The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  David Blatt was Boston-born and Princeton-educated. He’d spent his adult life playing and coaching overseas, guiding Russia to a bronze medal in the 2012 London Olympics. He’d led Maccabi Tel Aviv to a stunning upset over Real Madrid for a EuroLeague championship in 2014. It was enough to earn him a EuroLeague Coach of the Year award. Blatt was a successful vagabond overseas, rarely staying in one place for more than a few years. He coached in Russia one year and Italy the next. More importantly, he was an NBA unknown, which to Gilbert was more appealing than an NBA retread.

  Blatt, a skinny six-footer with a little salt in his mostly pepper hair, convinced himself that he had nothing left to prove in Europe. He’d turned fifty-five in the days after winning the EuroLeague championship in 2014 and he wanted a crack at the NBA. His high school coach, Phil Moresi, cautioned him not to do it. He’d likely have to serve as an assistant coach first, and if he landed on the wrong staff with a trigger-happy owner, Blatt would be out of the league and not have a strong enough name to get another chance. The move was risky. Blatt, however, was undeterred.

  Kerr became the head coach of the Warriors after passing on the Cavs job and selected Blatt as his top assistant. The two men shared an agent in Mike Tannenbaum. It was an opportunity for Blatt to ease into NBA culture and learn the league before perhaps one day running his own team. But after the Cavs had rushed into the previous hire in Brown, Griffin wanted to be thorough and present wide-ranging candidates to ownership. With Kerr’s blessing, Blatt met with the Cavs and quickly became the coach Gilbert wanted. Blatt bypassed the conventional route of starting as an assistant and zoomed right into the Cavs job. Griffin knew there would be a steep learning curve for Blatt and convinced Gilbert to go get Lue, too, who was the runner-up for the job and Griffin’s top choice.

  It’s unusual for the runner-up to be named associate head coach in any job search, but this was no typical situation. Blatt had no qualified assistants to bring with him. He was relying on the Cavs to supply his coaching staff. That’s why a number of assistants were retained from Mike Brown’s staff, along with the addition of Lue, who was there to help acclimate Blatt to the NBA and, yes, replace him if necessary.

  “David Blatt is going to bring some of the most innovative approaches found in professional basketball anywhere on the globe,” Gilbert raved in the team’s release announcing the hire. But beneath Gilbert’s excitement, there was reason for concern. Blatt was a complete novice to the NBA and before arriving in Cleveland, he was considered supremely arrogant. He lived up to his reputation almost immediately. When he won his first NBA game as a head coach, the players rallied around him and celebrated, presenting him with the game ball for his first victory. Blatt seemed almost offended about the display.

  “Not all of you know me that well,” Blatt told reporters a few minutes later. “But I’ve probably won over seven hundred games in my career.” Players have far more power in the NBA than they do in Europe, where the coach can be the star. Blatt was slow to grasp that culture from his first day.

  “How do you deal with the egos of the players in the NBA? I don’t buy that,” Blatt said at his introductory press conference. “I’ve had wonderful discussions with the players from the Cleveland Cavaliers and I find a group of guys that want to be coached, that want to learn, that care about winning. . . . I’ve coached enough great players to know when guys are happy playing together and seeing that doing it the right way fosters the spirit you need to win, it doesn’t make a difference where you’re coaching.”

  Of course, Blatt was referring to a Cavs roster of young players with high ceilings like Irving, Waiters, Tristan Thompson, and rookie Wiggins, the latest number one overall pick the Cavs had drafted. The LeBron factor didn’t seem to be part of the consideration at the time, for good or for ill. James was healing from another grueling season that had concluded with an NBA Finals loss to the Spurs five days earlier. Since they had waited this long, there was a thought throughout the NBA that the Cavs wouldn’t hire a coach until James chose his next destination. The timing of Blatt’s hire, not to mention the choice, shocked most everyone.

  “Blatt?” one general manager texted. “That’s not going to get it done.”

  “Get it done” in this case referred to getting James back to Cleveland. Every decision the Cavs made was viewed outside the organization through the LeBron lens. As the summer of 2014 inched closer and closer, agents and executives around the league believed James could return to the Cavs. But now, with his free agency just weeks away, the rest of the league thought their instability and poor season had cost them any chance at getting their king back. Privately, a number of folks within the organization felt the same way.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Big Three

  As 2014 free agency loomed, the final moves were clear. The Cavs, and Griffin, needed to secure Kyrie Irving and use his on-court talents if they had any hope of signing a second star. They still wanted that to be LeBron, but it wasn’t clear that was still possible. They needed to prepare for other options while at the same time figuring out how to heal the fractured relationship between Dan Gilbert and James, a task that would be far from easy.

  The Irving issue came first. Irving’s three years in Cleveland were littered with coaching changes and chemistry issues. His first two head coaches had already been fired and he had problems developing a rhythm with Waiters; the two weren’t close at all. He was blamed for being a ball hog, and rival executives thought the losing was getting to him; two separate team executives told me they believed he was pouting on the court. The relationship between Irving’s camp and the previous regime was fractured. Jeff Wechsler, Irving’s agent, disagreed often with both Brown and Grant. As a result, Griffin didn’t know what to expect when free agency began in July 2014. At one point, the Cavs held discussions about whether to build around Irving or trade him, fearing his attitude and defensive lapses would prevent him from evolving into an elite player.

  Compounding matters was the fact that Gilbert often regretted the way James had held the organization hostage with his contract. After James left for Miami, Gilbert believed, in hindsight, he should’ve pushed harder for James to sign an extension prior to his final season in Cleveland. And Gilbert privately believed that if James had refused, he should’ve traded him. This all seems logical given how it turned out, but the truth is, trading James would’ve been a public relations disaster, and it would have seemed ludicrous, at the time, to trade the best player in the game.

  But the league had learned a great deal from the Cavs’ 2010 cautionary tale. Other teams that watched the Cavs unravel feared enduring the same fate. That’s why the Nuggets traded away Carmelo Anthony, the Jazz dealt Deron Williams, and the Orlando Magic moved Dwight Howard. All were franchise players, but their teams no longer believed they could re-sign them and wanted to move them while they could still return real value. Gilbert, meanwhile, vowed to never be held hostage by another player or contract.

  So when Irving was up for an extension in 2014, no one was quite sure how it would go. The Cavs still held his rights for another year, but if Irving refused to sign the max extension or demanded something shorter, such as a three-year deal, the Cavs would explore trading him. Even before James, finalizing Irving’s fate was their number one priority. That’s why Gilbert, Griffin, Blatt, and Lue all met with Irving, his father, and his agent on the first day of free agency. Much to the Cavs’ relief, Irving agreed quickly to the max contract, worth $90 million over five years—the most the team could pay him under the league’s salary cap rules. The final year was a player option, but Gilbert acquiesced and gave it to him. Griffin didn’t spend a lot of time talking to Irving about James because no one knew yet how feasible it was.

  “At the time I took over, the most important thing to me was Kyrie has to sign long-term. And building the relationship with Kyrie was really important to me,” Griffin said. “That was really what we focused on. Wh
en we met with him in free agency, we didn’t really talk about LeBron. We talked about the different players we thought we could get involved with, showed them a list of those players. ’Bron probably wasn’t even on the list. We went about targeting all of those guys. Kyrie helped us recruit all of them.”

  Included on that list was Hayward, Utah’s restricted free agent. Griffin had long admired Hayward and wanted him on the Cavs, even though it was likely that because he was restricted, the Jazz would match any offer he received and force him to return to Utah. With Irving committed, the Cavs invited Hayward to Cleveland Clinic Courts early in the free agency process with the intent of offering him a max contract. Griffin envisioned Hayward starting at small forward alongside Irving and Wiggins, giving the Cavs a dynamic set of wings (including Waiters) all twenty-four and under. The Cavs had been unable to secure a meeting with James and started to fear waiting around for him while missing out on everyone else, which is what had happened in 2010. And since Griffin had lost hope that James was coming home in 2014, he aggressively pursued Hayward. When James’s agent, Rich Paul, found out Hayward was at the Cavs’ facilities, he called and told them to be patient and hold off making any decisions. Hayward left Cleveland with no offer in hand.

  I had lunch with Gilbert during All-Star Weekend in New Orleans in 2014, less than five months from James’s free agency. Gilbert believed then that the Cavs would have a shot at James, even though no one had explicitly told him so. The disappointing end to the season diminished a lot of that hope. But once Paul called and told them to hold off on Hayward, it became apparent the Cavs would at least have a crack at James. They had two main selling points to their pitch: This was home and Gilbert was willing to spend whatever was necessary to win. But there was still one big issue. Even when Grant and Ilgauskas were together in the front office, whenever the topic of James’s returning was broached, both men agreed that Gilbert and James would have to at some point bury their differences. That was the biggest hurdle that remained, and the resolution was far from clear.

  “When we would have conversations about would he come back or would it be okay, obviously we said he and Dan needed to sit down and talk. They don’t need to be best friends, but it’s a good business decision for both of them,” Ilgauskas said. “Then it was the fans. How would the fans respond? I said stop, the fans will be fine. You’ll see a complete one eighty. Don’t even worry about the fans. When a player of that caliber wants to come back, you take him back. You make that happen.”

  The eventual meeting between Gilbert and James was a covert operation few in the Cavs organization even knew was happening. On Sunday, July 6, a few days after Hayward left Cleveland without a contract, Gilbert flew on his private jet to Miami to meet with James and sort out their differences. A former radio host in Cleveland, Joe Lull, wrote on his Twitter account that Gilbert was flying to Miami to meet with James and it nearly broke the Internet. While Gilbert tried denying the report with his own tweet, Cavs fans located Gilbert’s plane on a flight-tracking website and posted to social media its route to Fort Lauderdale.

  “We sent Dan down there hoping he’d speak alone to LeBron, but that’s not how it went,” Griffin said. “They had him outnumbered about five to one. That’s wasn’t our vision of how it would go. Our hope was, and we requested, we’d sit with him alone.”

  James had Paul with him as well as other associates. They weren’t going to make this easy on Gilbert, not after that scathing letter he’d written on James’s way out of town. He’d called him a coward and a narcissist and accused him of quitting on his team. Gilbert apologized for the letter, while James apologized for the way he handled the Decision. The simple reality remains that, as Ilgauskas indicated, Gilbert and James would never be close. But they put enough pieces back together to at least be cordial.

  —

  The idea of James’s returning suddenly began to look promising again. But they had no commitment, and the Cavs needed to take some serious financial, and logistical, risks, even though they were still so unsure of the outcome. Money came first. Part of Gilbert’s pitch to James had referenced the Heat’s decision to release Mike Miller prior to the 2013–14 season because owner Micky Arison was unwilling to pay $33 million in luxury taxes. Releasing Miller cut the Heat’s tax bill in half, but it also angered James, who lost a good shooter and a piece he needed to win, purely for financial reasons. Gilbert believes money follows; it doesn’t lead. That was essentially the Cavs’ pitch to James: Come home and we’ll spend whatever it takes to win, regardless of luxury taxes. Whatever it takes.

  On his way back to the airport, Gilbert held a conference call with his business partners Nate Forbes and Jeff Cohen, and Griffin. It was a matter-of-fact discussion with no real emotion. Neither James nor Paul revealed any clues about whether James was coming home.

  “In my view of it now, it was all very boring,” Griffin said of the conference call. “Your heart’s racing and you hope to God it’s good news, but at the end of the day, it was just more box checking. Then at the end of the call, we thought, ‘Okay, we need to decide what we want to do next.’”

  For Gilbert, the casino owner, the answer was easy. He went all-in.

  James left the meeting with Gilbert and flew to Las Vegas for his basketball camp. Gilbert flew home and the Cavs went to work. The Cavs knew James wasn’t taking a dollar less than the max to return, so they had to undo the mistakes of the previous summer, which meant clearing Jarrett Jack’s salary off their books to have enough cap space to fit him. Jack was a mild disappointment his one year in Cleveland, averaging 9.5 points and 4.1 assists, but he was still a serviceable—albeit overpaid—NBA veteran.

  The Nets were interested in Jack and the remaining $12.5 million owed to him, but they had their own bad contract to move. The Celtics were called in to facilitate the deal under the NBA’s complicated salary cap system, but the Cavs had to pick up the hefty tab: The price was young, promising center Tyler Zeller and a future first-round pick. Zeller wasn’t going to the Hall of Fame, but he was a serviceable center with range who would play a long time in the NBA. And the Cavs gave him away for nothing, unsure whether James was really coming home or setting them up for more heartbreak.

  “I was very concerned. We made the trade in the dark relative to ’Bron,” Griffin said. “We made the trade knowing the only way we get ’Bron is if we have max cap space available. So I had to get to max cap space. Basically it was: We can’t be in the game unless I do this, so let’s get in the game. But the actual outcome? We didn’t know. That’s where ownership doesn’t get nearly enough credit. They’ll take a risk. They’ll trust in the process a little bit and they will take a risk. That was a very, very ballsy thing for them to do.”

  On Wednesday, three days after the secret meeting in Miami with James and Gilbert, James met with Pat Riley in Vegas. Unlike their 2010 meeting in Cleveland, this meeting did not result in a deal.

  The Cavs spent Thursday putting the finishing touches on their three-team trade with the Nets and Celtics. After taking a night to sleep on it, James invited Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins into his Vegas suite Thursday to collaborate on an essay. Jenkins had written several profiles on James, including a fabulous Sportsman of the Year story in 2012. This time the two spent an hour in close conversation; then Jenkins stitched it all together. After the way it had ended in 2010, after the way James and Gilbert set the organization on fire, there was only one poetic path he could take back to Cleveland: a letter. “In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have,” James and Jenkins wrote. “I’m ready to accept the challenge. I’m coming home.”

  With his decision made, James left Vegas and flew to Miami with good friend and now ex-teammate Dwyane Wade. He was in his Miami house Friday when Sports Illustrated posted the essay. James spoke briefly with Jenkins, pleased with the day’s outcome, while the country shook with the news and Cleveland
exploded in jubilation.

  —

  I was on United Airlines flight 1174 from Cleveland to Las Vegas to attend Summer League on the morning of July 11. A few Cavs personnel were on my flight and we briefly discussed James’s future while boarding. No one had any idea what he was planning or when it would be announced. Our flight was equipped with DirecTV, but I was reading a book when a couple of hours into the flight a man two rows behind me and across the aisle began to repeat, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God!” Each version grew louder than the last until he was nearly screaming it. People were nervous, turning to look and see why he was making such a commotion. Then he clapped his hands together once and shouted, “He’s coming back!” I immediately knew what he was talking about and scrambled to activate my seat-back television. By the time the plane landed, my life had changed forever.

  —

  Harry Buffalo sports bar is a stiff seven-iron from Quicken Loans Arena. As the man on my flight shouted, “He’s coming back!” the sleepy lunch crowd at the bar was erupting. Downtown workers flooded in while lines formed instantly down the street at the arena’s box office. The Cavs sold out of season ticket packages the same day James announced his return. They probably could’ve sold out the entire arena for the whole season in a few hours, but they held back some single-game tickets for the general public.