The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  “There was an acute awareness about LeBron and the path that he was headed down and how those roads were going to intersect eventually,” Carper said. “There’s that saying about how ‘when the stars align.’ It really was a situation where the stars aligned. Players and coaches go out to win every game. That was certainly the case with us. Everything that we did, I think, leading up to that was designed to allow us to be in that position to allow the stars to align.”

  The NBA instituted a draft lottery beginning in 1985 in an effort to dissuade teams from intentionally losing games—tanking—to get the number one pick. Now just being bad was no longer good enough. Teams had to be bad and lucky. The team with the worst record entered the draft lottery with a 25 percent chance at landing the top pick in the draft, while the team with the best record of all the non-playoff teams had less than a 1 percent chance at the top pick.

  As James entered his senior year of high school, the Cavs knew they had a future superstar in their own backyard. They won thirty-two games his freshman season, thirty his sophomore year, and twenty-nine his junior year. They were trending in the right direction, but not fast enough. The team with the worst record over the previous five full seasons had averaged about fifteen wins. The Cavs had the sixth pick in the 2002 draft, but if they were going to be in position to draft James the following summer, they had to get worse. Much worse. They needed to race to the bottom of the standings.

  Prior to the start of the pivotal 2002–03 season, James’s senior year at St. V, the Cavs traded away their top three leading scorers in Lamond Murray, Andre Miller, and Wes Person. All were decent veterans, but none of them were pillars of a championship organization. They got little back in return. Miller was arguably their best player and set a franchise record for assists in a season, but he was entering his contract year and wanted a max deal. The Cavs knew he wasn’t worth max money, but he was good enough to keep them from losing enough to have a chance at James. They dealt him to the Los Angeles Clippers for Darius Miles, a prep-to-pro phenom who was high on potential but low on production. Miles could run and jump as well as anyone, but he couldn’t guard a dead body and it quickly became clear he certainly couldn’t play basketball in the NBA.

  Cleveland began the season with the league’s youngest roster. Seven players had two years or less of experience, including guys like Smush Parker, Tierre Brown, and draft bust DeSagana Diop. Players and coaches compete to win every game, but the focus of ownership and the front office was simply to lose enough games to have a shot at James, or at worst, one of the other future stars in this talent-rich draft. Things seemed to be going according to plan, but at 8-34, coach John Lucas was fired around the midway point and replaced by interim coach Keith Smart. Lucas was never viewed as the long-term coach; he was always a stopgap measure to guide the Cavs through losing seasons. But Lucas’s firing angered James because Lucas let him work out with the team. James had played with some Cavs, some other pros, and some college players at Gund Arena (now known as Quicken Loans Arena) the summer before his senior year of high school. James held his own against the veterans, even dunking on one. The workout, which was against league rules at the time because James was still in high school, was reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Lucas was suspended two games and the Cavs were fined $150,000.

  Despite that minor bump, everything else was going as planned until the Cavs closed the season by winning two of their last three games and three of their last seven. They needed a loss on the final day of the season to clinch the league’s worst record and the best chance at landing James. Instead, Parker scored seventeen points, Brown scored sixteen points, and the Cavs beat the Raptors 96–86.

  “It was really good that our fans got to see down the stretch that we did pull some games out at home,” Smart said after the finale. “We had a tough season and it was good that the guys got a chance to win and get the feel of victory. They get to go home this summer glad they won their last game.”

  Not everyone shared Smart’s joy. Dick Watson, the team’s general counsel and a minority owner, was incensed as he stormed into the coach’s office after the win. “You fucked it all up!” Watson screamed at Smart as he pounded on the desk. “We spent months on this and you fucked it up on the last day!”

  Because of that win, the Cavs finished the season at 17-65 and entered the draft lottery tied with the Denver Nuggets for the league’s worst record. That meant they also shared with the Nuggets the same 22.5 percent chance for winning the number one pick. No one knew at the time, but Tad Carper was already carrying a number 23 jersey in the Cavs’ new colors with JAMES stitched across the back. Team owner Gordon Gund sat on the stage representing the Cavs at the lottery while general manager Jim Paxson stayed home to tend to his wife, who was undergoing chemotherapy for brain cancer. When NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik revealed the Cavs had won the number one pick, the city of Cleveland erupted. Carper reached into his briefcase, grabbed the James jersey, and shot onto the stage as the television show cut to a commercial break. Carper handed the jersey to an elated Gund. It was the most important victory in franchise history.

  “Nobody knew I had that [jersey]. Nobody,” Carper said. “I went onstage and gave it to Gordon, and as I turned around—this is still during the commercial break—the members of the media that were there were looking at me with their eyes wide open and mouths dropped open saying, ‘Oh my gosh! I can’t believe you just did that! Did you know something going in? Isn’t that arrogant or presumptuous?’ I still remember standing there on the edge of the stage looking at them saying, ‘Not presumptuous, just prepared.’ That’s what it was. The preparation, trying to prepare for success. It worked out. And if it hadn’t, then the jersey would’ve stayed in my bag and no one would’ve known we had it. It was so obvious and so clear, we had no reservation about it. If we won the lottery, this was obviously going to happen and this was our pick. We had no hesitation in doing that. It was one of the rare moments in NBA draft history. Even if a team knows who they’re going to take, there is leverage and reason to be gained by not talking about who you’re going to take in advance. This was one of those very rare situations where there was no leverage to be gained, no benefit to be had. We were very clear about that.”

  —

  LeBron Raymone James was born to a sixteen-year-old single mother on Hickory Street in one of Akron, Ohio’s tougher neighborhoods—about forty miles south of Quicken Loans Arena. He was raised by his mother, Gloria, and grandmother, Freda, until his grandmother died of a heart attack on Christmas Day in 1987. James was a week away from turning three. Unable to keep up with the maintenance on their old house, which had been in the family for generations, Gloria and LeBron were eventually evicted and the house was razed. James spent his childhood bouncing between apartments, family, and friends. He moved twelve times in three years and missed nearly a hundred days of school in the fourth grade.

  While James was struggling to survive, so were the Cavs, who didn’t even exist until 1970 and wasted little time in capturing Cleveland’s crown for sports stupidity. Ted Stepien purchased the team in 1980 and will go down, God rest his soul, as one of the worst scoundrels in NBA history. Stepien served in the air force during World War II and told people he once fell out of an airplane and lived to tell about it. The plane, he said, was about five hundred feet off the ground. Former Akron Beacon Journal sports writer Sheldon Ocker, who covered the Cavs when Stepien bought the team, approached him with the idea of spending a couple of hours together for a Sunday magazine piece. “Come over Sunday after church,” Stepien told Ocker. “We’ll sit out by the pool and watch porn.”

  The Stepien stories are endless. When Ocker went to his house that day, Stepien wasn’t home. Instead, Ocker tracked him down at a nightclub on the east side, where he was judging the Cavs’ first-ever cheerleader tryouts. Stepien and two of his associates were judging the pageant and taking notes. Stepien asked the girls question
s such as “What’s your favorite color? What’s your sign? Would you ever attend a nude beach?” When one of the contestants replied that she’d go to a nude beach with her husband, Stepien grew flustered. “I didn’t say anything about a husband,” he snorted.

  When the pageant was over, the judges and Ocker retreated to Stepien’s house to tally the scores. Each judge wrote down a number between one and ten for each contestant on an index card and made comments about each. When Stepien got to a card he didn’t like (“Shit, small tits!”), he’d throw it into the middle of the room. They finally narrowed the field of forty contestants down to twelve. There was only one problem: They were all white women. When it was pointed out to Stepien he needed to have some minorities, Ocker said he started digging through the index cards on the floor he had previously discarded. “I think she was black,” Stepien said about one. “She had nice tits and a nice ass. She’s in.” By the time they were finished, Stepien had added two African Americans. The dance team was complete.

  On the court, Stepien never valued draft picks, discarding them like gum wrappers while chasing marginal talent. He traded Butch Lee and a future first-round pick to the Lakers in 1980 for the anonymous Don Ford and the Lakers’ first-round pick that summer. The Cavs selected shooting guard Chad Kinch from UNC-Charlotte with the Lakers’ pick. They traded him twenty-nine games into his rookie year and he was released by the Dallas Mavericks after the season, his NBA career over after one year. The pick traded to the Lakers became Hall of Famer James Worthy. Stepien, in fact, managed to trade away all of his first-round picks between 1982 and 1986 for little in return.

  Stepien bungled the franchise badly enough that he nearly drove it out of the country—he was so despised in Cleveland that he wanted to move the team to Toronto. Attendance at the Richfield Coliseum bottomed out during the 1982–83 season, when the Cavs drew an average of 3,916 fans for games in an arena with more than twenty thousand seats.

  “I just remember that building being hollow,” said World B. Free, whose first year in Cleveland was Stepien’s last. “One ball sounded like seventeen balls bouncing at one time because of the echo. There was about a thousand people in that gym and everybody was basically just sitting there. Nobody was excited about anything.”

  The Cavs made so many god-awful trades under Stepien that the league had to save him from himself by enacting a “Stepien rule” that prevents teams from making trades that leave them without a first-round pick in consecutive years. The rule is still enforced today.

  When Stepien learned of the rule, he was enraged. Ocker called him to ask for his reaction and Stepien said now he wouldn’t be able to trade for “Cream”—that’s what he kept calling Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “If Cream wants to come here, now I won’t have the picks to go get him,” Stepien told Ocker. He was serious.

  NBA commissioner David Stern desperately wanted to be rid of Stepien and all but begged the Gund brothers, George and Gordon, to buy the team. The Gunds owned the Richfield Coliseum, the arena in which the team played, but Stepien had so badly mangled the on-court product that the Gunds weren’t interested. Stern was relentless and finally the two sides brokered a deal: The Gunds purchased the team for $20 million but had to pay Stepien only $2.5 million up front. They had ten years to pay off the rest. The deal included Stepien’s Nationwide Advertising company, and the Gunds negotiated to buy four first-round picks from the league for $1 million to replace the picks Stepien had bungled away. The Gunds’ purchase saved basketball in Cleveland.

  When Gordon Gund installed Wayne Embry as general manager and Lenny Wilkens as head coach in the late 1980s, the Cavs began to rise to prominence. A nucleus of Mark Price, Brad Daugherty, Larry Nance, and John “Hot Rod” Williams won at least fifty games three times between 1988 and 1993. Each season ended in heartbreak, however, because they could never topple Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. When James was four, the Cavs won fifty-seven games in 1988–89 but lost in the first round to Jordan’s Bulls on the play that famously became known as “the Shot.” When Jordan swept the Cavs out of the playoffs in the conference semifinals in 1993, it was the fifth time in seven years the Bulls had ended Cleveland’s season.

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  Thirty years ago, Cleveland sports fans lived in a very different world. There was a time when success was expected. After the Browns, led by Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, pounded the Baltimore Colts 27–0 to win the (pre–Super Bowl) NFL championship in 1964, no one even bothered to throw a parade. It was the Browns’ fourth championship in fifteen years, so players and fans gathered at the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel on Public Square hours after the game for a banquet. They ate dinner together. That was it. Then everyone went home. If anyone had known it was the last time Cleveland fans would have the chance to celebrate a championship for generations, maybe they would’ve put on some hats and gloves and reconsidered the parade.

  As the years rolled into decades, Cleveland teams created spectacular ways to lose, from roster mismanagement to soul-crushing blunders on the field. Brown, arguably the greatest player in NFL history, became embroiled in a power play with owner Art Modell after the Browns lost the NFL championship to the Green Bay Packers in 1965. Brown was a budding Hollywood actor and filming for The Dirty Dozen ran long in 1966, which meant he was going to miss the start of practices. An angry Modell publicly challenged him, placing a deadline on when Brown had to report to the team or be fined. Brown didn’t appreciate the threat and immediately retired. After playing for nine championships in sixteen years during the fifties and sixties, as of 2017 the franchise had yet to play for another one—but they invented new ways to cut the soul out of their fans while trying.

  Brian Sipe’s interception in the end zone during the final minute of an AFC playoff game will forever be known as “Red Right 88,” the name of the play call that ended the 1980 season. They were in range for a game-winning field goal, but Sipe forced a pass to Ozzie Newsome that was intercepted by Raiders safety Mike Davis and the Browns lost, 14–12. But that was just the cocktail hour to the Browns’ future feast of misery.

  First, there was “the Drive.” Bernie Kosar’s forty-eight-yard touchdown pass to Brian Brennan gave the Browns a 20–13 lead over the Denver Broncos with 5:43 left in the 1986 AFC championship game. When Broncos rookie Gene Lang botched the ensuing kickoff return, the Cleveland Stadium crowd roared. The Broncos were on their own two-yard line and the Browns were less than six minutes from their first Super Bowl. Instead, John Elway drove the Broncos ninety-eight yards on fifteen plays to force overtime. His touchdown pass to Mark Jackson in the final minute of regulation stunned Browns fans. The thirty-three-yard field goal by barefoot kicker Rich Karlis in overtime brought them a little closer to death. Karlis hooked the kick enough that it barely slid inside the left upright—and some devout Browns fans will still argue he missed it. Typical Cleveland. A shot at the Super Bowl was snatched away by inches.

  Then, “the Fumble.” The Browns’ shot at redemption came in the form of a rematch at Denver the following year but ended when Earnest Byner fumbled at the goal line in Mile High Stadium. They trailed 38–31 with a minute left in the AFC championship game and Byner had a clear path to the end zone, but the ball was stripped by Jeremiah Castille and the Broncos recovered. Byner, who totaled 187 yards and two touchdowns on the day while leading the Browns in both rushing and receiving, slumped to the ground alone in the end zone in disbelief. “What can I say except that I played my heart out,” Byner said after the game. “I left everything I had out there on the field.”

  Including the ball. Typical Cleveland. A trip to the Super Bowl, yet again, was snatched away by inches. Byner was a terrific running back, but that fumble poisoned everything. The Browns gave him away to the Washington Redskins in 1989 for Mike Oliphant, who had more fumbles (three) than touchdowns (one) in two years in Cleveland. Oliphant’s final season was 1991—the same year Byner won a Super Bowl with the R
edskins. Typical Cleveland.

  The Indians weren’t faring any better. They traded away popular slugger Rocky Colavito days before the start of the 1960 season. Colavito had hit forty-one and forty-two homers the two previous years and was just entering the prime of his career, but Frank Lane was running the Indians at the time and didn’t want to pay him. Lane was just another face in a long line of incompetent executives who have rolled through Cleveland. In his first three hundred sixty-five days on the job, Lane made ten trades involving thirty-two players. He gave away future single-season home run record holder Roger Maris and future Hall of Famer Early Wynn. But the trade that burned the worst was Colavito, a fan favorite who reciprocally loved Cleveland. Colavito tied for the American League lead in home runs in 1959, but Lane sent him to the Detroit Tigers for batting champion Harvey Kuenn. Lane kept Kuenn one year before trading him. The Indians won the World Series in 1948 and lost it in 1954. After trading Colavito, they finished as high as third once over the next thirty-three years. The Curse of Colavito was born.

  That curse was nearly broken in 1997 when the Indians were three outs from a World Series victory over the Florida Marlins. Workers were busy wheeling champagne into Cleveland’s locker room in Miami’s Pro Player Stadium and hanging protective tarps across the stalls, but reliever José Mesa fumbled as badly as Byner. He couldn’t hold the 2–1 lead, allowing a pair of singles to Moises Alou and Charles Johnson before Craig Counsell’s sacrifice fly tied the game. The Marlins won it in the eleventh off Charles Nagy, who was supposed to start the game but instead entered as a reliever. Nagy took the loss, but Mesa was the target of fans’ vitriol. He was the best reliever in baseball in 1995 and earned votes for both the Cy Young Award and Most Valuable Player. But like Byner’s, his stay in Cleveland ended shortly after his disaster. He was traded the next season. “Game Seven of the World Series just stuck with people,” former Indians general manager John Hart said. “We just didn’t see it happening here for José.”