Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion

by Andy Glockner

  Bleacher Report’s Ethan Skolnick, in a July 2015 feature on how the Cavaliers reinvented themselves around LeBron’s personality, provided insight to just how commanding James immediately was after his return to Cleveland. From the outset of the season, James demanded total accountability from everyone in the organization, from management through the head coach through the fifteenth man on the roster. There was an immediate urgency to win.

  But it wasn’t working, at least at first. LeBron, asked to be the team’s best player, leader, and club culture overhauler, was wearing down physically and mentally. Love didn’t seem happy or well used by Blatt. Irving was still feeling out his new role on the floor. It was a grind, with an adjustment period that seemed much steeper than when LeBron went to Miami and had to figure out a potent pas de deux with Dwyane Wade.

  The Cavaliers started 5–7, then won eight straight games. They headed to Miami for a Christmas meeting with the Heat at 17–10, and then lost there in LeBron’s return, with the major talking point afterward being how James connected much more readily on the court with Wade than any of his new teammates. A win at Orlando preceded a desultory twenty-three-point loss at then 6–23 Detroit on December 28, and then LeBron was done playing for a couple of weeks. Mostly without him, the Cavaliers ended up on an eight-game losing streak and bottomed out at 19–20 overall on January 13, 2015.

  Statistically speaking, the Cavaliers only had a plus-3.4 net rating (net points per one hundred possessions) in November, and actually had a negative team rating in December and through the first half of January. Then things began to change in a hurry.

  A week before the loss in Phoenix that dropped them back below .500, the Cavaliers had swung a three-team trade with the New York Knicks and Oklahoma City Thunder that offloaded inefficient shooting guard Dion Waiters for mercurial, semi-inefficient shooting guard JR Smith and “3-and-D” wing Iman Shumpert. The move solved a couple of issues for the Cavaliers, as Smith overall was a shooting upgrade on Waiters, and they added defensive depth on the perimeter, too.

  The next day, the team acquired center Timofey Mozgov from the Denver Nuggets, providing them with a physical rebounder and rim-protecting presence that the roster, thanks in part to an injury to Anderson Varejao, had sorely been lacking.

  The Mozgov trade was expertly tailored by Cleveland general manager David Griffin, and very well explained by ESPN’s Brian Windhorst in a January 2015 column. To do it, the Cavaliers carved out enough room to take on Mozgov’s $4.4 million salary through a series of barely reported transactions that turned an initial, paltry $1.6 million in cap space into a trade exception worth more than $5 million, all the while only using second-round picks as enticements to get other teams to work with them. It was the subtle kind of masterful cap manipulation that ultimately can be the difference in championship aspirations, and in this case, delivered the Cavaliers what they desperately needed.

  It’s not quite as simple as saying that the Cavaliers took off from there, but they proceeded to go 34–9 the rest of the way, even while throwing away a couple of late-season games as they rested key guys ahead of the playoffs. In February, the Cavaliers had a plus-8.8 net rating, and they followed that up with a plus-8.3 net rating in March as the revamped roster hit its stride and made them, especially on the offensive end, an extremely formidable force. In fifteen March games, the Cavaliers averaged 111.6 points per one hundred possessions, which would have led the NBA for the season.

  The subtext, though, was how their big three were meshing together, and what happened when various combinations of James, Love, and Irving were on the floor, and that is something that remains a work in progress.

  Per unpublished lineup information culled by Jacob Rosen, a writer for Cleveland sports blog Waiting for Next Year, the Cavaliers’ season-ending numbers when all three stars were on the court—even with all the early on- and off-court drama—were extremely potent. In the 1,441 minutes the trio was together on the court (about 36 percent of the Cavaliers’ total for the regular season), the Cavaliers had a plus-13.3 net rating and were very good on both sides of the ball. Those numbers, though, fell precipitously when either Irving or Love went to the bench, with neither a LeBron/Irving nor LeBron/Love combo even reaching a plus-3.0 net rating in a combined 720 minutes on the season.

  Somewhat interesting—both in how the roster was bolstered, and as foreshadowing for the playoffs, when both Irving and Love were injured—was that Cleveland was actually quite good when, of the three stars, only LeBron was on the court. In 333 regular-season minutes of “LeBron Plus Four Others,” Cleveland was a surprising plus-13.1 net rating, and defensively, only conceded 88.2 points per one hundred possessions. The Cavaliers had become a fuller team around LeBron, but they also were finding a scheme that worked when LeBron was the one and only orchestrator.

  Management must have noted, because they basically brought back every piece of the 2014–15 team to make another run at it. Irving was already locked up; Love signed a five-year, $110 million extension; and Shumpert inked a new four-season deal for $10 million per year. Cleveland also brought back Matthew Dellavedova and Smith on low-cost deals, and finally agreed to new terms with power forward Tristan Thompson on the eve of the new season. LeBron was always going to come back, and perhaps he reached a detente with Blatt, off a playoff run where the rookie NBA coach worked over more experienced coaches like Tom Thibodeau and Mike Budenholzer.

  It’s also worth noting that LeBron won titles in his second and third seasons in Miami, and man for man, Cleveland’s roster is better than those Heat teams. Expectations heading into 2015–16 were understandably huge, especially after Cleveland survived the growing pains of the initial season of immense change.

  CHAPTER 8

  No Single Path to Mining Talent

  I think there’s that pressure when you’re a top-ten, top-five pick that you want to come in and put up numbers . . . but once you’re in the league six, seven years, you realize that numbers aren’t that important. . . . You get the W, that’s more important. . . . No one’s really going to talk about a guy who averaged twenty and ten on a team that was terrible.

  —Andrew Bogut, center, Golden State Warriors

  Players can work to push themselves to reach the level of quality required to succeed in the NBA, but it takes more than an individual’s skill to become successful. We read every year about supposed “busts” who don’t live up to their draft status, but so much of player success depends on the environments in which they land, and NBA rookies don’t have much control over that process. The questions persist for any player that’s not a franchise-level star, though. Is this the right coach for that player? Does the coach get to stay awhile so continuity can develop? Is the franchise well-run at the owner and management level? Are there quality veterans in the locker room? Are the facilities and services that help players stay healthy up to current standards?

  Likewise, there are a wide-variety of talent acquisition strategies (and sub-strategies) that teams can pursue, depending on where they are in the competitive cycle, how much money they have available, and how desirable a location they are for players. While the draft and free agency are the two most direct ways for teams to acquire the kinds of players they want, trades and player development can be even more potent because they often are less impacted by outside market factors dictating who you can have and for how much money.

  Good teams find players from all of those avenues, although smart drafting and development is really crucial. Smart players develop and evolve to make themselves as valuable as they can be for as long as possible. The dance goes on and on, with a healthy dose of right time, right place also factoring in. To show the variety of ways teams can find the right players, here are five case studies from the NBA that show the different ways teams can obtain and nurture extremely valuable talent, and how certain players find a way to extend their value in the league.

  Andrew Bogut: From No. 1 Overall Pick to Pivotal Role Player

/>   Andrew Bogut is tired of talking about his injuries. There were the two most notable ones—the broken ankle he suffered when he landed on the foot of then-Houston Rockets guard Kyle Lowry, and the dislocated elbow suffered when he was nudged slightly on a fastbreak dunk against the Phoenix Suns and landed awkwardly on his arm—but there have also been a broken rib, another long-term ankle “sprain,” and the constant assortment of bumps and bruises that an NBA big man suffers when he plays as physically as Bogut does night in and night out.

  Bogut considers the vast majority of his injuries to be flukes rather than a byproduct of his favored playing style, but they certainly have had an impact on his career trajectory. He had a promising start to his NBA career in Milwaukee after the Bucks made him the No. 1 overall pick in 2005, maturing to the point where he averaged 15.9 points, 10.2 rebounds, and 2.5 blocks a game with the Bucks in 2009–10. The injuries kept mounting, though, and as they started to impact his shooting and mobility, he had to begin reconsidering his path as an NBA player.

  Things didn’t start much better when the injured Bogut was acquired by the Golden State Warriors at the trade deadline during the 2011–12 season in a deal for guard Monta Ellis, a popular mainstay who was deemed expendable as Stephen Curry grew into his stardom. At a jersey-retirement ceremony for team legend Chris Mullin the following month, team co-owner Joe Lacob was booed by the Oracle Arena crowd when he attempted to speak because of the fans’ displeasure with the trade.

  Bogut’s recovery from his various injuries was difficult. In an article written by Yahoo’s Marc Spears in December 2014, Bogut explained how badly his body had been failing him during the 2012–2013 season, going as far to suggest to his agent that he couldn’t play anymore.

  So Bogut had a choice to make. He couldn’t be a thirty-plus-minutes-a-game player anymore and stay effective and healthy, so he had to recast himself. He had retained his skillful passing ability and his affinity for setting screens, and as the league moved to a drive-and-kick spread offense motif, Bogut’s rim-protection skills remained very much in demand. So, he set out to be the best crucial role player he could be, all the while cognizant that some considered him to be a disappointment.

  “I’ve been in the league long enough. I was on a bad team where I put up numbers, and unfortunately had some bad injuries that have kind of changed my game a little bit,” Bogut said while sitting on top of an advertising board on the baseline of Atlanta’s Philips Arena. “I had two injuries where I was told I probably wouldn’t play again, so I’m happy to be out here playing. Obviously, as a No. 1 pick, I haven’t exceeded expectations, but I haven’t been a bust, either. I’ve kind of been in the middle, in my opinion. Probably average. I really hit my stride my third, fourth, fifth year, and obviously had some issues. So I don’t buy into [the perception] right now.”

  Bogut’s injuries may have been a possible red flag, but the Warriors were pretty determined to bring him in, and his elbow injury provided them the opportunity they needed. According to assistant general manager Kirk Lacob, team management had conducted a study of past Warriors teams as well as what kind of roster combinations were working in the league at the time, and came to the conclusion that they really needed to add a physical screen setter and rim protector to help out their perimeter players on both ends of the floor.

  “We basically found that the Warriors never had a center,” Lacob said. “They tried to draft one a million times. We need[ed] a center badly, a big guy. And not just like a center, we want[ed] someone very specifically who is a monster defensively, protects the rim, and can pull off rebounds. That’s specifically what we went after. I mean, I’m not going to pretend that we didn’t get very lucky to get Bogut—a lot of things had to go right, he had to get hurt, they had to want to trade him. That trade was like a twelve-month thing, but it’s definitely a guy that we targeted.”

  Fast-forward to the 2014–15 regular season, and while most of the attention on Golden State was focused on Curry and fellow “Splash Brother” Klay Thompson, or the emergence of multifaceted Draymond Green as the team’s very high-quality glue guy, Bogut’s defense, picks, and passing from both the high and low post were all enormous factors in the team’s success.

  Individual player net ratings, or the team’s point differential per one hundred possessions when they’re on or off the court, can be somewhat misleading and can be impacted by playing fewer minutes, but it’s worth noting that Bogut’s plus-16.6 “on court” net rating, per NBA.com, was the second-best on the team, just behind league MVP Curry. Bogut also had the team’s fourth-“worst” off-court net rating, meaning the Warriors struggled a bit more than usual when Bogut wasn’t playing. Additionally, the team’s 95.2 points allowed per one hundred possessions while Bogut was on the floor was the lowest for any regular rotation player, underscoring his rim-protecting importance. When Bogut was off the court during the regular season, the Warriors allowed a more pedestrian 100.2 points per one hundred possessions.

  Since Bogut only played a bit less than twenty-four minutes a game, it was almost like the Warriors had two separate teams, with very different approaches. That flexibility—whether it was Bogut conceding minutes to fellow bigs Marreese Speights or Festus Ezeli, or whether they went very small, with 6-foot-7 Draymond Green playing the role of de facto center—proved very difficult for most opponents to handle, and was extremely crucial for the Warriors in the postseason.

  To Bogut’s credit, he didn’t really care how much he played, and the team understood his unique value. Lacob said early in the season that, if told that Golden State would have Bogut and Andre Iguodala healthy for seventy-five games apiece, he wouldn’t have to ask for anything else in terms of a basis of great expectations for the season. Come springtime, he looked very prescient.

  In Bogut’s sixty-seven appearances in the regular season, the Warriors went 58–9 (versus 9–6 when he didn’t play). In the playoffs, he served crucial strategic roles in some series (like when Steve Kerr switched him onto poor outside shooter Tony Allen in the second round against Memphis, which allowed Bogut to roam freely in the paint and help deter the Grizzlies’ excellent inside duo of Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph), and played a total of two minutes and forty-six seconds in the Warriors’ final three games in the NBA Finals, when his skill set was not required given the specific matchup with the Cavaliers. That was OK by Bogut, who endured a long and painful road to get to this point and has moved team success well ahead of personal kudos on his priority list.

  “We have enough scorers and guys who will get stats,” Bogut said, “so [we need someone] setting good screens, getting the rebound, block[ing] shots, protect[ing] the paint, and I predicate the way I play on those things.

  “I think there’s that pressure when you’re a top-ten, top-five pick that you want to come in and put up numbers,” he added, “but once you’re in the league six, seven years, you realize that numbers aren’t that important. To me, they’re not that important. To other guys, they are. I think letters are more important to me. You get the W, that’s more important to me at this point of my career. No one’s really going to talk about a guy who averaged twenty and ten on a team that was terrible.”

  Khris Middleton: From Trade Toss-In to Leading Role

  One of the NBA’s most impactful young players was a mere footnote in a trade that happened in the summer of 2013, when the Milwaukee Bucks and Detroit Pistons swapped point guards, with Brandon Knight heading to the Bucks in exchange for Brandon Jennings.

  As part of the transaction, Milwaukee also received Ukrainian 7-footer Viacheslav Kravtsov, who had played 224 minutes in his debut NBA season for Detroit (and who was subsequently dealt to Phoenix as part of a trade to obtain veteran swingman Caron Butler before ever playing a minute for Milwaukee), and Khris Middleton, a second-round pick from Texas A&M who had shown some flashes both in college and during his rookie campaign in Detroit (he played 475 minutes in twenty-seven games), but was far from a finished product on either
end of the floor.

  Two years later, some advanced metrics considered him to be one of the best players in the NBA.

  ESPN.com’s real plus-minus (RPM) is best described as a next-generation attempt to refine an already-complicated metric called regularized adjusted plus-minus (RAPM), which was a calculation that tried to determine just how much of a positive impact individual players had on team performance on both offense and defense. These calculations were improvements on the original adjusted plus-minus calculations, which were a rough approximation of how many points better or worse a team performed while a player was on the floor, adjusted for his teammates on the court with him.

  For the 2014–15 season, the real plus-minus leaderboard doubled as a who’s who of NBA greats. League MVP Stephen Curry led the category, followed by LeBron James (the best player in the world), James Harden (league MVP runner-up and a first-team All-NBA guard), Anthony Davis (the next huge thing), and Kawhi Leonard (a destructive two-way force for the San Antonio Spurs). Of the top nine players on the list, four made first-team All-NBA for that season, and three more made second-team honors.

  At number ten overall was Middleton.

  Furthermore, if you round up Middleton’s offensive RPM score of 1.97 to 2, he was one of only seven players in the league with a rating of 2+ on both ends of the floor.