The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  As for Lillard, Grant was so enamored with him that he sent a representative to Lillard’s private workout in Utah prior to the draft, even though the pick wouldn’t have made sense, due to Irving—between the two, the Cavs were fearful the team would be too small to guard anyone and neither player would be happy sharing the ball with the other. “He’ll be better than Knight,” Grant told me during the combine, referring to Brandon Knight, the second point guard off the board behind Irving the year before.

  With Beal gone and Lillard not deemed a viable option, the guard Grant and the Cavs kept coming back to was Syracuse sophomore Dion Waiters. He attended four high schools while growing up in a tough section of South Philadelphia—two of his cousins and his best friend were all shot to death within about a year. Yet Waiters remained a Philly street legend even though he never started a game in college.

  Waiters had attitude problems. He sulked at times and clashed with Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim so badly as a freshman that Boeheim thought he might transfer. Waiters was good enough to start, but Boeheim was being loyal to the upperclassmen guards in front of him. He kept telling Waiters he would have to wait his turn. Starter or not, Grant and Byron Scott loved Waiters’s playmaking ability. They thought he could attack the basket and still facilitate for others. Scott compared him to Heat superstar Dwyane Wade. There was only one problem: The Cavs never actually talked to Waiters.

  Grant and Trent Redden, the team’s director of college personnel, made countless trips to Syracuse to watch Waiters, to study how he interacted with teammates. Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins was one of Grant’s friends from high school. These are the ways the Cavs had to get their information because Waiters’s agent, Rob Pelinka, pulled him out of the combine. Pelinka said he had a promise from a team to draft him, but that team wasn’t Cleveland. Grant stressed throughout his first year as GM how important it was to sit down with these players and try to get to know them, but they never had that opportunity. They took him anyway. “We did an enormous amount of research,” Grant said. “Maybe more than we’ve ever done.”

  Scott watched film of Waiters at Syracuse. Every time he watched another highlight, he grew a little more impressed. Waiters had the same stocky build as Wade, the same ability to get to the basket, and a knack to create for others. After watching about fifteen tapes of Waiters, Scott had his answer. Much like with Tristan Thompson the year before, the Cavs shocked everyone by taking Waiters fourth overall.

  “He’s a pit bull,” Scott said. “This kid isn’t afraid of anyone.”

  With their second pick in the first round, the Cavs traded up to take North Carolina center Tyler Zeller. Within two years, the Cavs had selected four players in the first round. They had addressed every position in the draft except small forward—LeBron’s position. Now they had to put it all together, which proved much more difficult than they expected. Almost instantly, folks around Irving were upset the Cavs didn’t take Barnes. Waiters’s game never fit well alongside Irving, who was the superior player. They were two ball-dominant guards who kept getting in each other’s way. On top of that, Waiters had the alpha dog mentality and was constantly nipping at Irving. He couldn’t understand why Irving was the favored son. He accused Irving and Thompson of playing “buddy ball” during one heated confrontation in the locker room following a game in Minnesota and teammates eventually grew tired of him. Waiters was known for sulking, for always thinking he was a victim.

  Within a few months of Waiters’s rookie year, the Cavs realized the pairing wasn’t going to work and they were probably going to have to eventually trade him. That was fine in their minds because Waiters, in trade value, represented a different type of veteran piece if James returned. They could move Waiters when the time was right and get what they actually needed to fit around LeBron. For now, they endured a toxic locker room that lacked veteran leadership.

  The downfall to not signing any veteran free agents is that the locker room can turn into a preschool with the children constantly bickering. But Grant was concerned that bringing in a veteran who wasn’t going to play would do more harm than good to the locker room. The veterans they had those first couple of years, such as Anthony Parker and Antawn Jamison, weren’t the type of vocal leaders who would keep young players in line. Parker was well respected by his teammates, but Jamison was caught in purgatory after James left and was looking for any door that would get him out. Jamison announced after the final game of the season he was leaving; there may still be skid marks on the pavement from how quickly he bolted Cleveland. He didn’t even show up the next day for locker cleanout.

  Waiters averaged 14.7 points as a rookie, second only to Irving’s 22.5. James’s free agency was now just a year away, and Gilbert wasn’t seeing enough growth. He had gotten impatient with Scott, who always coached as if he had more time. Gilbert loves teams built around defense, yet the Cavs were abysmal defensively. They had the worst defensive field-goal percentage in the league and ranked near the bottom in most all defensive categories. The Nuggets traveled to Cleveland in February 2012 and shot 50 percent from the floor to end the Cavs’ brief three-game winning streak. “We have made good progress recently,” Gilbert wrote on his Twitter account after the game, “but when the Cleveland Cavaliers arrive back to the top tier of the NBA we will be a DEFENSIVE 1st team.” Even before he sent that tweet, Gilbert had made up his mind. He was firing Scott at the end of the season. That was made apparent to me during All-Star Weekend in Houston, when a conversation with Gilbert prior to All-Star Saturday Night seemed to make it clear ownership was unhappy with the coach and Scott was in the hot seat.

  Meanwhile, a reunion with James seemed to be inching closer. The Heat visited in late March riding a twenty-three-game winning streak and suddenly more James jerseys were resurfacing inside the Q. Police, however, still swept the arena before James’s games with a bomb-sniffing dog.

  “Is this standard for every game?” I asked one officer.

  “Nope,” he said. “Only for that asshole.”

  He was still booed, but each return brought fewer boos and more cheers. One James superfan bragged all day on social media that he was going to storm the court—and he did—while wearing a homemade white T-shirt with WE MISS YOU scribbled on the front in black Magic Marker and 2014 COME BACK written out across the back. James tapped him on the head as the fan was led off the floor by security. Sentiment toward James was clearly changing.

  Gilbert tweeted before the game, “Cleveland Cavaliers young talent makes our future very bright. Clearly, LeBron’s is as well. Time for everyone to focus on the road ahead.” It was subtle and poignant, two characteristics not always attributed to an owner whose tachometer typically ran in the red. Forget about an olive branch; this felt like Gilbert digging up the entire olive tree and planting it in James’s yard.

  With every trip Miami made back to Cleveland, with every rumor surfacing that James could return in 2014, the cheers for James grew a little louder. Suddenly, 2014 was inching closer and closer, but the Cavs were still a disaster on the court. They actually led the Heat that night 67–40 and maintained a twenty-point lead with 3:28 left in the third quarter, but James and Shane Battier had the game tied within five minutes. The Heat ultimately won 98–95. A week later, while playing without both Irving and Waiters, the Cavs blew a fourteen-point lead to the Celtics in the game’s final eight minutes. They ended the night missing eight of their last nine shots and committing three turnovers, while Scott took three time-outs home with him rather than calling one prior to the final possession.

  Shaun Livingston ended the night with a miss from the elbow, just inside the lane where the free-throw line meets the lane line. It was a good look, but Livingston simply missed the shot. Scott said the next day that if Irving was in the game, he preferred to let him make a play before the defense could get set. But in that case, with Irving out nursing an injury, he should’ve called a time-out and drawn something
up. “The biggest thing [with calling a time-out] is you give them a chance to set up on defense, and sometimes just having that spontaneity, just letting guys go, is sometimes the best thing to do,” Scott said the next day. “But sometimes with the group we have now, it might not be the best thing to do. That’s one of the things I probably learned. We get in that situation in any other game, maybe I’ll just go ahead and burn that one and set up something especially for that person to try to get a better shot.”

  By that point, it was too late. Gilbert’s mind was already made up. Aside from the time-out issues, he didn’t like the way Scott was subbing Irving in and out of the game and he really didn’t like the way the defense showed no progress. No one within the organization felt like Irving was being held accountable with his attitude. He was young and immature and acting like it, but he wasn’t learning how to be a professional. When Scott grew irritated with his starters in a late-season loss at Philadelphia, he pulled all of them except Irving. That infuriated the upper levels of the organization, who felt like that sent the wrong message to Irving and the rest of the team. It became clear to me during All-Star Weekend that Gilbert was unhappy with Scott. It was all but confirmed for me during the final home game that he was getting fired.

  The last game of the season was at Charlotte. I called Byron at his hotel that afternoon and asked if he had any idea what was coming the next day. He said no, that when he was fired at each of his two previous jobs he suspected it. This time, however, he had gotten no indication it was coming. I told him to be prepared, because he was going to be fired the next morning. The Cavs lost to the Bobcats that night to end the season 24-58, the third-worst record in the NBA. Scott indeed was fired the next morning. With James’s free agency now only fourteen months away, it was time for the Cavs to start winning. Figuring out how to get Irving and Waiters, the team’s two best players, to learn how to play together became someone else’s problem.

  CHAPTER 6

  Old Faces, New Mistakes

  The firing of Mike Brown in 2010 had been difficult on everyone in the organization, particularly Chris Grant. The two had been friends since their days together at the University of San Diego. They played together on the basketball team for one season and immediately became close friends. They attended each other’s wedding and held each other’s children as newborns. In college, however, they were a modern-day Felix and Oscar. Brown was the point guard and studious son of a military man, Grant the bruising six-foot-ten, fun-loving prankster who went out of his way to piss off head coach Hank Egan, the man who in later years became Brown’s most trusted assistant coach in Cleveland.

  “Chris was a good rebounder and a good defender, a smart player, but he was always a practical joker,” said Egan. “He kept the team light and loose and tried to drive me crazy every chance he could. And he did a hell of a job with it.”

  Grant knew Egan liked to pick up stray pennies and place them in his shoe for good luck, so on road trips, Grant broke into his coach’s hotel room and scattered hundreds of pennies across the floor. When Egan was ready to throw the ball up one day to begin practice, Grant (only a freshman at the time) wiped the sweat off his own face using his coach’s shirt. He even went out of his way to lower his shoulder and run over Egan during practice. “Chris had no couth,” Brown said, laughing. “He didn’t care or think twice about it. He’d take his shoulder and run right into [Egan] and just kept playing like nothing happened. Coach Egan, to say the least, knew to get out of his way.”

  Since neither Grant nor Gilbert had really wanted Brown fired the first time, pursuing him again after Scott was fired didn’t take much convincing on either side. Brown had been hired and fired by the Lakers while Scott was in Cleveland. Danny Ferry, meanwhile, was now the general manager in Atlanta and equally interested in reuniting with Brown. Knowing there was competition for him, Grant and Gilbert moved quickly. That was frustrating for Griffin, who was pushing for the team to look at Butler coach Brad Stevens—the rising star in the college ranks. Grant was leery of college coaches in general because few have ever made the transition to the NBA successfully, and Stevens was never really considered for the job. Three months later, Stevens was hired as the Celtics’ head coach. Other names were considered—Grant sent Griffin and Redden on a scouting mission to Memphis late in the season to check out Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins, who everyone knew was soon going to be fired.

  Brown was always the primary target, though, and after the obligatory call to Phil Jackson to see if he wanted to coach again (he didn’t), the team moved quickly to finish the deal with Brown. Less than a week after Scott was fired, Brown met with top Cavs officials near Gilbert’s Michigan home. By the end of the night, the framework of the deal was in place. Brown was named the head coach again on April 24, 2013. He received a five-year deal worth more than $20 million, and at the introductory news conference, Gilbert admitted firing Brown the first time was a mistake.

  “For sure it was a mistake,” Gilbert said. “That summer . . . was a unique time for us as a franchise, there was a lot of uncertainty on all levels. We’re very happy that we get to rectify any position we took back then by Mike being available right now. Maybe it’s meant to be here. We’re very excited about today and the future.”

  Gilbert’s admitting to a mistake was important. It showed LeBron and his inner circle that he would accept accountability when he erred. At some point, if James was ever going to return to Cleveland, Gilbert needed to apologize for writing the Letter. Admitting a mistake with Brown was the first small step. And although their time together had seemed strained near the end, James spoke fondly of Brown after he went to Miami and credited his former coach with teaching him the importance of defense. Grant received assurances that James would have no problem playing for Brown again should he elect to return to Cleveland.

  Brown, meanwhile, thought Grant was crazy when he first heard the idea of wooing James back to Cleveland.

  “At first I didn’t believe it. It was kind of far-fetched,” Brown said. “As time went on and you see some of the dominos fall, you relize, ‘You know what? Yeah, he has a plan and he’s been working on this for years. This could really happen.’ So then there’s more excitement than anything elese. That’s exactly what the organization needed and what the city needed. It was the right time for him to leave and the right time for him to come back. I was excited for the plan.”

  But the pressure to improve the roster was mounting. James was in the business of winning championships, not steering rebuilding projects. If they were going to have any shot at getting him back in the summer of 2014, Gilbert believed the Cavs needed to start winning. That plan began with bringing back Brown, whose teams made the playoffs every year he was the head coach. That quickly became the expectation again, particularly after the Cavs managed to win the lottery for the second time in three years. They couldn’t win games on the court, but they couldn’t stop winning off it.

  Nick Gilbert, Dan’s son, represented the Cavs onstage each of the first three years the team was in the lottery. He snagged the number one pick in two of the three years. The television studio at NBA Entertainment erupted in cheers when the Cavs were victorious again. They jumped from number three to claim the top pick and they also held the number nineteen pick in the first round. With Brown back, a young nucleus, and another number one pick coming, Gilbert was certain the Cavs were postseason bound.

  “We were hoping regardless of what pick we got that this would be our last lottery,” Dan Gilbert said the night the Cavs won the top spot again. “We thought originally after everything had to be reset that it would be a three-year process. You never know, it could be four. We thought three years, but having number one and nineteen, we’ve got a pretty good chance of this being the last one for a while.”

  There was only one problem: There was no one worth choosing first overall. The critics who thought the 2011 draft headlined by Irving was bad ran out of th
e burning building screaming and crying at the choices in ’13. One opposing front-office executive said the draft was full of, at best, guys who would generally go sixth or seventh overall in a typical draft year. Scouts called it the worst draft in at least a decade and likely one of the worst ever. “You have to be fortunate enough to have the first pick in the right pool. We went into that lottery hoping to God we didn’t get number one,” Griffin said. “We literally felt like we were choosing from the least of all bad options. It was the best of a bad option. And that’s why we wanted to trade down.”

  Grant tried trading the pick but couldn’t find any takers. It’s rare for the top overall pick to be traded. The Magic dealt top pick Chris Webber to the Warriors in 1993 and received the third overall pick in that draft and three future first rounders just to move up two spots. The Cavs weren’t going to command anywhere near that type of value in this draft because no one else liked it, either. The Magic, drafting second, offered only a second-round pick to move up one spot. Grant was trying to get the traditional trade value out of the top pick, only everyone knew this wasn’t a normal year. There was no Chris Webber or Shaquille O’Neal or LeBron James or Anthony Davis or Kyrie Irving or John Wall. There didn’t even seem to be a Kenyon Martin, who had gone number one overall in a similarly feeble 2000 draft class. Martin played fifteen seasons and made an All-Star team. It was debatable whether there was an All-Star to be found in this group.

  That made the process of building their draft board excruciatingly stressful. There was no consensus number one pick. Nerlens Noel was widely considered the top prospect, but he was coming off a torn ACL and the Cavs had never been overly impressed. He was too skinny, too limited offensively, and going to miss most (or all) of what should have been his rookie season rehabbing. All those years of stockpiling draft picks were over. It was time to start winning. Noel was eliminated from the conversation early on.