The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  The Cavs liked center Alex Len out of Maryland, but Len was dealing with a stress fracture in his left foot. During his visit to Cleveland, team doctors scanned the other foot just to be cautious and found the beginning of a stress fracture in his right ankle, too. It’s not clear if the Cavs liked Len enough to take him number one overall, but finding the stress fracture in his “healthy” foot eliminated him from the conversation. No one knew if Len was aware he had problems in his other foot or not, but the Cavs sat him down and told him before his predraft workout with the team was over. Len went fifth to the Suns and had surgery to correct the problem prior to his rookie season.

  Gilbert liked Indiana guard Victor Oladipo, a six-foot-four package of muscle and athleticism. But Grant was concerned there was no discernible NBA skill. He played hard and he was athletic, but what was his definable skill? The decision for him instead came down to two players: Ben McLemore or Anthony Bennett. McLemore was a quick, explosive guard who averaged 15.9 points and shot 42 percent at Kansas. But he came from a troubled background and NBA personnel were concerned about some of the people in his inner circle. The Cavs already had Irving and Waiters struggling to play together on and off the court. Adding a third top guard to the backcourt could also complicate matters, and since McLemore measured only six-four, it could’ve been difficult to play all three together.

  Griffin spent a lot of time in Las Vegas and did all of the background work on Bennett, who was an undersized power forward at six-seven. Grant was low on Derrick Williams in the 2011 draft because of his size; Grant saw him as a role player because he was a “tweener”—too small to play power forward, too big and slow to play small forward. Bennett was sort of the same way. He wasn’t a good scorer in the post with his back to the basket, but hardly anyone is these days in this NBA game of pace and space and stretch fours. To that end, Bennett drew comparisons to another athletic-but-undersized power forward out of UNLV: Larry Johnson.

  Johnson was listed at only six-six, but he played ten years in the league and made two All-Star teams. He scored more than 11,000 points and grabbed more than 5,300 rebounds in his career, and the Cavs were hoping for similar numbers out of Bennett, who was explosive with great range for a big man. But he needed surgery after his freshman season to repair his rotator cuff. Teams knew he was going to miss all of the predraft workouts, the combine, and the Summer League, all of which complicated this draft. Three of the top prospects—Noel, Len, and Bennett—were rehabbing injuries and couldn’t do much.

  The pressure on Grant was immense. He knew Gilbert was expecting a winning team and the playoffs after three years of losing, and winning the top overall pick again only increased those expectations. But the front office knew it was debatable how much they were going to get out of the number one pick. Choosing between so many flawed prospects was keeping him up at night. He had to get this right. And much like with Williams two years earlier, Grant did not like Bennett. He wouldn’t listen to any debate about Irving or Williams. He made up his mind early on he was taking Irving. This time, however, there was no other clear-cut contender. Grant was high on McLemore, but everyone knew he wasn’t in Irving’s league in terms of talent and ability. So when the Cavs front office sat down before the draft to cast their vote on who to take, the final tally was 9–1 in favor of Bennett. The one vote against taking him? Chris Grant.

  I talked to Grant on his way into the office the morning of the draft. He wouldn’t tell me who they were taking because he insisted he didn’t know yet. He said it was down to two, but he wouldn’t divulge which two because he hadn’t spoken to their agents. Ultimately, Grant bowed to the rest of the staff. The talk leading up to the draft was that Bennett could tumble out of the top ten. Instead he was the stunning choice at number one.

  Oladipo, Gilbert’s favorite, went second to the Magic. Noel slid to the Sixers at number six, while McLemore went to Sacramento with the following pick. Grant wasn’t giving up on McLemore. He was close to a deal with the Kings for the seventh pick and thought he had something done, but the Kings backed out when McLemore fell to them. They took him for themselves instead. Much like when they drafted Irving, the Cavs didn’t even tell Bennett or his agent he was going number one. The pick stunned the rest of the league, including Bennett. “I’m just as surprised as everybody else,” Bennett said.

  I spoke to one team after the draft who said that at one point in their draft prep, they took Bennett’s name completely off their board. Grant, meanwhile, hardly gushed over Bennett when he met with the media after the draft.

  “As we did our evaluations throughout the entire year, we just kept coming back to his ability and his talent and how it fit with our guys,” Grant said of Bennett. “A lot of times, like [2012 and Anthony Davis], it’s just clear-cut. But for us, through the year, we always had him very high in our rankings and as we went back and reviewed the film and went on campus and visited everybody, we came away saying he’s a great kid. He’s willing to work and do the right things and he’s got a bunch of talent.”

  Notice how the phrase franchise player was never used. There were never any comparisons to other All-Star-caliber players, which is customary with this sort of pick. Brown was high on Bennett because UNLV was recruiting his son Elijah. Brown watched the Rebels play on several occasions and walked away impressed, believing Bennett could evolve into a small forward in the NBA. The pick, however, was a disaster.

  Bennett purchased a home in Independence, not far from the Cavs’ facility so he would be close. But it didn’t take long for team officials to begin questioning his work ethic, and it soon became clear Bennett couldn’t play either forward position. He started out as a rookie behind Tristan Thompson, Anderson Varejao, and free agent pickup Andrew Bynum. He never passed any of them. He showed up to his first training camp overweight by at least fifteen pounds and out of shape. When he appeared in the team’s intrasquad scrimmage on the campus of Baldwin Wallace University in early October, Bennett was gassed after only a couple of trips up and down the floor. The questions about his conditioning started early and never really went away.

  He fell behind and never caught up. His best performance in a Cavs uniform was his second preseason game at Orlando when he showed off nifty post moves, a step-back jumper, and three-point range. He scored sixteen points, including fourteen in the fourth quarter.

  Then the regular season started and Bennett missed the first sixteen shots of his career. He didn’t score his first basket until the Cavs’ fifth game. His only points prior to that were two from the free-throw line. He was booed by home fans within the first month and he ended his rookie year with meager averages of 4.2 points and three rebounds. He did not start any games and never even got off the bench in nearly half of them. Brown tried everything to get him acclimated. He tried him at small forward and power forward. He tried playing him during garbage time. He tried giving him a few days to clear his head. It didn’t matter. What the Cavs steadfastly refused to do was send him to the Development League. He clearly needed to play and wasn’t getting enough minutes, but the team feared sending him to the D-League would damage his already-fragile psyche. It was a wasted pick.

  “The issue with Anthony was, and we had no way of knowing it at the time, the kid had no desire to overcome adversity whatsoever. As soon as it was hard, he was out,” Griffin said. “His whole life, he rolled out of bed bigger, better, and more talented than everybody else. As soon as it was hard, it was over. And I was the one on campus at UNLV. I’m the one who got sold the bill of goods and I bought it hook, line, and sinker. You fuck up sometimes. But I feel bad Chris took it for that, because Chris was the one guy who wasn’t sure.”

  Bennett played for four teams in four years. He began the 2016–17 season with the pitiful Brooklyn Nets and still couldn’t get on the floor. Bennett was waived the following January after appearing in only twenty-three games and averaging five points. Unable to find another NBA job, he e
nded the season playing in Turkey. He will go down as the worst number one overall pick in draft history, yet his failures in Cleveland were just a small microcosm of what went wrong during the all-important 2013–14 season. That draft was the kickoff to a summer and season of discontent. The Blueprint was suddenly in doubt.

  CHAPTER 7

  Grant’s Tomb

  It was time. James’s free agency was so tantalizingly close. But the Cavs had plenty of work to do with the roster and on the court. After three seasons of concentrating on the draft, and trying their best not to win, the Cavs wanted to show LeBron that they could be playoff contenders. The expectation, and the pressure, was on everyone, but especially Mike Brown.

  Brown’s first act as head coach upon returning to Cleveland occurred in Las Vegas during Summer League. We met that July in the lobby of the Four Seasons high atop Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas as he talked defense using cell phones, salt and pepper shakers, and napkins to diagram plays and defensive sets. He was in his element demonstrating the defensive side of the game. But plenty of coaches know X’s and O’s. The truth was, Brown struggled to connect with his young roster, and in fact turned some of them off immediately.

  During the first day of Summer League practice, Brown lined up the players across the baseline and instructed for nearly three hours—unheard of during the usually casual summer sessions. Only a handful of the players, like Dion Waiters, Tyler Zeller, Carrick Felix, Matthew Dellavedova, and Kevin Jones, even had a realistic chance of making the actual team in the fall. Anthony Bennett was a rookie out with shoulder surgery, and the other rookie, drafted nineteenth, Sergey Karasev, was still playing overseas. Nevertheless, Brown pulled players off the baseline one at a time, instructed and drilled with them, then returned them to the baseline and pulled off another player. This went on all morning. “Damn, man, three hours,” Waiters said afterward. “I ain’t never seen nothing like that.”

  Brown’s teams had reached the playoffs every season he had been a head coach, and fair or not, that was the expectation again for 2013–14. Gilbert made that clear the day he brought Brown back. James’s free agency was coming fast now, and the Cavs’ house wasn’t in order. They had the league’s worst cumulative record over the previous three seasons and a dramatic leap was necessary. The Cavs had won twenty-four games in Byron Scott’s final season, but the average number of wins needed to secure the final playoff spot in the East was right around forty. Brown had his work cut out for him.

  The Cavs had spent three years hoarding cap space and stockpiling trade assets in preparation for the summer of 2014 and what they hoped would be the return of James. Within the first couple of weeks of free agency in 2013, however, all of that changed. Gilbert was applying pressure to upgrade the roster by any means necessary and the Cavs dipped into free agency for the first time since James departed. All of that work to protect the cap space was undone in one month. It was the first time since the idea of LeBron’s returning was really set in motion that the Cavs got away from the endgame. Once they committed to spending, they knew they’d have to dump money—and assets—the following summer if James truly wanted to return. At this point, however, Gilbert was concerned with simply making the team competitive.

  It wasn’t easy. Chris Grant arrived at Kyle Korver’s door at 12:01 A.M. on July 1, the first moment teams could talk to free agents. Korver was thirty-two and one of the best shooters in the league, which is what the Cavs needed. They had two drive-and-kick guards in Irving and Waiters, but no one to consistently space the floor and knock down shots when defenses collapsed. Korver wasn’t interested in Cleveland’s rebuilding project, spurning the Cavs to take less money to remain with the Atlanta Hawks. Grant tried Mike Dunleavy next, but like Korver, Dunleavy took less money to go to Chicago. These were not elite-level free agents but quality veterans who could make a big impact in Cleveland. Still, the Cavs had had a hard time luring marquee free agents to Cleveland even when James played there. Trying to do it without him was next to impossible. Gilbert was relentless: Go find somebody. The Cavs knew they would have to overpay. The plan they had intricately followed for three years was gone. But was this the next step or a total change in direction that would threaten the entire idea? At this point, it was hard to tell.

  “That was a very difficult summer. We sort of lost our way a little bit,” Griffin said. “We had been really clear and direct about what our game plan was up to that point and that was the first time we sort of hit a fork in the road. Did we try to be better? Did we not try to be better? That was the first time we had real discord in that regard.”

  Gilbert had been patient during three awful years, abiding by the plan. In the time since James had left, Grant had acquired six additional first-round draft picks. Some of them had been used already, such as drafting Irving and Zeller, and some were tucked away in the war chest of trade assets to be used—in a best-case scenario—to build the team around James. But now suddenly Gilbert was pushing hard for the front office to spend and win.

  “We probably have to show we’re going to be a playoff team,” Griffin said. “’Bron is not coming to a crappy team.”

  Grant had been hesitant to bring in veterans to police the locker room because the Cavs were committed to the youth movement. Now he was looking for veterans who could play. Jarrett Jack was a thirty-year-old reserve guard coming off a terrific season with the Golden State Warriors. He wasn’t the best fit because the Cavs already had two ball-dominant guards in Irving and Waiters, but they were running out of options and felt pressured to make a move—something—to upgrade the roster. As expected, they had to overpay for Jack by giving him a four-year deal worth $25 million. The fourth year, at least, was a team option. Jack was expected to provide guidance and leadership to a locker room that lacked both. But the Cavs weren’t done. Gilbert was pushing for more. Gilbert wanted Andrew Bynum.

  Bynum was two years removed from an All-Star season. He won two championships with the Lakers and evolved into one of the best centers in the game before knee problems kept him out for the entire 2012–13 season. The Cavs were interested in trading for Bynum in 2012, but he was instead shipped from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in an enormous four-team deal that sent Dwight Howard to the Lakers. Bynum was hampered by knee problems throughout his one season in Philadelphia and never played for the 76ers, instead opting to have arthroscopic surgery on both knees in March. The trade wrecked the Sixers and forced a dramatic rebuild and overhaul of the roster similar to what was happening in Cleveland. Four months after Bynum’s knee surgery, the Cavs were the only team to offer him a contract.

  The front office was cool on Bynum as a player from the start. As negotiations between the two sides were only beginning, one team executive texted me: “If he comes, great. If he doesn’t, I’m already over it.” And when the two sides reached an agreement, I called Grant to congratulate him. “We’ll see,” Grant said. “I don’t know if we’ve won anything or not.” Gilbert, however, was thrilled. He sent out a tweet praising Grant for landing Earl Clark and Jack in free agency. “What’s next CG?” Gilbert tweeted.

  Realistically, the Cavs weren’t sure what Bynum had left or even if he wanted to play basketball anymore. He had two championship rings, $73 million in NBA checks, an All-Star appearance, and now two bad knees. What was left to prove? Grant wanted to protect himself in case the Bynum experiment blew up. He structured the contract so that only half of his $12 million salary was guaranteed up front. The other half was guaranteed in early January. In a worst-case scenario, if Bynum didn’t work out, his contract created a pseudo trade deadline and left the Cavs as the only shoppers. They could theoretically deal his contract to another team that would promptly release him and shed salary if necessary.

  The Cavs were cautious with Bynum and held him out the entire preseason because of his knees. He debuted in the season-opening win against the Brooklyn Nets. He played less than eight minutes, but he scored three points,
grabbed a pair of rebounds, blocked a couple of shots, and passed for two assists while tying up Nets All-Star center Brook Lopez. It was an encouraging start, but there was no rhythm to the Cavs’ system because he hadn’t really been practicing or playing in preseason games.

  It sounded strange, but Brown kept insisting that the games, at least early in the season, were going to have to serve as the team’s practices because of Bynum. Bynum was highly intelligent and fairly quiet. He kept to himself. When the locker rooms were open to the media prior to games, Bynum generally sat at his locker with a cup of coffee, wearing headphones and an electronic muscle stimulator on his knees. When he did play, Bynum still had pain in his knees, which was discouraging. He admitted he wasn’t having any fun and he’d considered retiring before eventually signing with the Cavs.

  “It was a thought, it was a serious thought,” he said one day in late November while sitting in Temple’s gym in Philadelphia following practice. “At the moment, it’s tough to enjoy the game because of how limited I am physically. I’m still sort of working through that. I’m a shell of myself on the court right now. I’m struggling mentally. I’m trying.”

  On the court, his insertion into the offense was just another obstacle in a season full of them. Waiters was wearing thin on his teammates and Brown was struggling to connect with Irving. No matter how many times he encouraged him, no matter how many times he praised him, Brown couldn’t get any traction. Irving’s agent, Jeff Wechsler, had represented Larry Hughes during Brown’s first era in Cleveland. Brown and Hughes clashed badly, culminating in a heated meeting with the pair in Ferry’s office when he was the general manager. Brown threatened to bench Hughes for the rest of the season and showed that he had ownership’s backing, regardless of Hughes’s hefty contract. Shortly after that meeting, Hughes was traded away—less than three years after he signed a five-year deal in Cleveland.