by Jason Lloyd
Hell, James said as much on his way out the door. Less than a week after The Decision, when the matches were still scorched on the sidewalks outside the Q and the sulfur from the burning jerseys was still wafting down East Ninth Street in downtown Cleveland, James told GQ writer J. R. Moehringer he was open to playing again in Cleveland someday.
“If there was an opportunity for me to return,” James said in July 2010, “and those fans welcome me back, that’d be a great story.”
So that’s exactly where Grant aimed. In the weeks, months, and years following James’s departure, Grant and the front office formulated a bold strategy: make their team appealing enough to bring him back at some point—perhaps as soon as 2014. His first seven years in Cleveland had been marred by a roster of quick fixes thrown together under the threat of his imminent departure. Now that he was gone, they could take their time on a rebuild. They had four years to get it right.
“From the time we were building it, we always talked about how there was a chance he would come back,” Griffin said. “And Chris did a good job of maintaining the relationship with Rich Paul. I got to know Rich pretty well during that time. It was always a thought. The guiding principle was get elite, high-valued assets, and that’s what we did.”
The roster was purged immediately. Zydrunas Ilgauskas followed James to Miami and Shaquille O’Neal left in free agency. O’Neal had been acquired prior to James’s final season in Cleveland when the Cavs were preparing for another conference finals showdown with Dwight Howard and the Orlando Magic. Except they never even got there. They were eliminated by the Celtics one round shy of the Magic. Without James, there was no need for an aging, expensive, well-past-his-prime superstar like O’Neal. The only players they wanted to keep were Daniel Gibson and Anderson Varejao. Everyone else had a sticker price.
As the start of the first season without James approached, players did their best to keep a stiff upper lip when talking about him, but everyone understood the situation. Mo Williams, who believed he was one of James’s closest friends on the Cavs, very publicly endured all five stages of grief in the days, weeks, and months after James left. In the hours after The Decision, Williams wrote on his Twitter account, “I still can’t believe he’s gone” (denial), “We all angry, mad” (anger), and “Let’s pray he have a change of heart 2night” (bargaining). In the days before training camp began, Williams said, “This has been the worst time of my life. Dealing with family issues and everything with the team has been very hard” (depression). Finally, the day before training camp began, Williams did his best to move on from James without saying he was “over” James’s leaving (acceptance).
“That’s a big word, if that makes sense. I think at some point you’ve just gotta turn the corner,” Williams said. “You’re walking down this long hall. Everyone has been to high school before. You’re in this classroom all the way down the hall and you gotta get all the way to the other side of the hall. It looks like this hall is so long, but once you turn the corner, you can’t see that hall anymore. Right now today, we’re turning that corner going to our next classroom. And we can’t see nothing but forward now. There’s no LeBron in this building. Whether we believe it or not, he’s not coming back. This is who we’ve got. This is what we’ve got. I don’t see the big TNT trailers, the ESPN trailers. I see you though. This is what we’ve got. This is the hand we’re dealt and we have to play the best we can.”
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The city of Cleveland wasn’t thinking about 2014 yet. They were focused on the present, and the one game that everyone in Cleveland badly, badly wanted the Cavs to win. From the time James flew to Miami covered by the darkness of night on July 8, 2010, the entire city of Cleveland prepared for his return on December 2, 2010, when the Heat would play the Cavs in Cleveland for the first time. James still recalls the date from memory because it was unlike any scene ever witnessed in NBA history.
“It was, uh, pretty hostile,” James recalls now with a smile.
Williams arrived for work that morning wearing a Boston Red Sox jacket. He’d never worn that jacket on any other day that entire season, but he wore it on the day his former friend—a Yankees fan—was back in town.
Interest in the game reached historic levels for a random regular-season game in December. The media requests were on the level of an Eastern Conference finals game, which created a logistical nightmare for the Cavs. For the playoffs, rows of seats are blocked off for media. But this was a regular-season game and those seats had been sold long ago. A number of media members were granted credentials but didn’t have a seat in the arena bowl. They had to watch the game on televisions from the workroom or the dining room.
The Heat’s plane struggled just getting into Cleveland. Miami hosted Detroit the night before James’s big return, creating a lengthy flight prior to the back-to-back. The charter flight didn’t land at Cleveland Hopkins airport until two thirty A.M. on December 2 and the flight crew reported a wing “flap issue” as the plane was on its approach. The crew alerted air traffic control, which dispatched two fire trucks to the runway—standard procedure for such events. But the plane landed without incident. It was a fitting start to a volatile twenty-four hours in Cleveland.
Cavs officials and owner Dan Gilbert begged fans to be on their best behavior when James returned. Booing was fine and so were some signs, but there was a fear within the organization that random fans might storm the court during the game. After all, the hatred for James—whom fans viewed as a traitor for deserting his homeland—had reached levels never before seen in sports.
The Heat held a walk-through the afternoon of the game at the Ritz-Carlton hotel that lasted a little more than an hour. Ilgauskas, the former fan favorite who had spent thirteen years in Cleveland and remains the franchise’s all-time leader in games played (one of the few records James doesn’t have), was the first player to emerge from the ballroom. Ilgauskas was close with James and followed him to Miami in hopes of winning a championship before he retired. He recognized some friendly faces and shook a few hands after exiting the ballroom. He eventually retreated to his room before James appeared outside the ballroom.
“Time for me to get some sleep,” James said to no one in particular, but representatives from Nike and James’s business partner Randy Mims were waiting on him for an impromptu meeting in the hotel lounge. The meeting lasted about an hour and James finally retreated to his room around three thirty P.M. The first bus departed the hotel for the arena at five fifteen. On his way out of the hotel lobby, James was asked by a former acquaintance if he’d be ready for the storm that awaited him inside his former home. “Yes, sir, I will be,” James replied confidently. “I will be.”
A few hours later, James entered the arena wearing sunglasses, a black leather jacket with TIME TO ROLL stitched across the back, and silver headphones over his black stocking cap. He gnawed on a stick of gum nervously as more than fifty media members stared at him in eerie silence while soothing Christmas music drifting out of the speakers in the background was ignored. James took seventy-three steps from security, down the hallway that once had been adorned with his pictures, and into the visiting locker room. The Cavs had waited until the morning of the first home game to pull down the life-sized images of James that decorated the hallways outside the locker room. The billboard-sized images had been replaced with a couple of tasteful square pictures of James that listed his accomplishments.
As James marched down the hallway that first night back, he slowed only to speak with sideline reporter Craig Sager, and then later to acknowledge a familiar face he recognized near the Cavs’ locker room. James pointed briefly, then disappeared into the visitor’s locker room. When he emerged, he was dressed head to toe in the Heat’s red and black colors.
The league provided extra security personnel to flank the tunnels leading to the court and surround James throughout the night. The visiting locker room at the Q is awkwardly shaped an
d includes an alcove at the far end, near the door to the trainer’s room, that holds nine lockers. But for this night, the Heat cordoned off the entire alcove for James and planted security personnel in front of him so not even the reporters had access to him. As the Heat took the court for pregame warm-ups, it was clear the guards lining the court had been given zero-tolerance instructions. I was near the tunnel filming James’s jog onto the court when a fan lunged over my shoulder just to point at James and yell obscenities at him. He was immediately spotted by the league’s security team and ejected. He never touched James; he merely pointed and yelled in his direction. Gone.
Bud Hagy was one season ticket holder I spoke to in the days prior to the game. Hagy had two seats located four rows behind the visitor’s bench. He was offered $10,000 for the seats. He declined. He had a message he wanted to deliver to James himself: “Kiss my ass!” That would hardly be the worst thing James heard that night.
The team’s mascot, Moondog, was wearing a bulletproof vest when he took the floor for the national anthem and opening introductions. One by one, the Cavs marched out a pitiful list of the closest thing Cleveland had to celebrities. It was meant as a power play by Gilbert, who had painstakingly rounded up the names and planned their entrance, but it came off as sad and depressing as Browns players Josh Cribbs and Shaun Rogers, Indians players Travis Hafner and Jensen Lewis, Browns legend Bernie Kosar, and comedian Drew Carey all marched to their courtside seats in a single-file line, each wearing his own personalized Cavs jersey as the sellout crowd roared. Gilbert saved his own appearance for last. The scoreboard camera filmed Gilbert, who was hailed as a hero by fans for the scathing letter he wrote the night James vanished, walking to his seat.
The explosion of the home crowd was so loud that it caught James’s attention. When he looked up and saw Gilbert’s face on the scoreboard, James simply nodded his head and tapped his feet. He marched down the line, barking instructions at his Miami teammates and pumping his fists in excitement as the cheers kept cascading down for Gilbert in waves. It was ultimately the fans’ last chance to cheer.
James dominated his former team. He walked over to the home bench—the bench he’d sat on for seven years—and talked trash to his former teammates, who were helpless to stop him. James heard chants of “Ak-ron hates you!” every time he went to the free-throw line, but he smiled widely through his mouth guard and played on. There was some pushing and shoving at times in the stands—a few brave souls actually arrived wearing James Heat jerseys—at least one arrest was made, and the Heat bench was peppered at times with nine-volt batteries thrown from the stands. It was reminiscent of the Dawg Pound at the old Browns Stadium, when opposing players were hit with batteries and dog bones every time they were backed up deep near their own end zone.
The only assault inside the Q, however, was the performance James dropped on his old teammates. James came looking to give out an ass beating and he did, particularly in the third quarter, when he scored twenty-four of his thirty-eight points. James was spectacular in the face of hatred and the Heat crushed the Cavs, 118–90. After the game, James again refused to apologize for leaving or for his handling of the event in the form of The Decision.
“I never regret any decision I make,” James said. “You just try to learn from some of the things in life. You try to handle situations the right way and you learn the next time. There’s not a clock to turn back and do it all over again. My intentions were on point. Maybe the execution was just a little off.”
That was the closest he came to an apology. The two teams departed in opposite directions that night. The experience galvanized the Heat, who won twelve straight and twenty-one of twenty-two before ultimately winning the East and advancing to the NBA Finals. The humiliating defeat, however, essentially ended the Cavs’ season. They plunged into history, losing twenty-six consecutive games at one point and thirty-six of thirty-seven. The twenty-six-game losing streak tied the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the longest in professional sports history. They went 0-15 in January, the first winless month in franchise history (minimum ten games). And yet, somehow, James and the Heat’s dropping a prison beating on them wasn’t the worst loss of the season.
Their humiliating 112–57 loss at the Lakers in January was the actual worst night of the season. The Cavs set franchise records for fewest points in a game and most lopsided loss. James and the Heat were in town to play the Los Angeles Clippers at Staples Center the next day and a giddy James tweeted, “Crazy. Karma is a b****. Gets you every time. It’s not good to wish bad on anybody. God sees everything!” (James, incidentally, sprained his ankle the next night against the Clippers and had to miss two games.) The Cavs’ purge had finally reached rock bottom.
“In thirteen years, I can honestly say I ain’t ever felt that embarrassed to be on the basketball court,” said Antawn Jamison, one of the few remaining respectable veterans. “It can’t get any worse than this. I don’t know how much of this I can take. This, by far, is rock bottom.”
Jamison was a two-time All-Star dealt to Cleveland from Washington at the trade deadline during James’s final year with the Cavs. He had arrived expecting to play with LeBron and Shaquille O’Neal while competing for a championship. Instead, he spent the final year of his contract playing next to guys like Samardo Samuels, Semih Erden, Jawad Williams, and Joey Graham—none of whom played in the NBA again.
Samuels missed a road trip to Toronto because he lost his passport during the NBA lockout. Manny Harris won a roster spot during training camp of his rookie year, then sabotaged his own career when he wore wet socks into a cryotherapy chamber on Nike’s campus and sustained severe freezer burn on his foot—despite warning signs not to wear wet clothing inside. He was ultimately released after one season. The Cavs’ roster was a collection of misfits and defective parts.
When it was over, when the smoke and rubble were all that remained of a brutally painful 19-63 season, Scott walked out of his office the day after the season ended wearing a CSI: Miami T-shirt in honor of his favorite television show. It was a fitting end to a catastrophic season given the autopsy it deserved and the man in Miami responsible for the organization’s demise. “I had a moment where I wanted to kill everybody on the team,” Scott said, laughing.
The main mission of the season was to lose as many games as possible and aggregate the best odds of winning the draft lottery and the number one overall pick. To that extent, the Cavs even screwed that up. It was much like in 2003, when they won two of their last three games to pull into a tie with the Denver Nuggets for the league’s worst mark. This time the Cavs won four of their last six games to pull ahead of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The burst allowed them to narrowly avoid becoming the first team in history to go from first to worst. No NBA team has ever plummeted to the worst record one year after enjoying the best, but the Cavs fell from a league-best sixty-one wins with James to nineteen without him. Their only saving grace was that the Timberwolves won just seventeen games. They entered the draft lottery with the second-best odds of winning the number one pick.
Unlike in 2003, however, this wasn’t considered a devastating blunder, because there was no LeBron James in the 2011 draft. In fact, there was nothing but uncertainty. Although all seemed hopeless at the time, the wheels of fortune were finally beginning to turn in the Cavs’ direction.
CHAPTER 4
Lottery, Luck, and Ping-Pong
The traditional way of building championship teams in the NBA is organically and through the draft, supplemented by trades and key free agent signings. The Lakers built a dynasty in the 1980s—with the help of former Cavs owner Ted Stepien—by selecting Magic Johnson in 1979, James Worthy in 1982 (thanks, Ted!), and A. C. Green in 1985. Add in key trades for an in-his-prime Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1975 and rookie Byron Scott in 1983, and the Lakers had enough firepower to rip off five championships in the 1980s. The same was true of the Celtics, who drafted Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Dan
ny Ainge within a four-year span to form the nucleus that won three championships in the 1980s.
The league changed in 1995 with the addition of rookie scale contracts and again in 1999 when the league adopted max salaries. Suddenly words such as mid-level exception and luxury tax became as important to championships as pure talent. Teams began dumping contracts and giving away valuable assets, such as draft picks, just to create cap space or get under the luxury tax. The most famous example of that happened with the Suns. Griffin was an assistant in their front office when they were forced to give away two first-round picks just to entice the Seattle SuperSonics to take Kurt Thomas’s contract. It was simply a cost-cutting move. Nothing more.
The Cavs, meanwhile, could never surround James with enough talent during his first reign in Cleveland to win a championship, in part because they missed on high draft picks the year before and after drafting him.
When James and Chris Bosh left for Pat Riley, Dwyane Wade, and the Miami Heat in 2010, they changed the way the league does business. Never before had two superstars, both in the prime of their careers, left their teams to join a third superstar in the prime of his. The 2011 lockout, which would loom over the 2011 draft, was in part a response to the Heat’s machinations to clear the cap space necessary to pull off such a daring move. Owners, including Gilbert, wanted to incentivize stars to stay with their current teams in an effort to make sure three players couldn’t join forces on one team ever again. Penalties were also stiffened for going over the cap and the league introduced a “repeat offender” status for owners who habitually pay luxury taxes.
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But all of this was still months away when the Cavs’ 2011 draft plan went into effect, the first significant step in the rebuilding process. Shortly before seven P.M. on May 17, 2011, nearly a full year after James left for Miami, Dan Gilbert accompanied his vice chairman, Jeff Cohen, to an elevator inside the winding hallways of the NBA Entertainment campus in Secaucus, New Jersey. Before they parted ways, Gilbert left Cohen with one final instruction: “Don’t come back with anything less than number one.”