by Jason Lloyd
“We’ve waited two years to open this motherfucker,” Cohen said on his way out of the locker room. He was saving it for the flight to Las Vegas. Yes, Vegas. The Cavs flew from California to Vegas because that’s where all high rollers go to celebrate achievements. The Vegas stop was poetic for James, considering he had been in Las Vegas when he chose to return home and begin this two-year quest.
I was sequestered with Cohen in the lottery room the night the Cavs won the right to draft Irving first overall. Fast-forward 1,862 days and it was Irving, not James, making the biggest shot of the night to end Cleveland’s fifty-two-year title drought. But it was James who guided them there.
“Just knowing what our city has been through, Northeast Ohio has been through, as far as our sports and everything for the last fifty-plus years,” James said. “You could look back to the Earnest Byner fumble, Elway going ninety-nine yards, to Jose Mesa not being able to close out in the bottom of the ninth, to the Cavs went to the Finals—I was on that team—in 2007, us getting swept, and then last year us losing four to two. And so many more stories. And our fans, they ride or die. The Browns, the Indians, the Cavs . . . They continue to support us. For us to be able to end this, end this drought, our fans deserve it. They deserve it. And it was for them.”
J. R. Smith, maligned throughout his career and weighed down by his reputation as a team cancer, broke down on the podium. With tears streaming down his face, he thanked his family for always standing by him. He hadn’t always made life easy for them given his reputation, his suspensions, and all his fines, but sitting on the podium crowned a champion, Smith felt redeemed.
“I’ve been in a lot of dark spots in my life, and if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to get out of it,” Smith said through the tears. “But they are who they are. They fought with me. They yelled at me, they screamed at me, they loved me, they hugged me, they cried with me, and they always stuck by my side no matter right or wrong.”
When the Cavs had the opportunity to acquire Smith from the Knicks, Griffin had gone to James to see what he thought. James never hesitated. Go get him, he told Griff, and I’ll take care of him. In return, Smith helped James win his third championship ring, leaving him halfway to Jordan’s six. His performance in these NBA Finals, particularly in dragging the Cavs back from the ledge, makes it clear he is still the most dominant player in the game.
“He’s the best player in the world. I think he showed that,” Cohen said. “He removed all doubt. I don’t know how anybody can argue that. Everybody said he’s past his prime, that the face of the NBA today was Steph. Steph is a great player, but LeBron is still the greatest player in the world.”
Before the playoffs began, James Jones had the idea to create a puzzle. Sixteen pieces in the shape of the Larry O’Brien trophy—one for every win the Cavs needed to win a championship. After each playoff win, a different player on the fifteen-man roster took a turn fitting in the next piece. When Love missed Game 3 against the Warriors with a concussion, he was able to place that piece after the game because James told him they’d win it for him. The players kept the puzzle quiet throughout the postseason, waiting for the cameras to leave before pulling it out after each victory. Finally, after Game 7 of the Finals, it was Lue’s turn to place the last piece, shaped like the state of Ohio. The puzzle was complete, and it was time to party.
Before Game 7, Cavs fans had jammed into the Q to watch the game on the Jumbotron. There were so many people that the viewing party spilled out into the plaza between the arena and Progressive Field. When it was over, the real party started. I joked for years that if Cleveland ever won a championship, the city would burn off the map and fall into Lake Erie. While other major cities have been plagued by crime, fires, and violence during sports championship celebrations, Cleveland again shined. It was a peaceful, passionate party.
Thousands met the Cavs’ charter flight at the airport early the next afternoon to greet a team of exhausted, hungover players. James was the last to emerge from the plane, hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy high above his head. He took a lap around the fence so the screaming fans could catch a glimpse of what a real trophy looks like. Flights into the city quickly sold out, as did hotel rooms across downtown. After waiting fifty-two years to throw a party, no one wanted to miss it. People who had grown up in Cleveland and moved away over the years flew home for the show; some traveled in from other countries just to be part of the celebration.
City officials warned folks to arrive early and take public transportation. Lines for buses and the rail system stretched into the hundreds by seven A.M.—hours before the parade began. By nine A.M., the estimated wait time to catch a train from the airport into downtown was five hours. City and team officials scrambled to create a parade route, construct a stage, and think of every last detail. They nearly had a catastrophe when nobody thought to order a few hundred portable toilets, a clutch save nearly as important as James’s late-game block on Iguodala.
The streets of downtown were flooded with an estimated one million people—nearly triple the city’s population of about 390,000. Aerial shots of the city were breathtaking. A sea of humanity stretched a half mile south along Ontario Street from the arena past Progressive Field, across Carnegie Avenue, and a mile north on East Ninth toward the lake. People were hanging out of parking garages and scaling the world’s largest rubber stamp, a twenty-eight-foot-tall statue spelling out FREE in Willard Park, just to get a good view.
Police never bothered to barricade the parade route and bystanders spilled into the streets, blocking the path and delaying the start of the parade. The one-and-a-half-mile stretch of road was only supposed to take about an hour to travel, but the parade took four hours to complete because police had to clear the roads inch by inch in order for the caravan to pass. Players shook hands and gave high fives. Smith, Iman Shumpert, and Mo Williams spent the day shirtless—Smith wore his uniform shorts and went about three weeks without ever wearing a shirt, judging by social media pictures. Love carried around two WWE-style championship belts with a cigar in his mouth. When the caravan passed the ten-story LeBron James banner that hung across the street from the Q, James stood, arms outstretched, mimicking the banner, creating one of the most iconic images from the day.
James concluded the celebration by taking the stage and delivering a notes-free speech that lasted sixteen minutes. He addressed each of his fourteen teammates individually, thanking each one. He credited Tristan Thompson for his durability (he possessed the longest active consecutive games streak in the NBA), Love for his resiliency, and Irving for his potential. “He thought I was blowing smoke up his ass early in the season when I said he could be the best point guard in our league and also be an MVP in our league,” James said. “And I know every single one of you watched that Finals. You all saw what this guy’s capable of doing. And he’s only twenty-four. Oh, my goodness. He’s only twenty-four.” James was funny and unfiltered, cursing throughout a speech that was carried live on television. “It still hasn’t hit me what actually happened,” he said. “And for some crazy reason, I believe I’m going to wake up, and it’s going to be like Game Four all over again. I’ll be like, shit, we’re down two to one still.”
The day ended with James and Hall of Fame icon Jim Brown holding the championship trophy together, the long-ago past meeting the delicious present in Cleveland. Gilbert had vowed when he purchased the franchise in 2005 to deliver a championship, although he never could’ve imagined it taking this long or this path. Plenty of mistakes were made. Coaches and general managers were fired, superstars came and left and came back. And along the way, the Cavs created their own path to glory. League executives have known for years it’s impossible to win in this league without a superstar, so the Cavs planned for years to lure back their ex. They drafted and developed a new star, then compiled a war chest of trade assets to go trade for another one once James returned. And the analytics component identified
the proper supplementary pieces to round out the roster.
And when it was all over, after the plan was executed, the championship celebrated, and the parade complete, James descended the stage and saw me out of the corner of his eye. He turned and flashed a thumbs-up and walked into the arms of immortal greatness. He was still cradling the Larry O’Brien trophy. He might never let go. He doesn’t have to.
Epilogue
Fifteen days after the Cavs exited Oracle Arena as champions, LeBron James was vacationing in Spain during the Fourth of July holiday when Kevin Durant shook the NBA universe by joining the Warriors. A team that won seventy-three games during the 2015–16 season now boasted an MVP winner and arguably the NBA’s second-best player.
Dan Gilbert, meanwhile, was busy cutting checks. The championship season cost him about $161 million in payroll and luxury taxes, which meant Gilbert took a loss of about $50 million on the season, according to people privy to such information. He can afford it. Forbes estimated his net worth in the spring of 2017 at $5.9 billion, a $1.3 billion increase over his net worth from the fall of 2016, making him the wealthiest resident of the state of Michigan. But the championship also meant other teams were now highly interested in chipping away at the champs.
Prior to the 2015–16 season, the Cavs had an opportunity to lock up Matthew Dellavedova on a reasonable three-year, $10 million deal. But since they still controlled his rights at the time, they declined and forced him to play out the season on a one-year, $1.1 million contract before he could reenter free agency. Dellavedova agreed to a four-year, $38 million deal with the Milwaukee Bucks after the championship, and although the Cavs had the opportunity to match it, their tax situation made the feat virtually impossible. Letting the scrappy Dellavedova go, and failing to sign him for the long term when they had the chance, hindered them throughout a turbulent 2016–17 season.
Dellavedova departed to Milwaukee, while center Timofey Mozgov left in free agency for the Los Angeles Lakers. Mo Williams compounded the Cavs’ problems when he called GM David Griffin the day before camp opened to announce his retirement. The void caused by the departures of Dellavedova and Williams left the Cavs scrambling without a viable backup point guard to Kyrie Irving. It was also the first sign that the Cavs’ title defense was going to be more difficult than they had imagined.
First, however, was the chance to celebrate. The Cavs received their championship rings on a historic October night in Cleveland while the Indians opened Game 1 of the World Series across the street against the Chicago Cubs. A city that waited fifty-two years for just one championship had the chance to win two within five months. While that made for a bustling downtown—lots around the facilities were charging $110 for parking (about five times the normal rate)—the atmosphere inside Quicken Loans Arena, for the season opener against the New York Knicks, was electric.
J. R. Smith cried during the ring ceremony because that’s what he does. James also wiped away tears after addressing the crowd, and Kyrie Irving ran off the floor to embrace his father and present him with the championship ring.
“We just have a very, very unique relationship which goes deeper than almost life itself,” Irving said. “Just a culmination of a lot of emotions as a kid kind of watching him sacrifice as much as possible to allow me to have the freedom to play basketball every single day, but also understanding how basketball correlates to life and vice versa. How he always related it back to me being an even better man every single day. It’s just very, very, very fulfilling in terms of giving it to him and I’m glad he got it.”
The next eight months, however, constituted one of the strangest seasons of James’s career. Smith got a late start when his contract dispute dragged into the preseason, and then he missed nearly three months after breaking his thumb just before Christmas. He returned in March, a few weeks after Kevin Love went down with a knee injury that cost him a month. In all, Cavs players missed 186 games during the regular season to injuries, illnesses, rest, and other excused absences, the sixth-most in the NBA. Even coach Tyronn Lue fell victim to illness, missing time with bouts of vertigo.
“It’s been a strange season, probably one of the strangest I’ve been a part of from the simple fact of just having the chemistry and camaraderie out on the floor,” James said in March. “From the coaches to the players, guys have been in and out. We’ve had a lot of injuries.”
Chris Andersen was lost for the year in December to an Achilles injury. Channing Frye mourned the devastating losses of his mother and father, who died just a month apart. Andrew Bogut was signed in March, but his career with the Cavs lasted less than a minute. Bogut broke his left leg just fifty-eight seconds into his debut after a freak collision with Miami’s Okaro White. Griffin spent most of the season searching for a big man and another point guard. Meanwhile, the losses mounted.
Griffin privately believed this team was even more explosive than the team that won the championship. At one point, he thought the Cavs were talented enough to flirt with seventy wins. Instead, they coasted through the regular season at 51-31, which wasn’t even good enough for the top seed in the weakened Eastern Conference.
They were embarrassed in Chicago in early December, surrendering seventy-eight points in the paint defensively en route to their third consecutive defeat—the first time they had lost three straight games since Lue took over as head coach. The Cubs’ Game 7 victory back in October cost the Indians a World Series championship and forced James to arrive at United Center that night wearing a full Cubs uniform to pay off a bet he made with good buddy Dwyane Wade. He left the arena that night, however, wearing a scowl.
“We’ve got to get out of the honeymoon stage,” James said. “You’ve got to battle every night like we ain’t won nothing. Last year is last year and after ring night, it’s over with. Now it’s a new season and everybody is gunning for us every night and we have to understand that. The honeymoon stage is over and it’s time to play some real ball.”
James was just getting warmed up. After the Cavs acquired sharpshooter Kyle Korver in early January, James used it as an opportunity to remind people they still needed another point guard. And when I asked LeBron a few weeks later why he was throwing so many more passes to Korver than anyone else on the team, James shrugged.
“Who the hell else is going to throw him the ball?” James said.
The Cavs and Warriors spent most days with one eye on what the other was doing. When James hosted his annual Halloween party for his teammates, the drum set had a special 3–1 LEAD decal and he handed out cookies of tombstones with Warriors players’ names on them. But James also respected the roster and talent assembled in the Bay Area and the number of players who could dribble, pass, and shoot. The Warriors are full of playmakers, while the Cavs rely heavily on James and Irving.
By the trip to New Orleans in late January, James was fed up with it. He had privately grumbled for weeks about his team’s inefficient play, and a loss that night to the Pelicans, after falling behind by twenty-two points in the first half, was their fifth defeat in seven games. James hadn’t gone 2-5 in a seven-game stretch in nearly three years. This was the loss that broke him.
“We’re not better than last year, from a personnel standpoint . . . we’re a top-heavy team,” James said. “I just hope that we’re not satisfied as an organization. How hard it was to do that shit. I just hope we’re not satisfied.”
James fumed for the better part of fifteen minutes, but he made it clear that he wasn’t angry with the job Griffin did in assembling the roster.
“I ain’t got no problems with the front office,” he said. “I told [Griffin] to his face, so it ain’t like I’m telling y’all to put it on record. I see Griff all the time. One thing about me, if I got something to say, I’m going to tell it to your face. We need a fucking playmaker.”
Griffin was angry that James made his complaints so public. And even though James made it clear his comm
ents were not directed at the GM, that didn’t stop Griffin from firing back. He directed the complacency at the players, not ownership.
“The comment about the organization being complacent I think is really misguided,” Griffin said. “Organizationally there is absolutely no lack of clarity on what our goal set is. We are here to win championships and there is no other solution, there is no other outcome that is acceptable and there never has been. But in terms of the on-the-court complacency, I’ve seen a lot of that.”
Nearly a month to the day following James’s rant, Griffin found his long-sought point guard and playmaker in Deron Williams. The Dallas Mavericks bought out the remaining few weeks on his deal and released him so he could sign with a contender. Williams quickly chose the Cavs. He was thirty-two and a five-time All-Star. On paper, he was the ideal complement to what the Cavs needed. He might have lost a step or two, but he could still run pick-and-rolls, he could still shoot, and the Cavs only needed him to play fifteen to twenty minutes a night. But the signing fell flat. Williams never really adjusted to the reserve role.
Until Williams signed, James was essentially the backup point guard. Lue tried guys like DeAndre Liggins, Jordan McRae, and rookie Kay Felder at the spot. But of the three, Felder was the only natural point guard, and he was too inexperienced to really help. Using James as the primary ball handler behind Irving forced Lue to juggle a number of elements. James averaged a league-high 37.8 minutes a night, a number that caused plenty of consternation during the season. James insisted he felt great and wanted to play that many minutes. His trainer, Mike Mancias, gave his blessing, so Lue obliged and kept him out there.
But it came with trade-offs. The Cavs rarely practiced, sometimes going weeks with nothing more than shoot-arounds the mornings of game days. Lue also sat James plenty of nights for rest purposes, which at times angered the league. By the time the regular season was over, James had missed eight games and had logged just eighty-five more minutes than he had the previous season.
