by Jason Lloyd
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Copyright © 2017 by Jason Lloyd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lloyd, Jason.
Title: The blueprint : LeBron James, Cleveland’s deliverance, and the making of the modern NBA / Jason Lloyd.
Description: New York, New York : Dutton, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022370 (print) | LCCN 2017039979 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524741914 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524741907 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Cleveland Cavaliers (Basketball team) | James, LeBron. | National Basketball Association—History. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Basketball. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Coaching / Basketball. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Sports.
Classification: LCC GV885.52.C57 (ebook) | LCC GV885.52.C57 L56 2017 (print) | DDC 796.323/640977132—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022370
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
For Alessia, Alexander, AJ, and Avamaria,
I love you.
For Mom and Dad,
Thank you for working so hard every day so I never had to.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning, King James Version
CHAPTER 2
“He’s Gone”
CHAPTER 3
Starting Over
CHAPTER 4
Lottery, Luck, and Ping-Pong
CHAPTER 5
Old Memories, New Hopes
CHAPTER 6
Old Faces, New Mistakes
CHAPTER 7
Grant’s Tomb
CHAPTER 8
Z
CHAPTER 9
Outside the Box, Other Side of the World
CHAPTER 10
The Big Three
CHAPTER 11
The Modern NBA
CHAPTER 12
Homecoming King
CHAPTER 13
Crutches, Calves, and Contracts
CHAPTER 14
Shoulders, Slings, and Fighter Pilots
CHAPTER 15
Pool Views
CHAPTER 16
Christmas Mourning
CHAPTER 17
Gambling Man
CHAPTER 18
Go West and Strangle the Media
CHAPTER 19
Seven
CHAPTER 20
Larry
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PREFACE
As a boy growing up in the west suburbs of Cleveland, I cried the day Michael Jordan eliminated the Cavs from the NBA playoffs on “the Shot.” I sat in the hollow, decrepit Cleveland Municipal Stadium on countless summer nights and cheered for anonymous Indians teams filled with guys like Pat Tabler, Ken Schrom, Cory Snyder, Brett Butler, Tom Candiotti, and Ernie Camacho.
Celebrating championships was never a realistic expectation. Just being there had to suffice. Over time, I came to expect sports collapses and magnificent disasters, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when the Indians blew Game 7 of the World Series in 1997 or when the Browns took losing to an all-new level and the city lost the franchise in 1995.
In Cleveland, devastation and heartbreak are just another food group. It’s part of the terms of the deal when you root for these teams. I never had much interest in sticking around these parts after college, and while I had plenty of opportunities to move away, I never did. That’s what made covering the 2015–16 Cavs season such an honor and privilege. From the time LeBron James returned to Cleveland in 2014, I have been by his side chronicling every step of the journey, first for the Akron Beacon Journal and now for The Athletic.
I was there the summer night a capacity crowd at Akron’s InfoCision Stadium welcomed home their prodigal son. I was there the night he sat in the locker room, devastated, with a towel over his face for nearly an hour after the Cavs lost the NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors in 2015. And most importantly, I was here for the four years he wasn’t.
While James was off in Miami winning championships for the Heat, I was watching the Cavs painfully construct a daring plan to try to win him back. It involved a lot of losing, a lot of money, and a lot of luck. They made mistakes along the way, but ultimately 2016 will be remembered as Cleveland’s greatest sports year in more than fifty years.
I’m the only one who has covered the Cavs every day, home and road, from the time James left until the day he returned. The Blueprint is a culmination of that four-year plan, a boy coming home to fulfill a promise and a city shedding its loser mentality to rise in glory. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed living it.
INTRODUCTION
There on the floor of his office, on a perfect summer morning, a grown man collapsed alone on his hands and knees in both joy and terror as the television hummed behind him.
The lights inside cavernous Cleveland Clinic Courts were mostly dim, the court was darkened, and the basketballs had been put away after an exhausting 2013–14 season, when the Cleveland Cavaliers were again among the worst teams in the NBA. All the years of planning, the meticulous preparation for the summer of 2014, and a team’s future seemed to disintegrate in the fire of another crushing season. With most of his staff in Las Vegas and the temperature in Cleveland hovering in the low eighties, David Griffin, the Cavaliers’ GM, milled around his office in jeans, a golf shirt, and flip-flops with the television on ESPN and the volume low.
It was July 11, 2014, and the rush of NBA free agency was essentially over. All of the marquee names had agreed to new contracts except one, the biggest one, the diamond jewel. Four years after leaving Cleveland in a rubble of smoke and ashes, LeBron James had the opportunity to go home. Unbeknownst to almost everyone—certainly to the fans—the Cavs had spent all of James’s four years in Miami working tirelessly to bring him home, and to provide him with a fresh chance at ending Cleveland’s long championship drought. But no one had any idea whether the plan would work.
The final preparations had begun two weeks earlier. It was Dan Gilbert’s turn first. Four years ago, Gilbert had eviscerated James and his decision to play for Miami in a blistering letter, and the two men hadn’t spoken face-to-face since. If James was going to come back, Gilbert knew he was going to have to apologize. Gilbert requested a meeting with James in the early days of free agency in July 2014, then secretly flew to Miami hoping to meet his former star one-on-one.
But when Gilbert arrived, James had the house full of his friends
and business associates. He wasn’t going to make this easy, not after all the names Gilbert had called him in that letter. Gilbert walked in clearly outnumbered. Still, he apologized for the blistering comments he’d written in the hours after The Decision, James’s hour-long television show announcing his decision to leave Cleveland for Miami. James apologized, too, for the spectacle of the television show and the way he left town. The two men managed to glue back together some pieces of their long-fractured relationship, but Gilbert stepped back on his plane and flew home with no promises, no assurance that James was returning.
Griffin remained pessimistic throughout the free agency process. Would LeBron even want to come home? The Cavs had the worst cumulative record in the league the four years he was away and were coming off another miserable season of failed expectations, locker room dysfunction, and more turnover in the front office and coaching staff. They’d just hired a little-known coach from the other side of the world in David Blatt, who had no NBA experience. In Griffin’s best-case scenario, James would return to Miami on a one-year contract—giving the Cavs a little more time to put their house in order—and if they met expectations in 2014–15, if they could contend for a playoff spot with a young roster and new coach, Griffin surmised that maybe they’d have a real chance at luring him home the following summer.
Griffin also knew he wasn’t the only suitor. Three days after his secret meeting with Gilbert, James met with Heat president Pat Riley in Las Vegas. Riley had been the one who traveled to Cleveland in 2010 and convinced James to leave home and take less money to come to South Beach and win championships as part of a Big Three. Now he was chasing James into the desert, begging him to stay and see the plan through. But Riley left Vegas without a deal in place.
James wasn’t going to another new city and starting over again. He was either staying in South Beach or going home. James’s agent, Rich Paul, called Griffin during the early morning hours of July 11 to discuss personnel moves and the flexibility the Cavs had to add talent around James if he returned. Paul wanted a blueprint of how the Cavs could surround him with the pieces necessary to win, but he never hinted that James was actually coming. Griffin, still refusing to believe they were serious about returning, went back to work.
On that July morning, Griffin returned to milling around his office inside Cleveland Clinic Courts, the Cavs’ $25 million practice facility, which was built in 2007 and spans fifty thousand square feet of offices; it includes a weight room, hot and cold tubs, and seventeen thousand feet of basketball courts in suburban Independence. The fact that it was constructed just off Interstate 77, a short drive from James’s palace in nearby Bath Township, is no coincidence. Griffin sat in his office lining up a worst-case scenario in the likely event James was staying in Miami. The Cavs liked Gordon Hayward, but he was long gone. So were Chandler Parsons and Channing Frye. All of the free agents Griffin thought could fit this group had agreed to offers elsewhere. If James didn’t come home, the Cavs would be left with a young team, a glut of cap space, and no one worthy of it. “There was no next step on the board,” Griffin said.
Griffin had joined the Cavs’ front office in 2010, only months after James left for Miami, but didn’t receive the job as full-time general manager until May 2014. It was midmorning on his sixty-first day on the job when an exuberant Nate Forbes called him. Forbes was a minority owner of the Cavs and a friend of Gilbert’s since college. Throughout the last four years, Forbes played a vital role in repairing the relationship between James and the Cavs.
“The king is coming home!” is all Forbes needed to say. Griffin was stunned. Within seconds, he turned to his TV and saw ESPN break into its programming with the same news. After winning two championships in four years in Miami, LeBron James was coming home to Cleveland. Griffin hung up so he could listen to the newscast, then dropped to his hands and knees in shock, exhaustion, and jubilation.
“It was at once the happiest I had been, and eleven seconds later just this overwhelming sense of, ‘Oh my God, now we have to win a championship.’ I had no transition,” Griffin said. “It was literally sheer joy and then sheer panic all at one time.”
James and Paul had executed their plan perfectly. They had it timed down to the minute. James had been in Las Vegas most of the week and met privately with Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins Thursday morning to help him script a perfect essay that would be published under LeBron’s name “as told to” Jenkins. LeBron picked over scrambled eggs and sipped on carrot juice while talking to Jenkins fifty-eight floors above the Las Vegas Strip. His hotel room at the Wynn overlooked the Spring Mountains. This, Griffin found out later, was where James voiced aloud that he was officially coming home.
Jenkins stitched everything together in the essay and sent it for approval to James, who made a few alterations during his long flight to Miami. By Friday morning, Sports Illustrated was ready to post the news that shook the NBA. First, James called Heat president Pat Riley and told him he wasn’t coming back. Paul called Gilbert and then Forbes and told them the prodigal son was returning. Five minutes later, it was Griffin’s turn. Now, as Griffin watched his television in stunned disbelief, so did James’s own household, which was full of friends—and applause—when ESPN broke in with the news. An “Oh shit!” echoed off the walls of James’s house as the plan was flawlessly executed. Both plans, actually—the Cavs’ plan and James’s plan. The Cavs’ plan was just much longer in the making and required much more suffering.
When James had bolted Cleveland for Miami in 2010, fans had run into the streets burning his jerseys. That left James and everyone else wondering what the reaction would be in Miami. But this time, as word spread that James was leaving, all the television cameras parked in front of his house quietly packed up and left. In a tropical paradise where the weather is always sunny and bathing suits are appropriate attire, life went on as normal without a king. His departure was met with barely a twenty-four-hour whimper.
Griffin, meanwhile, went right to work. He was expected to meet the team in Vegas Friday afternoon for Summer League but missed the flight because his life had immediately changed. No longer were the Cavs scheming to get James back and planning for the future. Now it was time to win. Immediately. Griffin eventually made it to Las Vegas later Friday night, but he missed the team’s celebratory dinner. His wife, Meredith, went in his place as the Cavs owners feasted and popped champagne. For David Griffin and the Cavs, it was time to get to work.
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning, King James Version
Cleveland sports is littered with tales of sadness, devastation, and heartbreak. But it wasn’t always that way. Cleveland teams had a proud tradition of success in the mid-twentieth century up through the NFL’s Cleveland Browns championship in 1964. The following fifty years, however, contained so many magnificent disasters that they were given their own legendary names, such as “the Shot,” “the Drive,” and “the Fumble.”
LeBron James was supposed to change all of that. The phenom who grew up just down the road from Cleveland in Akron was regarded as basketball’s best prospect by his junior year of high school. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated for the first time as a junior at Akron’s St. Vincent–St. Mary and was declared “the Chosen One” and the next great NBA superstar. James was ready to soar. And the Cleveland Cavaliers wanted to go with him.
During the 1998–99 basketball season, just as LeBron was getting media attention, the Cavs began losing more games than they were winning. They were sliding into NBA mediocrity, not good enough to compete for championships and not bad enough to draft elite talent. The teams with the worst records have the best chance at high draft picks, so in the NBA landscape, the absolute worst place to be is stuck in the middle. By the time James was entering his senior year of high school, it was clear he was the top talent available in an elite 2003 draft class that had scouts, coaches, and general managers swooning.
“Heading into
that lottery and that draft, there was a lot of preparation that took place internally regarding the outcome of the lottery,” Cavs senior vice president of communications Tad Carper said. “That draft was one of the strongest ever. History has proven that to be the case. We knew that going in. This was a loaded, powerful draft and we knew it was going to be a game-changing situation for us.”
Carmelo Anthony was a freshman who guided Syracuse to a national championship. Chris Bosh was the ACC Rookie of the Year, leading Georgia Tech in scoring, rebounding, blocks, and field-goal percentage. Dwyane Wade was an explosive combo guard out of Marquette who kept rising on draft boards throughout the predraft process. Darko Miličić was a tantalizing European who dazzled during workouts. In all, the 2003 draft produced nine All-Stars and two NBA Finals MVPs. The jewel of the draft, however, was James. And the Cavs were determined to do everything possible to get him.
The Cavs had swung and missed badly at acquiring a superstar when they traded for Shawn Kemp in 1997 and signed him to the seven-year, $107 million deal his former team, the Seattle SuperSonics, refused to give him. As Kemp’s weight ballooned north of three hundred pounds and his play deteriorated, the Cavs regretted giving him the deal almost immediately and spent at least two years trying to get out from under it. They finally did in 2000, dumping the last four years and $71 million on the Portland Trail Blazers. Removing the bloated Kemp erased the only star off the roster, and fan interest was waning. The Cavs faced the same problem the NBA in general battled at the time: a lack of star power.
Ratings had steadily declined following Michael Jordan’s retirement in 1998. More than twenty-nine million people had tuned in that year to watch Jordan topple the Utah Jazz and win his sixth NBA championship. Ratings plummeted after that, and by the time James was a senior in high school in 2003, fewer than ten million watched the San Antonio Spurs beat the New Jersey Nets for the franchise’s second championship. In Cleveland, attendance was down, and so were the gate receipts. The Cavs were losing more than $1 million a month. Cleveland, and the rest of the league, desperately hoped the 2003 draft would supply the needed star power to jolt fans back to the game.