The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  Trying to balance the personal schedules of so many on the guest list was difficult, particularly trying to get Ilgauskas’s parents there from Lithuania. Finally, the Cavs and Ilgauskas reached a mutually agreeable date: March 8. To the benefit of everyone involved, the Heat were off that night and James was in Chicago, just a short flight away from Cleveland. Logistically speaking, it was possible to get him to Cleveland and back. The fact the Knicks were in town and the New York media would be there to capture it made the theater aspect all the better. James was delighted to get the invitation and quickly accepted. So three years, seven months, and twenty-seven days after James left town amid burning streets with the Decision, he returned to the Q to celebrate a piece of Cleveland history.

  And what a party they threw. The ceremony was so lavish and included so many moving parts that they needed a midweek walkthrough to ensure everyone knew their role and places. The Cavs rented a projection system to create a video tribute that stretched across the floor, turning the ninety-four-foot court into a 3-D movie screen. Wayne Embry, the general manager who drafted Ilgauskas, returned with a speech. Gilbert spoke. Ilgauskas’s parents attended and his father, a retired bus driver, kissed the Cavs logo at center court after the ceremony.

  Everyone affiliated with the night insists it was done that way because Ilgauskas deserved it after so many painful foot operations, so many hours of agonizing rehab, and a sparkling career that ended with 10,616 points and 5,904 rebounds in a Cavs jersey. The fact James was there to witness it and feel it . . . well, no one will dispute that was an enormous side benefit.

  “Part of me was kind of hoping it would provide moments where I could reach LeBron,” Ilgauskas said. “First and foremost though, I wanted him there as a former teammate and friend. I didn’t care if he played another game in Cleveland. That didn’t matter to me. It was more about the past than the future. But I did think him coming back, seeing how Cavs fans can be and how they are most of the time, how much passion they have for their players and their city. He was right there on the floor. From what I saw and heard, people had a good time. People were nice to him and he was able to reconnect with old coaches and players. I think that could do nothing but help with the decision to come back.”

  The Heat were not pleased with the whole idea and sent assistant coach Ron Rothstein to Cleveland with James. Rothstein had been an assistant in Cleveland early in Ilgauskas’s career, so both sides were comfortable with Rothstein there to chaperone. James arrived to the game early in the first quarter and was given a private suite. He eventually made his way down to the court and had the opportunity to say hello to old friends and Cavs support staff members he probably hadn’t seen in years. The Cavs.com crew even tried filming a spot with James, who was eager to do it, prior to the halftime ceremony. But Cavs media relations guru Tad Carper saw what was happening and shut the whole thing down because it just wasn’t a good look given all of the history between the two sides.

  Just one month after he was fired, Chris Grant was back inside the Q to enjoy the celebration he had helped create. Grant contemplated staying home, wondering if it would be awkward given all of the factors at play. Ultimately he chose to go support his friend. Ferry and Jim Paxson were there, too, also former general managers fired by Gilbert. They all congregated for a conversation and a laugh just outside the Cavs’ locker room.

  James’s appearance on the court created an added buzz in the arena—particularly when James sat down on the Cavs’ bench for the show. Whether it was fate or the devious work of a perfect lineup, James took his seat next to Grant, of all people. Grant had literally spent four years trying to get James back on that bench. For at least one night, he’d accomplished it. The night was an illustration of months—years—that Grant, Forbes, and the Cavs spent repairing a relationship that had been destroyed in a matter of hours one night in July 2010.

  And this night, Ilgauskas’s night, was a subtle reminder for James: This could all be yours again. The jersey in the rafters, the adulation of an adoring fan base. The immortal legacy. Sure, they cheered loudly for LeBron James in Miami. But Miami wasn’t home. No one could ever love him like his home could love him, if only he’d give them that chance again.

  James mingled with all of his former teammates both before and after the event. He posed for pictures with Daniel Gibson and Delonte West; he hugged old friends and relived a few cherished memories. The celebration was heartfelt and touching. And when it was over, James climbed onto his charter flight and flew back to meet his team in Chicago, to return to the life he’d chosen for himself nearly four years earlier.

  CHAPTER 9

  Outside the Box, Other Side of the World

  The Cavs had steadfastly prepared for that moment—LeBron sitting back on their bench with fans cheering, thinking, they hoped, about coming back to sit on their bench again. They were about to find out if all the preparation was worth it. The next step in the plan, though, would be under new leadership. Chris Grant had returned to his home in suburban Cleveland, out of work following a season where it all unraveled. David Griffin was now running the Cavs at least temporarily for the rest of the season while Gilbert searched for a permanent replacement.

  Griffin is a ginger, short in stature with a little less hair on top than he had when he joined the Cavs as Grant’s top assistant two months after LeBron’s departure. Like James, Griffin left his hometown team to work elsewhere. He spent seventeen years with the Phoenix Suns after growing up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in West Phoenix. He left the organization after a contentious falling-out with Suns owner Robert Sarver and moved to Cleveland, which was still sweeping up the debris from James’s ugly exit.

  Griffin was a hard worker who loved basketball but never planned on making a career out of it. He majored in international finance at Arizona State and minored in Chinese. He wanted to be part of the westernization of China until he took a job as an intern in the Suns’ media relations department two years before graduation. Before advanced stats computer software churned out data like it does today, Griffin was producing the type of stats that made the Suns’ front office take notice. He was an advanced stats computer unto himself. A few years after he was hired as an intern, Griffin crossed to the basketball operations side and started over from the bottom cutting up film. It involved watching hours of game tape and cutting up the plays the coaches wanted to see and splicing them together onto one tape. He worked his way into the number two chair in Phoenix before leaving.

  Griffin passed on general manager jobs in Memphis and Denver, waiting for the right opportunity. He thought he had found it in Cleveland following Grant’s dismissal. “This thing is teed up,” he told me the night the Cavs’ season ended with a home win against the Nets. Irving was eligible to sign a max extension over the summer, and while the Cavs had internal debates over whether to trade him, ultimately Griffin knew they would offer him the extension. But no one in the organization knew whether Irving would accept it. The relationship was frayed, and if Irving balked at signing the full extension, the Cavs were prepared to begin shopping him.

  If negotiations with Irving went smoothly, then they could start swinging big. Yes, James was the number one target if he opted out of his contract in Miami and became a free agent, but there was a stretch when Griffin didn’t believe James was actually coming. At least not during the summer of 2014. The Cavs were a mess. They weren’t winning enough to remain in playoff contention and Griffin didn’t believe James would return to a team that wasn’t ready to win.

  Even if they swung and missed on James, he still believed there was enough free agent talent to drastically improve the Cavs. He was particularly high on Gordon Hayward, although other free agent options such as Chandler Parsons, Trevor Ariza, and Channing Frye were also available. The mistakes from the previous summer limited their cap space, but there was still optimism. The Cavs were finally ready to get something done in free agency. How much and
how high they’d swing depended on James’s future, but Griffin wasn’t even sure he’d be the one to put it all together.

  Griffin met with Brown during that uncomfortable period when he was only the interim GM and Brown’s own future was again in doubt.

  “If it’s you or me, it’s going to be you,” Griffin said. “You’ve already made your money. Now I’m going to make mine.”

  Gilbert took three months after the season to search for Grant’s permanent replacement, ultimately settling on the person who was in his own building the whole time. But that wasn’t the only change he made. The day Griffin had the “interim” tag removed, Brown was fired as the head coach after just one year. Gilbert may have admitted once already that firing Brown was a mistake, but that didn’t stop him from doing it again 384 days later. Gilbert never held a press conference, instead issuing a release with both decisions included.

  “This is a very tough business. It pains all of us here that we needed to make the difficult decision of releasing Mike Brown,” Gilbert said in a statement. “Mike worked hard over this last season to move our team in the right direction. Although there was some progress from our finish over the few prior seasons, we believe we need to head in a different direction. We wish Mike and his family nothing but the best.”

  Gilbert offered to meet with Brown after firing him to explain his reasons, but Brown declined. He had been brought to Cleveland to provide structure, improve the defense, and win more games. He’d done that. The Cavs had won nine more games than they had the previous season, they’d improved their defensive field goal percentage from dead last in the NBA to twelfth, and their defensive rating (which measures how many points teams allow per hundred possessions) had jumped from twenty-seventh to seventeenth in Brown’s one season in charge. But it wasn’t enough to save him.

  Griffin began an exhaustive coaching search. Grant and Gilbert had rushed to hire Brown within a week of firing Scott, but this time the Cavs wanted to prove they were taking their time to find the right candidate. In the meantime, Griffin’s first duty as full-time general manager was representing the team at the NBA’s draft lottery, a job reserved for Dan’s son, Nick Gilbert, the last three years. Teams can send anyone they want to represent them during the lottery. Sometimes it’s an owner or player or head coach or GM. The Cavs had won the top pick two of the three years that Nick was on the podium. Now it was Griffin’s turn.

  The Cavs finished the season 33-49—yes, a nine-game improvement over the previous season, but far short of the playoff expectations Gilbert had placed on the franchise. They missed the eighth seed in the playoffs by a disappointing five games, but the season essentially ended with a bad road loss at Atlanta in early April. The Cavs began the night just two games behind the Hawks and Knicks for the eighth seed but put forth a lousy effort in a lopsided 117–98 beatdown. It dropped them three games behind with five games left and essentially extinguished what flickering playoff hopes they had left.

  The loss irritated Luol Deng, the one veteran who understood how to win. Irving and Waiters never grasped how to play together and how to share the ball, two things that aggravated a veteran trying to teach youngsters the right way to play.

  “Sometimes you don’t want to say stuff like this, but at the same time we have to be honest with each other and know when we’re at our best, it doesn’t have to be go out and score thirty,” said Deng, whose comments were clearly aimed directly at Irving and Waiters. “If it’s the flow of the offense, I’m playing well and making shots, I’ll go with it. But if I recognize how the game is going, how guys are playing and how they’re playing defensively, just move the ball. Move the ball to move the ball.”

  Deng was in the final year of his contract when Grant acquired him in January 2014. He was a two-time All-Star and the closest thing the Cavs had on the roster to a veteran leader. He had been brought to Cleveland with the understanding he could stay long-term with an extension, but when Grant was fired, that feeling changed on both sides. He departed for good after the season ended, ultimately signing—of all places—with the Miami Heat.

  Griffin met with Timberwolves president Flip Saunders two days before the draft lottery. Saunders, a Cleveland native, was back home visiting his dad and carved out time during the trip to have dinner with Griffin. The Timberwolves knew at this point they were going to have to shop Kevin Love during the summer or risk losing him. The Cavs had been interested in Love for years. The feeling, however, was not mutual. Love had expressed no desire to sign an extension if the Cavs traded for him and most everyone in the league assumed Love was headed to Los Angeles when his contract expired. Griffin and Saunders talked about Love in loose terms but certainly nothing was agreed upon at that point.

  Griffin entered the lottery armed with Nick Gilbert’s trademark bow tie in his pocket and his grandmother’s pin on his lapel, which he kept rubbing for good luck throughout the proceedings. Unlike in years past, when the Cavs turned the lottery into their very own traveling concert, this time there was no private jet loaded with Cleveland celebrities. Gilbert didn’t even make the trip; he was giving a speech during the lottery. As usual, minority owner Jeff Cohen represented the Cavs in the private room where the drawing was held and Griffin was onstage. That was it. Inexplicably, the Cavs entered ninth and cashed in on a microscopic 1.7 percent chance to win the lottery for an unprecedented third time in four years.

  Brett Wilson is a numbers whiz I found while covering the Cavs for the Akron Beacon Journal. He graduated from Kent State with a degree in mathematics, and his specialty is probability. He even developed formulas to predict how successful a career a college player will have in the NBA based on his statistics. Wilson is now a software quality assurance tester. I have no idea what that means, but I’m sure it’s something smart, because this guy is incredible with numbers. Whenever I need some crazy computation, I find Brett. So when I e-mailed Brett and asked him the odds of the Cavs’ winning the lottery three times in four years, this was (part of) his (lengthy) reply.

  “Since each lottery has no impact on another they’re all independent probabilities, so the probability that [the Cavs] would get 1st in ’11, ’13, and ’14 and not get 1st in ’12 is 0.0005 or 0.05%,” he wrote. “If you’re looking at it solely in terms of LeBron coming back, you might just want to focus on 2011 and 2014. I would argue that what we got out of the 2012 and 2013 drafts didn’t make much of a difference in his decision. [The] probability of getting first in both ’11 and ’14 was 0.0039 or 0.39%.”

  So basically the Cavs’ odds of landing three number one picks in four years was 1 in 2,000—or roughly the same odds that the 18,300 people who applied to be astronauts at NASA faced in 2016. The Cavs, essentially, caught lightning. Griffin knew by winning the lottery, he had enough to go get Love from the Timberwolves because of the value of the number one overall pick.

  “I think we’re very open-minded,” he said after stepping off the stage. “We’re going to try to get radically better much quicker. We feel there’s a sense of urgency about improving our team as a whole.”

  Griffin and the front office went to work evaluating talent. Kansas’s Andrew Wiggins was the consensus publicly, but the Cavs had other ideas. Griffin believed Wiggins’s teammate center Joel Embiid was the best player available, going so far as to call him “a transcendent talent”—the only such player like that in this draft. The Cavs would’ve happily taken Embiid number one, but there was a problem: Embiid was a mess physically. Foot and back problems prevented the Cavs’ medical staff from signing off on him. In fact, they went in the other direction and advised the Cavs to pass on him. He was simply too risky with the top pick.

  It was a crushing blow for a team that viewed Embiid as the total package at both ends of the floor. His athleticism and hands were mesmerizing. Had Embiid been healthy, he would’ve been on the Cavs. Instead, they chose Wiggins over Duke’s Jabari Parker. Wiggins was an ultra-athletic
wing who was a good defender with a suspect shot. He essentially played the same position as LeBron, but that wasn’t Griffin’s main concern at the time. Griffin envisioned starting Wiggins at shooting guard alongside Irving and bringing Waiters off the bench in a role that suited him more naturally.

  Of course, the reality is they did have the buying power now if James indeed wanted to come home. They now had the trade pieces to acquire Love or another star and surround James with enough talent to win. But trading for Love before getting a commitment from James seemed too risky. Irving, likely, wasn’t enough to pique Love’s interest, and even his future remained in doubt. Love wanted to play for a team that could contend for a championship. That didn’t appear very likely in Cleveland.

  Before they settled on whom to choose and what to do with the pick, the coaching search was intensifying. The only problem was that teams that have the worst cumulative record over the previous four seasons—and that fire two coaches in as many years—have a hard time attracting top candidates. Steve Kerr, Griffin’s good friend from their time working together in the Suns’ front office, declined to meet to discuss the job. UConn men’s head coach Kevin Ollie, a former Cavs player and the hottest name among college coaches, also declined. Kentucky’s John Calipari and Florida’s Billy Donovan passed.

  James’s free agency was a couple of months away and the Cavs were left to pick their next head coach from a collection of rookie assistants looking for their first job (Adrian Griffin, Tyronn Lue) and guys at the end of their careers looking for another paycheck (Alvin Gentry and Lionel Hollins). Gentry was one of Griffin’s three finalists since they’d spent time together with the Suns, but Gilbert overruled him. Griffin preferred Lue, Doc Rivers’s rising assistant in Los Angeles. Lue had played eleven years in the NBA, won two championships as a backup point guard, and been surrounded by some of the game’s biggest names throughout his career. He was a teammate to both Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan and he’d been coached by Phil Jackson and Rivers. But he had just turned thirty-seven and had never served as a head coach. Instead, Gilbert went outside the box—six thousand miles from the box, to be precise. The Cavs found their next coach on the other side of the world.