by Jason Lloyd
“The night he left with The Decision, people in here were running into the streets crying and screaming,” Harry Buffalo general manager Caitlin Cassidy said. “When he announced he was coming back, people did not go back to work. They immediately started drinking like it was a holiday. People left work and came in. You couldn’t move in here. People were running to the Q screaming with signs. It was really cool.”
It felt as if Cleveland had already won a championship. In a sense, it had. The city that had been rejected by so many and neglected for so long was suddenly wanted again.
—
Griffin was in his office at Cleveland Clinic Courts tying up some last-minute work in free agency. The rest of his staff was already in Las Vegas. He was left behind with only a few lower-level folks, the analytics minds and young guys just breaking into the business. Griffin had the television on in his office when Nate Forbes, one of Gilbert’s partners both in business and with the team, called to tell him what was happening. Rich Paul called Gilbert, then Forbes, who quickly called Griffin.
“The king is coming home,” Forbes told Griffin just as ESPN was breaking in with the story. Griffin threw himself down on the floor, celebrating on his hands and knees. “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. It was literally sheer joy and then sheer panic all at one time.”
Ownership threw a celebratory dinner bash that weekend in Las Vegas, but Griffin missed the dinner. His wife, Meredith, landed in time to celebrate. But Griffin flew later in the day and missed everything.
—
Blatt was holding one of his first Summer League practices in Vegas that Friday morning. He was putting Bennett and Wiggins through drills when a buzz filled the gym. When the greatest player in the game today and one of the five greatest of all time decides to come home, it doesn’t take long for word to travel. Griffin called two of his top assistants, Trent Redden and Koby Altman, and told them James was coming back.
As news spread through the gym, Blatt calmly walked over to Tad Carper, the team’s vice president of communications, and asked if it was true. Carper said yes. “I kind of feel like I’m jumping from mountaintop to mountaintop,” Blatt said.
—
Shortly after the announcement, James flew to Brazil and watched World Cup soccer with his old-and-now-new-again teammate Anderson Varejao. When he returned, he filmed a movie in New York. He didn’t address the media or general public until a rally in early August at InfoCision Stadium, the football home of the University of Akron Zips. Thirty thousand people filled the stadium to welcome LeBron back. Grammy nominee Skylar Grey flew in to sing her hit song “Coming Home.” Grey cowrote the song in 2010—the year James departed. It was as if the song had been written with him in mind.
I know my kingdom awaits and they’ve forgiven my mistakes
I’m coming home, I’m coming home
Grey’s chorus echoed throughout the stadium as the sun set and camera flashes spotted the Ohio dusk. James and his family circled the track around the football field as the crowd roared. Finally, he took the stage, held his head in amazement at the scene in front of him, and spoke for twenty minutes. He insisted the basketball aspect was a very small piece in all of this. He was coming back to make a difference in Northeast Ohio. He meant it. Even while he was playing for Miami, James supported his hometown and region by purchasing computers and other equipment for Akron schools. He geared initiatives toward Akron’s at-risk youth with a Wheels for Education program (grades three through five) and his I PROMISE network (grades six and up) beginning in 2011, programs he would expand even further after he returned.
“I’m gonna do what makes my city and my state happy,” James told the InfoCision Stadium crowd. “That’s why I came back. I love you. I’m back.”
—
James dropped the mic and walked off the stage as fireworks filled the Akron night sky. The king was back on his throne, but the real fireworks were only beginning. With Irving under contract, James knew he had a perennial All-Star guard to play alongside into his thirties. He had someone to share the load, something he’d never had his first time in Cleveland. Irving had been named All-Star MVP just five months before James’s free agency. He held the award on the court in New Orleans, unsure really of what to do with it. Standing behind him, James encouraged him to hoist it high over his head.
“Kyrie is special. It’s just that simple. He’s a very special basketball player, very smart basketball player,” James said during All-Star Weekend. “His ability to shoot the ball, get into the lane, make shots around the rim, he has a total package. And I’ve always known that. I’ve always witnessed that, ever since he was in high school. And I’m extremely happy for him.”
James likely never would’ve returned if Irving hadn’t agreed to that contract extension at the start of free agency. But he still needed another piece. The NBA is a star-driven league. James had played alongside two stars in Miami and with Irving now under contract, he had the chance to duplicate it because everyone knew the Timberwolves were getting ready to shop Kevin Love.
Love had a reputation as a loner. He’s a homebody who often prefers a night on the couch binging on Netflix instead of a night on the town. He has always been more comfortable walking to his own beat in life. None of that mattered to James, who was enamored with Love’s game while the two were teammates at the 2012 London Olympics. They didn’t know each other well, but James told Love that he would be the reason the Americans won gold. “He always thought I was blowing smoke,” James said.
Love agrees. He wasn’t sure how to read James in London. “I would just kind of brush it off and shake it off,” Love said. “I was standoffish because I didn’t know him well.”
When the two were reunited six months later at All-Star Weekend in Houston, James sought out Love to again tell him how much he liked his game. That’s when Love knew he was serious. And it came at the right time, because Love wasn’t feeling very appreciated in Minnesota. Former Timberwolves general manager David Kahn had previously refused to give Love the five-year max contract extension he and the rest of the league felt he deserved, instead offering four years and the opportunity for Love to be a free agent a year early, in the summer of 2015. Love blasted ownership and management in a December 2012 Yahoo Sports story, just four months after the London games and two months before James and Love saw each other again at Michael Jordan’s fiftieth birthday party in Houston.
“I don’t know who labels people stars, but even [Timberwolves owner] Glen Taylor said: I don’t think Kevin Love is a star, because he hasn’t led us to the playoffs,” Love was quoted as saying in the scathing piece. “I mean, it’s not like I had much support out there. That’s a tough pill to swallow.”
Love was furious when the story was published, and it changed his relationship with the media for years. He felt betrayed by the piece. The league’s collective bargaining agreement forces players to be made available daily to reporters, but all of Love’s answers turned into canned clichés that lacked any depth. Still, Love concedes today that the contract offer insulted him.
“I wanted to be locked in for five years. I didn’t get it. I got a little upset,” he said. “I thought I’d be the franchise tag guy; I wanted to be the face of that.”
Kahn was fired at the end of the 2012–13 season and replaced by Flip Saunders, who was respected and adored by many—including Love. But Love was already halfway out the door. He played one more season in Minnesota before making it clear that he wouldn’t sign an extension and would explore free agency in 2015. Saunders had a choice: He could trade Love during the summer of 2014 or risk his three-time All-Star walking away and getting little or nothing in return, just as the Cavs did when James walked.
The Warriors explored trading Klay Thompson for Love, which was ironic s
ince Thompson and Love were childhood friends who played on the same Little League team. But the Warriors coaches pleaded with management not to make the deal, believing Thompson fit better with their style and that they were close to a championship. When the Warriors refused to trade away Thompson, it left the Cavs as the front-runners—provided they included Wiggins, the top overall pick from 2014. The Timberwolves weren’t interested in Dion Waiters or Tristan Thompson or any other package the Cavs tried assembling. It had to be Wiggins. The Cavs relented, believing Love was finally open to signing long-term in Cleveland because of how aggressively James pursued him.
When James returned to Cleveland, one of his first calls the day his essay posted on Sports Illustrated’s website was to Love, who was driving to the gym and pulled off on the side of the road to take James’s call. The two spoke for no more than fifteen minutes. Suddenly, all of the seeds James had planted the last two years with him began to bloom. James praised his game during the Olympics and again during Jordan’s birthday party. Now James was showing Love how much he meant it all. James knew Love’s situation and said he wanted him in Cleveland. Love agreed on the spot. Now it was a matter of getting him there. Cavs officials privately insisted for weeks that they wouldn’t trade Wiggins, the über-athletic forward from Kansas who was a long, tenacious defender. But they ultimately relented, sending Wiggins, the disappointing Bennett, and a first-round pick to Minnesota in exchange for Love. Instantly, he joined Irving to give James and the Cavs another prominent Big Three, just as he’d had in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Yet for all their similarities (three superstars joining together), there were stark differences as well. James and Wade were close friends when he went to Miami; he had little connection to either Irving or Love. Also, Bosh, James, and Wade were all in the prime of their careers. While James was still in his prime, he wasn’t as explosive as he had been in 2010 and Irving was still a few years away from entering his prime. In the span of just a few weeks, the Cavaliers went from bottom-feeders to NBA contenders. It was a triumphant moment, but the Cavs couldn’t rest for long. Figuring out how to make all the pieces fit became more difficult than anyone imagined.
CHAPTER 11
The Modern NBA
The modernization of today’s NBA began around the new millennium in the waterfront town of Treviso, Italy, where the Botteniga River meets the Sile. That’s where Mike D’Antoni was spending his second tour as head coach at Benetton Basket when Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo flew to Italy to meet with him. Colangelo’s son, Bryan, was general manager of the Suns and wanted to bring D’Antoni on as an assistant coach. The elder Colangelo flew with his wife to meet D’Antoni and his wife.
D’Antoni was doing things a little differently in Europe and Colangelo wanted to see for himself. D’Antoni taught his players to push the pace and play fast in a league where, Colangelo believed, that was even more difficult to do than in America. But D’Antoni had proved successful at it. He’d guided Benetton to a 28-8 record in the Italian League and won a championship. He’d also advanced to the 2002 EuroLeague Final Four.
D’Antoni had previously served as the head coach at Benetton for a few years in the mid-1990s, leaving in 1997 for a front-office role with the Denver Nuggets. He was handed the head coaching job for one year in Denver, then promptly fired after going 14-36 during the lockout-shortened 1998–99 season. That was at a time when the Nuggets were burning through a new head coach every year; D’Antoni just happened to be the latest casualty. He bounced around the NBA as a scout and an assistant coach for a couple more years before heading back to Treviso, where Colangelo went looking for him in 2002.
“We felt he was a thinker, he was cerebral, he truly believed in how the game should be played,” Colangelo said. “But you have to start somewhere and we started him as an assistant.”
Colangelo agreed with his son’s recommendation to bring D’Antoni onto head coach Frank Johnson’s staff. Johnson was a former reserve guard with the Suns who had the “interim” tag removed after the 2001–02 season. He replaced Scott Skiles during the season and the Suns failed to make the playoffs for the first time in fourteen years. Still, Johnson was handed a three-year contract despite going 11-20 as the interim coach. He was charged with rebuilding the Suns around Stephon Marbury, Shawn Marion, and Joe Johnson. At twenty-five, Marbury was the oldest of the young nucleus.
The Suns indeed returned to the playoffs during Johnson’s first full season, but they were quickly eliminated in the first round. He was fired following an 8-13 start to the 2003–04 season and replaced by D’Antoni.
“There’s been something amiss all year, in my opinion,” Jerry Colangelo said at the time of the firing. “The more I saw on the floor, the more I disliked what I saw as it related to body language, communication or lack of same.”
David Griffin was a young executive still working his way up within the Suns organization at the time. He was paying close attention to the way Colangelo structured the franchise, building a family atmosphere of peace, joy, and love. It’s the way Griffin envisioned constructing his own teams one day. The pace and space D’Antoni brought, however, were something that no one outside of the Colangelos could’ve predicted, and it made a huge impression right away.
“It should be exciting the first couple of nights,” D’Antoni said at his introductory news conference. “Balls should be flying around. We’ll try not to hurt anybody. But hopefully it will make it exciting, anyway.”
D’Antoni may not have realized it, but he was starting a revolution in Phoenix. His frenetic style was aimed at pushing the ball on offense so quickly that it would force the opponent to play fast as well. The goal was to get off a shot within the first seven seconds of each possession. Defense was never prioritized; the idea was simply to run teams to exhaustion.
“Offensively we wanted to just wear teams down to where they just didn’t have enough in the tank to beat you offensively,” said Cavs forward James Jones, who played on a couple of those Suns teams under D’Antoni. “That allowed you defensively to just suppress their numbers. It was all about wearing them down, wearing them down, wearing them down.”
And it worked. The Suns won at least fifty-four games in each of D’Antoni’s four full seasons and twice won more than sixty. They led the league in scoring three of the four years.
“We knew exactly what the philosophy was, so there wasn’t any requirement in terms of ownership, management, and coach to buy in. It was really getting the players on your roster and future players to buy into that philosophy,” Colangelo said. “We had certain personnel that made it all happen. Mike had the personnel where this was going to work. That’s why it was so successful. It’s one thing to say you want to play quick, fast, and push the ball. But if you don’t have the personnel to do it, you’re killing yourself.”
But for all their success, the Suns never won a championship with D’Antoni—they never even played for one. Their best finishes were consecutive appearances in the Western Conference finals, where they lost to the Spurs in five games in 2005 and to the Mavericks in six games in 2006. D’Antoni was fired in 2008 after the Suns won fifty-five games but lost in the first round to the Spurs—the same team that eliminated the Suns from the postseason in three of D’Antoni’s four years in charge. At the time, D’Antoni’s frenetic style of pace and space and shooting three-pointers was dismissed as a gimmick. Championship teams were built on defensive principles, not the NBA’s version of the NFL’s run and shoot. But over the next decade, it became the dominant style. In 2017 the NBA is obsessed with pace and space, three-pointers, and layups.
The movement toward pace and space stemmed from a transition toward analytical processes that had been building for quite a few years. It seemed to escalate around 2013 with the introduction of player-tracking cameras in all twenty-nine NBA arenas. Suddenly, every motion on the court was recorded and dissected. While advanced stats such as pace, offensive an
d defensive rating, and PER (player efficiency rating) had been around for a few years already, now there was even more data to churn through and examine. Some of the league’s new-age GMs began to look at the game differently: Why take a midrange jump shot when that is worth the same as a layup? If it’s going to be a jump shot, make it a three-pointer. Otherwise get as close to the rim as possible to increase the likelihood of the shot going in. The advanced metrics fell right in line with Griffin, who made his mark in Phoenix initially by poring over statistics and devising his own brand of analytics. It’s how he caught the eye of Colangelo and others within the organization after starting out as a media relations intern.
“He was just a young whippersnapper joining the organization. He was wide-eyed. He had arrived being a local kid having a dream and aspiration. He was living his dream,” Colangelo said. “The thing that impressed me was he was really a hard worker, very focused, very energetic. Just wanted to be successful. So he was very aggressive in that sense. I think in this business, you need to be.”
Griffin learned plenty from the Suns, but he departed the organization in 2010 for a reason. He is not close with D’Antoni, and his relationship with Suns owner Robert Sarver, who bought the team in 2004, remains strained. But Griffin took plenty of lessons from Phoenix, which Colangelo noticed him applying to the Cavs almost immediately.
“I would say just that what he’s done, certainly I believe was a reflection of his experience growing up with our organization. And he has said that to me,” Colangelo said. “Knowing how David came up, his breeding if you will, in terms of our culture in Phoenix—we had a very, very strong culture. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I’m referring to the selection of players, trading for players, signing free agents, and then the things he said to back those things up. It was a little bit of déjà vu in the sense that he may not have been making the calls in Phoenix when he was here, but that’s where he got the base. And he’s done a terrific job on his own.”