The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  Off the floor, Griffin went to work trying to change the Cavs’ culture. He muted Gilbert, who stopped doing interviews almost entirely. He prioritized mending the relationship between Irving, Wechsler, and Cavs management. And he began trying to forge a relationship with James after he returned to Cleveland. Griffin had enjoyed the peace, joy, and love culture Colangelo instilled in Phoenix and he did his best to try to replicate it at times in Cleveland—even though that dynamic hasn’t always been successful.

  “Every team is different. Every group of players calls for a different way to play, depending on your talent. I’m talking about culture and philosophy. That has nothing to do with style of play,” Colangelo said. “The culture and putting pieces together and having the philosophy of how you complement your stars. Phoenix was not blessed with a LeBron James. How many teams have had a LeBron? It’s totally different with him. Obviously you have to change your philosophy to some degree, but you don’t discard your parameters that you’ve had for years and just say, ‘I’m going to do it a new way.’ Normally we’re creatures of habit. If you believe in something, you’re going to stick with it.”

  Colangelo is a hero in the Valley of the Sun. He rescued the Suns by purchasing the franchise in the 1980s and resurrecting them to thirteen consecutive playoff appearances. He brought baseball to Phoenix and delivered a World Series championship in 2001, which remains the region’s lone professional sports championship. He went on to repair USA Basketball after it bottomed out with a bronze medal in Athens in 2004. One of the first items Colangelo fixed within Team USA is one of the same areas he emphasized in all of his businesses: culture. Build a winning culture and maintain it. It’s not so easy to do.

  “I think the word is respect. I think you have to get the respect of players, and a coach certainly has to have that with his players. In some cases, management can do exactly the same, too. I think we had that in Phoenix. So it starts there,” Colangelo said. “Then you agree, usually management and coach agree on how you’re going to play and then you have a game plan and stick to it. In the meantime, you create this culture where they feel you really do have their best interest at stake and it’s not all about X’s and O’s and wins and losses. You have to be able to withstand a lot of adversity in the NBA because quite often, plans go astray. What carries you through difficult times is a strong culture.”

  —

  Yet as Griffin went to work restructuring the Cavs, what no one could’ve predicted was the quiet empire being erected in the West. The Golden State Warriors’ rise to prominence wasn’t as loud and dramatic as Cleveland’s after James’s return, but it was equally as unexpected and impactful. And it seemed to be built on many of the same offensive principles that D’Antoni had applied to the Suns a decade earlier.

  Bob Myers was plucked from a successful career as an agent at Wasserman Media Group to work in the Warriors’ front office in 2011. Forbes estimates that Myers negotiated more than $575 million in player contracts during his career as an agent, but he left Arn Tellem, at the time one of the most powerful agents in the NBA, to start as the assistant general manager for the Warriors. Myers is well liked around the league. He has the reputation of being humble, almost to a fault. He joined the Warriors following the 2010–11 season when they went 36-46 and finished an anonymous twelfth in the West. He ascended to the top job at Golden State a year later. Much like with Griffin and the Suns, Myers grew up a Warriors fan in the Bay Area. His first NBA game was a Warriors game when he was just a boy.

  “This is a great day for me, but what will be a better day is when we get this team to a place when we’re playing beyond the regular season and competing for a championship. That’s when I’ll really be excited,” Myers said at his introductory news conference in 2012. “I’m not going to promise anything, but there’s a quote I saw that says, ‘You cannot ensure success, but you can deserve it.’ We’re going to work with our staff to deserve to be successful and not stop until we get there.”

  Myers is a hybrid of the old-school and new-age general manager in the NBA. There was a time when most NBA general managers were former players who retired their way into a front office. And while Myers did play the game at a high level, advancing from walk-on at UCLA to scholarship player to 1995 national champion, he never had much of a chance at a future as an NBA player.

  That makes him similar to Griffin, who loved the game growing up but never had much of a chance to play it professionally. They are part of a new wave of analytical general managers taking over the league. Guys such as Daryl Morey, who earned an MBA from MIT and never really played the game, rose to the top of the Houston Rockets. Rich Cho was an engineer, then a lawyer, and then an NBA cap specialist who knew how to construct a roster using algorithms and cost efficiency. In other words, he was the closest thing the NBA had to a Billy Beane / Moneyball model. Now he’s the general manager of the Charlotte Hornets. The brains, the highly educated, are taking over the sport, just as the Suns-style offense has.

  Myers tries to connect with his players and build the same type of culture Griffin was striving to find in Cleveland and Colangelo successfully built in Phoenix. It’s the same culture that has made the San Antonio Spurs the NBA’s gold standard for decades. After they have fame and riches, Myers has a simple question for his players: What do you want?

  “What do you think it takes to win a championship? Because you only get so many years to do it. It’s your life. After you’re done playing, you can’t play anymore. That’s it,” Myers said during a Sloan Sports Analytics Conference panel in 2017 in Boston. “You have ten years, you have fifteen, twelve. And if you’re a superstar, the pressure now to win a championship is tremendous. The emphasis we put on a championship is insane to me. How we value it or devalue it if you don’t have one. So these players, these superstars, are under tremendous pressure to check that box. If they’re the right-minded type of people, which superstars usually are, they can accept that challenge.”

  Myers said it isn’t so much loving to win but despising to lose.

  “If I could give you a test to measure how competitive you are, that’s invaluable,” Myers said. “It’s not liking to win. It’s hating to lose. When you’re competing, when you are in an intense moment of competition, the thing that drives you to the degrees and depths you don’t know you have, what you’re trying to do is avoid that feeling of losing. You’re not trying to feel the joy of winning. What you’re trying to do is, ‘I cannot stand what it’s like to lose so much that I’m going to dig down and do every single thing possible to avoid that.’ You don’t win without people like that. That’s what drives you to win. ‘I cannot picture myself after losing this game, this series, this competition because I know what that feels like and I have to avoid it.’ It’s not celebrating winning. No, we avoided losing. That’s what we did. That’s a common thread in successful people. I don’t know that it makes the best dinner partners.”

  That’s what Myers strives to find in all his players. He went to work immediately on the Warriors’ draft board in 2012, his first draft, looking for competitive winners, and hit home runs with each of his three picks. His best pick, in fact, was his last. Myers scooped up Harrison Barnes with the seventh pick after the Cavs passed on him at number four. He selected center Festus Ezeli with the final pick in the first round and selected undersized power forward Draymond Green with the thirty-fifth overall pick in the second round. Spartans coach Tom Izzo, who nearly took the Cavs job the summer James departed, kept telling Green the Warriors were showing the most interest in him and thought he could wind up at Golden State. The Big Ten Player of the Year his senior year and Michigan State’s all-time leading rebounder slid all the way out of the first round.

  “I think I’m a little more athletic than I get credit for,” Green said at his introductory news conference. “But that’s not what I’m going to hang my hat on. I play hard, I’m going to play tough, I’m going to rebou
nd and do those things. I think I’m a better defender than I get credit for as well. That’s something I have to continue to prove. If you’re going to play defense and you’re going to rebound, you’re going to find a way onto the court somehow. Defense and rebounding is always going to help you win games, so that’s the thing I want to do.”

  Green ultimately proved to be the steal of the draft and has blossomed into one of the top defenders in the NBA. His fiery temper and tenacity have become trademarks of powerful Warriors teams, although no one could’ve predicted it at the time. Green and Barnes quickly became starters who complemented a backcourt of Klay Thompson and Steph Curry, two of the league’s best shooters. Add in the trades that brought Andrew Bogut, David Lee, and Andre Iguodala and suddenly the Warriors were replicating much of how the Suns played under D’Antoni. There was, however, one stark difference: The Warriors were defending, too.

  The frenetic pace, the quick shots, the propensity to take and make threes, however, all looked eerily similar to the style Griffin grew up under in Phoenix. By the 2013–14 season, the Warriors led the league in scoring (110 points per game) while ranking second in three-pointers and pace, which calculates how many possessions a team has per game. The only team that generated more possessions than the Warriors was the Brooklyn Nets.

  But much like the Suns the decade before, the Warriors weren’t winning, either. They hadn’t advanced beyond the second round of the playoffs since 1976, which just happened to be the year after their last championship. It was an exciting brand of basketball and it certainly generated interest, but no one was sure it could generate a champion. After the Warriors were eliminated by the Clippers in the first round in 2014, the team fired Mark Jackson as head coach despite a 98-66 record the previous two years. Despite some success, the relationship between Jackson and ownership became untenable.

  Myers quickly zeroed in on Steve Kerr as his choice, stealing him away from Phil Jackson and the New York Knicks. Kerr had presided over Griffin in Phoenix’s front office. He’d won championships as a player and he worked as a television analyst. Kerr had the perfect demeanor to lead a team of young stars to prosperity—and it was all happening just as James was returning home.

  “He blew our socks off,” Warriors owner Joe Lacob said of Kerr. “Steve Kerr and Bob Myers together is my dream team. That is a dream team.”

  Lacob’s dream soon became a nightmare for the rest of the NBA, and particularly the Cavs. James captured the league’s full attention with his return home. But no one predicted the Warriors’ empire rising out of the Bay Area.

  CHAPTER 12

  Homecoming King

  Rebuilding in the NBA typically is a slow, methodical process that takes years to evolve. The Cavs did it in one summer. There was enormous pressure to get the pieces to work together, ideally immediately. And then there was the LeBron-related pressure. The pressure to coach him, the pressure to surround him with the right pieces. And from the minute James returned, Griffin felt the pressure to win.

  James’s first home game back inside Quicken Loans Arena was on October 30, 2014, against the New York Knicks. Sure, there were preseason games before it, but this was the one that mattered. This was the first time he’d appeared at the Q in a Cavs jersey for a real game since that horrific night in 2010 when he was booed off the floor following a loss against Boston. And he understood the enormity the morning of the game.

  “All of us shouldn’t take this moment for granted,” James said. “This is probably one of the biggest sporting events that is up there, ever.”

  Quite a statement, but quite a player. As James jerseys went up in flames four years earlier, as fans booed and hissed him during the years he wore Miami’s red and black, this moment had never seemed possible.

  Kyrie Irving was introduced first, followed by Dion Waiters and Anderson Varejao. An upbeat instrumental version of Skylar Grey’s “Coming Home” played in the background as the crowd roared in the darkened bowl. Kevin Love was introduced next before the music was cut and the arena went eerily quiet, anticipating what was to come. In-game arena host Ahmaad Crump began to growl, “From St. Vincent–St. Mary High School . . . ,” as James stood up from his seat, arched his neck and back, and closed his eyes. The crowd roared as their prodigal son took his rightful place on the floor.

  The game was far less dramatic than the buildup. James shot just five of fifteen and committed eight turnovers. He scored seventeen points, grabbed five rebounds, and passed for four assists in the 95–90 loss that marked David Blatt’s NBA debut. It was the capstone to an exhausting week for James, whose daughter, Zhuri, was born eight days prior to the opener.

  “It was a huge night,” James said. “I’m glad it was great but I’m also glad it’s over. Now we can play regular basketball.”

  Just like that, another clock was ticking. While Danny Ferry felt James’s contract clock always ticking during his first tour in Cleveland, speeding closer and closer to 2010 and free agency, this time, it was his body clock ticking. He had already played eleven years and forty thousand minutes between the regular season and postseason. It was fair to assume James could continue playing at his elite level for about another four seasons before he might start to decline.

  “The pressure comes from the fact that I love him, I want what’s best for him. I want to see him live the dream he’s trying to live out and this is his hometown,” Griffin said. “And when you put yourself in that position, you think about the six-year-old version of you. The six-year-old version of me, watching the Suns lose in triple overtime to Boston [in the 1976 NBA Finals]. If I had it in my power to do what he does, and deliver that to them, it’d be the most important thing in my life. So we are part of the most important thing in the life of the most important athlete in America at the given time. He’s not the most important basketball player, he’s the most important athlete on the planet. We are literally working with Babe Ruth every day. So the responsibility you feel is one hundred years from now, when his story gets written, we were there. We have to give him what the story needs.”

  And when James first returned, the Cavs needed plenty. They needed shooting, more depth, and a rim protector. Throughout the entire summer of 2014, Griffin didn’t really believe James was coming back. He thought all the losing from the last four years and the organization’s failure to make a drastic step toward improvement had cost them that chance. There is a plethora of things he would’ve done differently had he known for sure James was returning. Griffin had believed the most realistic scenario was that James would return to Miami on a one-year deal with a player option for a second year and give the Cavs one more year to get their house in order before seriously contemplating a return in 2015.

  While the Cavs finished the 2013–14 season at 17-16 with Griffin as interim GM, they still finished sixteen games below .500 and missed the playoffs in the pitiful East by five games. They were the worst team in the league the four years James was gone—mostly by design—and nobody thought James had any interest in a rebuilding project. James was all about rings and trophies, about chasing down his idol, Michael Jordan, and his six championships. James won only two titles in Miami. He had a long way to go, and by all accounts, so did the Cavs.

  “We weren’t ready for LeBron when he showed up,” Griffin said. “You don’t go four years of just horseshit basketball, flip a switch, and become champions. There were going to be growing pains. There were going to be issues.”

  This, too, was part of the plan. As the Cavs were collecting draft picks and trade assets, Grant always knew some of the personnel wouldn’t fit if James indeed returned. That didn’t bother him, though, because the pieces that didn’t fit would still be valuable commodities that could be moved for pieces that made more sense. And changes certainly were going to have to be made now; Griffin was convinced the Cavs’ pieces didn’t fit even before James returned. Now it was a matter of figuring out what worked and what did
n’t. That became clear almost immediately. There were too many dribblers and not enough quality shooters.

  In two years together, Irving and Waiters could never find enough oxygen to coexist and thrive. Now they were bringing in the most dominant player in the game. They tried making Waiters into a catch-and-shoot player, but Waiters resisted. “That’s not my game,” he said. “I can do it, but you know what I’m effective at: pick-and-roll and things like that.”

  They showed him the numbers from the previous year, when James was still in Miami. Waiters shot an excellent 42 percent on catch-and-shoot three-pointers (72 for 173), which is as basic as it sounds—a shooter stands and waits for the ball, then shoots without dribbling. The number of statistics available to teams, fans, and media now is overwhelming. A Portland player, for example, has led the league in distance covered on a court every year since the numbers became available for the 2013–14 season. For instance, Nic Batum ran more than 216 miles during games that season, the most ever recorded by the league’s data-tracking software. Damian Lillard led the league the following season and C. J. McCollum did during the 2015–16 season. Each player was above 200 miles in distance covered.

  There are numbers now to show teams where guys are getting the ball most often on the floor and where they’re most effective—they break down a player’s elbow touches (when a player reaches the part of the lane where the side line meets the free-throw line) and who most effectively runs pick-and-rolls together. We’re in the information era, but it’s almost too much information right now. Teams are still trying to sort through what to do with it all.