoffs, let alone been tested in the crucible of truly meaningful games; and the world’s most talented and demanding player, a basketball savant who was coming back home not just to attempt to nail down Cleveland’s first-ever NBA title, but to basically reinvent the entire culture of the franchise he himself had once left.
Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion Page 19
