The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  James was an infant for the Drive and the Fumble, but he turned thirteen a couple of months after Mesa blew the World Series. After growing up in Akron, James now deeply understood the challenges of Northeast Ohio. This wasn’t a city that people aspired to reach. No one grew up in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles hoping to one day make it to Cleveland, a city that had its best days in the 1940s and 1950s and began deteriorating in the 1960s, when folks left the city for the suburbs and racial tensions heightened. Pollution set the Cuyahoga River on fire multiple times, most notably in 1969, and the city’s debt rose to $30 million in 1978, when it became the first city since the Great Depression to default on its loans.

  Simply put, those who grow old there are usually born there. The talent drain is crushing, particularly when the talent is a six-foot-eight, two-hundred-fifty-pound cash register. James’s entry into the library of Cleveland sports misery is the most debilitating: the Decision.

  CHAPTER 2

  “He’s Gone”

  Entering the 2009–10 playoffs, Anderson Varejao had attempted a total of twenty-five three-pointers in his first six years in the NBA. He made only one. The twenty-sixth was also the final shot of the season and served as the last shot taken with LeBron James in a Cavs uniform. A season with championship expectations instead died in the Garden in the second round. Boston stunned the Cavs in a perplexing series that included an incensed Dan Gilbert publicly chiding his team before they were eliminated.

  “Our entire franchise has done everything in its power to put all of our players, and its coaching staff, in the best possible position to execute when it counts,” Gilbert told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “The last two home playoff losses, and the manner in which we lost these games, does not come close to being anywhere near the high expectations all of us have of our organization.”

  Gilbert said that after an embarrassing 120–88 loss to the Celtics in Game 5 at home when James was booed off his own floor in what was ultimately his final home game, although no one knew it at the time. But looking back now, it was clearly the beginning of the end. He scored fifteen points but shot just three of fourteen and seemed disengaged. In Game 6, James pulled off a triple-double—twenty-seven points, nineteen rebounds, and ten assists—but he also turned the ball over nine times and the Cavs stumbled quietly into the Boston night. Down nine in the final minute, with coach Mike Brown imploring someone to foul to stop the clock, no one did. The five on the floor resigned themselves to the fact the season was suddenly, stunningly over. The Cavs lost to the Celtics, 94–85, and James tore off his Cavs jersey before reaching the locker room for an ominous press conference.

  Three times during a seven-minute postgame interview, James used the phrase “my team.” Only he wasn’t talking about his Cavs teammates or Gilbert or Danny Ferry or coach Mike Brown or anyone else within the organization. Now, for the first time, he was talking about his close friends and his agent, Leon Rose.

  As James was transitioning into free agency, I was transitioning into the role of Cavs beat writer for the Akron Beacon Journal. My first night working for the Beacon was James’s final home game against the Celtics, when he was booed off the floor. In other words, I showed up and all hell broke loose within the franchise.

  This profession has taken me to thirty-one states, Canada, and South America. It has also forced me to cancel dinners, miss birthdays, and alter vacation plans. The schedule of an NBA beat writer is gruesome and unrelenting. Rarely are we in one city for more than a day or so and rarely are we home more than four days at a time. It’s always home for two days, gone for three, home for four, gone for six. It’s hard on marriages; it’s particularly hard on children.

  Not that I’m complaining. I’ve made two trips to the White House, tagged along for a round of golf with Byron Scott (while mocking his purple and gold Lakers driver), and stalked Dan Gilbert’s private jet to the tarmac. I’ve driven through the night in a rental car from Cincinnati to Charlotte and nearly ran out of gas in the middle of Kentucky bluegrass just for the possibility Andrew Bynum might play in a preseason game the next night. He didn’t. I’ve snuck into parking garages and unknowingly broken into a private airport. I’ve written millions of words on thousands of games. All part of the job, this beautiful, wretched, privileged, cursed job of flying around the country to watch grown men dribble. Only in America.

  —

  Back in the summer of 2006, James signed an extension with the Cavs that would allow him to become a free agent in the summer of 2010. He was entitled to sign for an additional five years but worked his contract so he could become a free agent after three seasons beyond his rookie deal. It was all part of his plan to enter free agency earlier, when he was entitled to a bigger slice of the salary cap.

  In hindsight, the shorter contract placed a ticking clock on the franchise. Despite James’s growing into the league’s best player and winning two Most Valuable Player awards, one superstar isn’t enough to win in the modern NBA. The Cavs’ annual collection of trade-deadline deals and a couple of crucial misses on draft picks did not produce a winning formula.

  Essentially, the Cavs scrambled for seven years to properly surround James with enough talent to win. Remember, they gutted the team his senior year of high school, trading their three leading scorers from the year before, just to be in position to draft him. Now that they had him, they had nothing to put around him. They missed the playoffs James’s rookie year and then botched the contract of promising power forward Carlos Boozer, allowing him to leave through free agency when they still owned his rights. They used the tenth pick in the draft—their last lottery pick during the James era—on Oregon small forward Luke Jackson. The pick made sense; Jackson averaged 21.2 points his last year with the Ducks and shot 44 percent from the three-point line. But he had two herniated discs in his back during his rookie year, an omen of things to come. Jackson played just forty-six games for the Cavs and was gone after two years. He was out of the NBA after two more, injuries derailing a once-promising career.

  Gilbert spent $375 million to buy the Cavs in 2005 during James’s second season. They were 31-24 on March 1 but collapsed over the final six weeks and finished 42-40. They lost a tiebreaker for the final playoff spot, meaning James was 0 for 2 on making the playoffs. Gilbert fired coach Paul Silas before the ink was dry on his purchasing papers. General manager Jim Paxson was fired after the season. Gilbert replaced them with Danny Ferry as GM and Mike Brown as head coach.

  In five years together, Gilbert, Ferry, and Brown guided a flawed roster to the top of the Eastern Conference. James dragged a supporting cast of Sasha Pavlović, Drew Gooden, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and Larry Hughes to the NBA Finals, where they were swept by Tim Duncan and the Spurs. Always hearing that clock ticking above him, Ferry traded for aging stars like Shaquille O’Neal and Antawn Jamison in an effort to get James more help. And it sort of worked, at least during the regular season. The Cavs won sixty-six games during the 2008–09 season but were upset by the Orlando Magic in the conference finals. They won sixty-one games during the regular season in 2009–10, James’s last season under contract, but that ended in bitter defeat to the Celtics. The Cavs were very clearly trending in the wrong direction in the playoffs, and now James was sitting at a podium inside the Garden talking about free agency.

  “It’s all about winning for me,” James said after getting eliminated by the Celtics in 2010. “I think the Cavs are committed to doing that, but at the same time, I’ve given myself options to this point. Me and my team have a game plan we’re going to execute and we’ll see where we’re going to be at.”

  The Cavs went into scramble mode. Gilbert never really wanted to fire Brown, but no one could get answers from James about what he wanted. Gilbert believed sacrificing Brown and his simplistic offensive schemes would appeal to James, who at times hinted he wanted to play in a more up-tempo style. On May 25, 2010, less than two weeks after a bitter end to the seaso
n, Gilbert fired the first full-time head coach he’d hired. Ferry disagreed with the decision to fire Brown, and his relationship with Gilbert had already become untenable. Ferry left the franchise when his contract expired a few days later.

  —

  The shocking announcement was made on June 4, 2010. I will always remember the day Ferry walked away because it was also the day my son AJ was born. My wife, Alessia, was in her hospital room awaiting her C-section when my phone buzzed. Ferry was leaving; conference call in an hour. I frantically texted and e-mailed my boss and Cavs people trying to coordinate who would handle the call for the Beacon Journal, my employer at the time. It certainly couldn’t be me. My son was coming, and as the doctor and nurses wheeled my wife into the operating room, I trailed behind on my phone. “You’re not really doing this, are you?” Alessia hollered with her head tilted back in my direction, although she couldn’t turn it far enough to actually see me. “You’re not really working on the day I’m giving you a child?!”

  (Ferry returned to the San Antonio Spurs as an assistant after leaving Cleveland. I told him about the delivery debacle the next time I saw him, and he got a good laugh out of it. “Sorry,” he said. “Did you name him Asshole for me?”)

  With his coach gone, a rookie GM in Chris Grant, and the fate of his superstar hanging in the balance, Gilbert needed a new head coach. Being a Michigan State graduate, he aggressively pursued the Spartans’ Tom Izzo. The interest in the Cavs’ coaching search was insatiable and the media scrutiny was at an all-time high. Everyone wanted to know when Izzo was coming to town and reporters did their best to find out—while the Cavs did their best to cover their tracks. On the day Izzo was scheduled to visit, they had planes scattered across Michigan and Ohio. Gilbert was on a plane landing at Burke Lakefront Airport. Izzo was supposed to land there, too, but when the Cavs caught wind of all the media waiting for them at Burke, they rerouted Izzo’s plane to little-used Cuyahoga County Airport.

  I tracked the tail number of one of the planes Gilbert was using to Burke. I called my sister-in-law, Luciana, who was at my house visiting following the birth of AJ, and told her I was deputizing her to be a reporter for a day. She needed to grab her camera and get to Burke immediately if not sooner. I drove through an open gate and began looking for Gilbert’s plane. There was a red button with a sign that read PRESS FOR ASSISTANCE. I certainly needed assistance, so I pressed the button and told the man on the intercom, “I’m looking for a plane that’s supposed to be leaving in twenty minutes.”

  “Come on back,” he said as the gate buzzed. “We’ll help you find it.”

  Great! Just what I needed. After wandering around the tarmac for a few minutes, I found the plane tucked behind a building that served as sort of a boarding gate/waiting room for passengers. But there was another problem: Luciana struggled following my directions. The gate I had driven through was apparently designed to keep people like me out. While the rest of the media were where they were supposed to be, behind a fence, I had inadvertently trespassed and the gate was now closed. Luciana couldn’t get back to me. But when another driver pulled up, the gate opened and she followed in behind. We sat inside the holding room for nearly an hour waiting for someone to arrive. Izzo? Gilbert? Grant? I thought it was Izzo’s plane, but I couldn’t be certain. My boss called during the ordeal and asked where I was. “Standing next to the plane,” I said, and he howled.

  After an hour of waiting, a black SUV with tinted windows drove right to the plane. Gilbert emerged from the back seat with his assistant and I told Luciana to start snapping pictures as quickly as she could. In a flash, Gilbert was out of the car and onto the plane. His driver spotted me and asked if I needed help. “No, I’m good,” I told him, and he said I wasn’t allowed to be back there. When airport personnel found out who I was—hey, they never asked—they told me I had to leave.

  Disappointed that I had stalked the wrong plane and come up empty, I was sitting in rush-hour traffic on East Ninth Street in downtown Cleveland when my cell phone rang. It was a source from Michigan State. The school was holding a rally for Izzo on campus that evening if I could get there. No one was sure yet when Izzo was returning from Cleveland or if he would speak at the rally, but there was a chance. That was enough for me.

  It takes at least three and a half hours to drive from downtown Cleveland to East Lansing even without heavy traffic. It was going to be tight. I called my wife and told her I wasn’t coming home, that I had to drive to Michigan to try to catch Izzo. She had planned a family dinner for that evening with both sets of parents to celebrate the new baby, but I wasn’t going to make it. I hung up and dictated part of a story to the desk while blazing a trail west on the Ohio Turnpike and north on I-75. I spoke to some students who were holding candles and had made signs pleading for Izzo to stay and soon realized East Lansing and Cleveland had a lot in common. The biggest stars of their cities, the icons who served as the sports lifeblood, were tempted to leave while the fans begged them to stay.

  Izzo claimed to be intrigued by the NBA and Gilbert’s pen never runs out of ink, so the size of the paycheck wasn’t an issue. But Izzo was a god on campus. He wasn’t going to throw away immortality just to be another face in the NBA, and he certainly wasn’t going to Cleveland without assurance that James was coming back. Izzo, however, had about as much luck reaching James as the Cavs did. James wasn’t talking to anyone. Izzo had to make the decision on his own, which ultimately made it an easy choice. Izzo stayed put.

  Knowing how former players appealed to James, they pursued Brian Shaw and Byron Scott, eventually settling on Scott, the former Showtime Laker and three-time NBA champion. Scott believed he had a plan to reel in James, telling ownership they had to be firm with him. Scott had a long history of clashing with his former stars, including J. R. Smith and Baron Davis. The relationship with Davis grew so toxic during their time together in New Orleans that Scott banned Davis’s personal trainer from the locker room. Davis eventually came around, however, apologizing to Scott years after they split for the way he behaved when they were together.

  Now Scott was hoping for the chance to coach James, and was just cocky (crazy?) enough to take the job without a commitment that James was returning. The Cavs announced Scott’s hiring in the early hours of July 2, right around the start of free agency. James’s free agent meetings during the summer of 2010 created three of the most bizarre, surreal days in NBA history. One by one, some of the most powerful men in the NBA—and pop culture—filed into his LRMR offices (named after LeBron and his closest friends, Rich Paul, Maverick Carter, and Randy Mims) in the IMG building in downtown Cleveland to pitch him on why he should join their team. The New York Knicks decimated their roster and sat on cap space for two years on the off chance James felt like moving to Manhattan. The New Jersey Nets led off the meetings with billionaire owner Mikhail Prokhorov and Jay Z, and the Chicago Bulls closed them on day three. In between were the Miami Heat, the Los Angeles Clippers, and yes, the Cavs.

  Gilbert and the Cavs staff went to great lengths to remind James this was his home. They rented billboards throughout Cleveland with HOME sprawled across them. Hundreds of fans formed a human tunnel down East Ninth Street, holding HOME signs and cheering wildly as James drove by. They tossed white powder into the air, mimicking James’s old pregame ritual, and pleaded for their star to stay just as Michigan State fans had held a vigil for Izzo. Some of the meetings between James and prospective teams lasted more than two hours, and usually the executives met with the media after, and all said the same things: The meeting went well and they were optimistic they could land him. The Cavs’ presentation was a bit shorter. It only lasted about ninety minutes, and afterward Grant had to address the media. Only one problem: No one could get the door open. As the gathered crowd of reporters chuckled outside, Grant and Carper waited for a building employee to arrive with a key card to get the door open. Grant eventually made it outside and addressed reporter
s for one minute without taking questions.

  “Obviously we know LeBron well. I would characterize it as positive,” Grant said of the meeting. “We think it’s pretty incredible that LeBron chose to have these meetings here in Cleveland, at his home.”

  There’s that word again. Home. Part of the Cavs’ pitch was a playful cartoon featuring James and some of his teammates cracking inside jokes. More importantly, however, the Cavs had news for him. They had reached an agreement with the Toronto Raptors on a sign-and-trade for Chris Bosh. Then Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo knew Bosh wasn’t returning and was willing to talk to just about any team in the league in an effort to recoup value for their departing star. Bosh was a five-time All-Star just entering his prime. He represented the type of player the Cavs had desperately pursued to pair with James but never could get. Even now, in their final days, they still couldn’t close this kind of deal. The Cavs couldn’t reach Bosh to gauge his interest in coming to Cleveland, so they appealed to James. If you can get Bosh to come here, they told him, the deal is already done. James sat back in his chair. “Man, I don’t know him,” he said.

  On the day of The Decision, James attended his Nike camp at the University of Akron. The Cavs could feel him slipping away, so Scott went to the school hoping for one last opportunity to meet with him. But he couldn’t get close. Scott just watched James scrimmage with a number of Cavs players for about an hour before leaving. “I’m always hopeful,” Scott said on his way out of the gym.