The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  Teams have analytics departments where smart men who are good with numbers sit in offices and try to decode what they all mean. Teams also have salary cap experts who pore over contracts and the league’s complicated collective bargaining agreement searching for secrets and loopholes, such as the fact Baron Davis’s contract had a stretch clause in it or that the final year on Brendan Haywood’s contract for 2015–16 was worth $10.5 million and it was nonguaranteed. That’s why the Cavs had been so eager to acquire Haywood, a fringe NBA player at that point in his career, on draft night in 2014, long before James or Love was in Cleveland. With such a hefty nonguaranteed year, the Cavs believed they could flip him to another team looking to shed salary and obtain a good player in return, since a team could then cut Haywood and not owe him a dime since his contract wasn’t guaranteed.

  Just as baseball has created a whole new language with terms like WAR (wins above replacement), FIP (fielding independent pitching), and BABIP (batting average on balls in play), the same is now true for basketball. Player efficiency ratings (PERs) and usage rates tell more of the story than just how many points a guy scores. Traditional shooting percentages—how many shots a team takes and how many it makes—have been replaced by offensive and defensive efficiency, which standardizes how many points a team scores and allows per hundred possessions. It’s no secret that the NBA has evolved into a pace-and-space league where length and athleticism have replaced sheer size. Efficiency is the league’s new buzzword. The most efficient shots to take are either at the rim or three-pointers. The midrange game has become obsolete. So, too, are plodding big men who play with their backs to the basket.

  Where centers like Patrick Ewing and Shaquille O’Neal once dominated the game—dribble down, set the half-court offense, throw it to the big man in the post, and get out of his way—now that formula is obsolete. Sure, there are still plodding centers (Detroit’s Andre Drummond isn’t winning a three-point contest anytime soon), but most of the game’s centers aren’t really centers. Positions in the NBA today, more than at any other time in the game’s history, have become interchangeable.

  As for Waiters, his 42 percent shooting on catch-and-shoot three-pointers ranked higher than both Love’s and Irving’s for the previous season. If Waiters could do that, just space the floor and shoot threes while expending the bulk of his energy on the defensive end, he would be an asset. If he didn’t, he’d be gone. Instead, on a team with All-Stars like James, Love, and Irving, it was Waiters who led the team in shot attempts in each of the first five preseason games after James returned. Sure, it was preseason and it didn’t matter, but it spoke to Waiters’s mind-set and his willingness to fit into a system. Waiters wasn’t fitting in.

  When James first came back to Cleveland, he defended Waiters. He tried mentoring him. All of the veterans did. James Jones told the younger players to stop stretching and sit in their chairs when the head coach was addressing the team. They could stretch before or after he talked. LeBron told them no eating while watching film. As part of the roster makeover, LeBron wanted guys like Jones and Mike Miller, guys who were grown men and who could teach Waiters and Irving how to be professionals.

  James believed Waiters had been unfairly labeled as a scapegoat his first couple of years in the league and cautioned the young guard not to pay any attention to it. Yet as the two spent more time together on the court, James seemed to distance himself from Waiters, who dribbled too much and constantly called for the ball. His stunts during his first two years in the league, when the Cavs were terrible and full of rookies, didn’t sit well with the new veterans. When Waiters and Irving pounded the air out of the ball during the third game of the season at Portland, James simply stood in the corner in protest, refusing to participate. His message was clear: Keep playing the way you have and you’ll keep getting the same results. The Cavs were hammered 101–82.

  “There’s a lot of bad habits, a lot of bad habits been built up the past couple years,” James said after the game. “When you play that style of basketball, it takes a lot to get it up out of you.”

  Blatt, who was battling his own problems within the locker room, pulled the team together for a film session the next day at Utah. The season was just three games old, but Blatt wanted to establish a food chain. James and Love get to eat first, Blatt told Irving, and as the point guard, it was his job to feed them. Irving could find his own rhythm after the other two got going. Yet when the game ended that night in Salt Lake City, Irving had thirty-four points and zero assists. That aggravated James, who essentially told Irving that could never happen again. The Cavs ended the night with six assists, tying a franchise record for fewest in a game. The Cavs lost at the buzzer, 102–100, and they officially started 1-3 James’s first year back.

  The problems weren’t just centered on Irving and Waiters. Love was a man without a nation his first year in Cleveland. He had made it clear early in the preseason that he was used to playing in a certain style, which included getting a couple of inside touches first before working his way out to the three-point line. No matter how many times he said so, however, he seemed to be ignored. Blatt wasn’t interested in making Love comfortable and neither was James. The only person who predicted this, who foreshadowed how badly Love would struggle in his new role, was Chris Bosh.

  In a revealing interview with Bleacher Report prior to the season, Bosh had predicted Love was “in for a shock.” At the time, he sounded like a scorned ex. Just like Love in Minnesota, Bosh was an All-Star power forward on a team going nowhere BLBJ (before LeBron James). He wanted the chance to win, so in 2010 so he left the Raptors for the Heat in free agency. Days later, James stunned the NBA by joining him and Dwyane Wade in South Beach, forming the superpower that soon became the most hated team in the league.

  Bosh’s numbers were slashed playing alongside two ball-dominant wings in James and Wade. He looked at the Cavs’ roster and predicted the same for Love, who averaged twenty-six points and twelve rebounds in his final season with the Timberwolves. “It’s a lot more difficult taking a step back, because you’re used to doing something a certain way and getting looks a certain way,” Bosh told Bleacher Report’s Ethan Skolnick during Love’s first training camp with James. “And then it’s like, well, no, for the benefit of the team, you have to get it here. So even if you do like the left block, the volume of the left block is going to be different. Now you have to make those moves count. So with me, it was like a chess game. I’m doing this move and thinking about the next move and trying to stay five moves ahead. You’re not getting it as much. If you got one or two a game, it’s a lot different.”

  Bosh averaged 24 points, 16.5 shots, and 10.8 rebounds in his final season with the Raptors. He averaged 18.7 points, 13.7 shots, and 8.3 rebounds in his first season with the Heat.

  “You just get your entrée and that’s it,” Bosh warned. “It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, I need my appetizer and my dessert and my drink, what are you doing? And my bread basket. What is going on? I’m hungry!’”

  Bosh’s comments were immediately dismissed. Sure, he overhauled his game during his time with James in Miami, becoming much more of a three-point shooter than he ever had been in Toronto. But the comparisons didn’t seem to fit because Love was already an adept three-point shooter. Hell, he had even won the three-point contest during All-Star Weekend before arriving in Cleveland. Bosh’s comments were also made in the days before the Cavs and Heat played in a preseason game in Brazil. Love concluded the trip to South America with a sparkling performance, scoring twenty-five points in the win over James’s former team. He followed it up with another twenty-five-point effort in a preseason victory against the Milwaukee Bucks. Everyone was feeling good about where they stood.

  “I’m comfortable and just not trying to, I guess, fit in so much,” Love said. “I had a talk with the guys on the plane ride over [to Brazil] and also at different practices off the floor and they told me to fit out. Just be
myself . . . You always say check your egos at the door but we also need to bring our egos with us because that’s what makes us so great. We wouldn’t be here without them.”

  Just eight days after saying that, Love’s tone began to change. He intimated after the preseason finale at Memphis that he was having to adjust his style of play. Those inside touches he’d grown accustomed to having his whole life were no longer there. Now he was a floor spacer but had no role other than to fill in the gaps around the perimeter. He struggled to find his footing in those first few weeks. Just as Bosh predicted, Love was looking for some bread and water. He took six fewer shots and scored ten fewer points per game in his first season in Cleveland than he had in his final season with the Timberwolves. There had to be a better way to use his vast skills, but no one seemed concerned with finding it.

  One of Love’s low points came in a 103–99 loss at the Indiana Pacers on February 6. He was terrific the previous night, scoring twenty-four points and grabbing nine rebounds in a home victory against the Los Angeles Clippers. But he followed it up against the Pacers by scoring just five points on two of eight shooting and didn’t make a basket after the first quarter. He repeated that night what he’d said on so many occasions, that he was just trying to do what the team needed.

  “Last game I got the ball in the post a lot and I was able to get myself going early,” Love said. “Tonight I wasn’t asked to score the ball, but LeBron and Kyrie had it going.”

  Whether it was Love’s remarks or his temperament through the first half of the season, something was obviously aggravating James. He had worked so hard to recruit Love and bring him to Cleveland, but once he got him there, even other folks in the organization noticed the change in his demeanor. The Cavs were off the day following the loss to the Pacers, but James took to Twitter late that evening to fire the tweet heard around the locker room: “Stop trying to find a way to FIT-OUT and just FIT-IN,” James wrote. “Be a part of something special! Just my thoughts.”

  Love was terrific the next day in a rout of the Los Angeles Lakers at home, scoring a season-high thirty-two points and making seven of eight three-pointers. James, of course, was initially asked about the tweet and denied it was related to anything going on with the Cavs. “It was a general thought I had,” James said. “Obviously whatever thought I have, people try to encrypt it and Da Vinci Code it and all that stuff.”

  When the pack of cameras and microphones dissipated, a few of the beat reporters hung around James’s locker to continue the interrogation. ESPN reporter Dave McMenamin, who used the FIT-OUT/FIT-IN tweet in an October story, pulled up a screenshot of the quote and showed it to James, who read the quote, smiled, and handed the phone back to McMenamin. We told James that was an awfully strong coincidence.

  “It’s not a coincidence, man,” James said while rubbing lotion into his legs and feet. Now we had a problem. Nobody was taking notes and no recorders were rolling. It was just guys standing around talking, so was it on or off the record? No one was quite sure, so I stopped James a few minutes later as he was leaving the locker room to ask him.

  “Ain’t nothing off the record,” he said. “I know everything that comes out of my mouth. If I say it, it’s on the record.”

  Fair enough. James knew what he was saying. It was all on the record. Now, depending on various factors, Love’s postgame routine could include weight training, soaking in a therapy pool, or both. He routinely took longer than most to shower, dress, and leave the locker room after games and did so again on this day. He was absent from the locker room while James was talking and had no idea what was being said. Nobody asked Love about the tweet or James’s remarks during his usual postgame availability, so I waited until after the scrum dispersed before filling him in on our conversation with James. It was only a matter of time before he saw it on television anyway, so I wondered what his reaction was to all of it. Love has a Twitter account but doesn’t spend much time on it and had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned James’s tweet. I showed it to him and told him how James told the couple of us that it wasn’t a coincidence. Love felt blindsided.

  “I feel like I’ve done all the right things. I haven’t got upset or been down,” he said. “There’s moments when I hope I would’ve played better, but it’s a long, long season. I don’t know really what he’s talking about. I feel like I’ve sacrificed and I think everyone knows that. I’m not trying to downplay what he said, but I think I’ve done a pretty good job of trying to help this team.”

  The next day, James walked back the whole sequence on social media and said he wasn’t calling out Love, but by then it was obvious. Even Cavs personnel—including Griffin—later confirmed that James was indeed upset with Love and targeted the tweet at him. After working so hard to get him to Cleveland, James had quickly grown frustrated with Love.

  It had started when Love showed up for that first season out of shape. Love hadn’t worked out much at all the summer he was traded and he wasn’t the player James was expecting. His legs bothered him throughout his first season with the Cavs. His back was hurting. James loves talent and loves playing alongside elite players, but Love’s physical condition prevented him from being the type of player James had thought he was getting. So James gravitated toward Kyrie Irving and left Love to twist without a defined role. Blatt did little to help Love adjust, instead bristling whenever the topic of Love’s role was broached. When he was asked about Love again in early February after he scored twenty-four points and grabbed nine rebounds in a home win against the Clippers, the Cavs’ twelfth straight victory, Blatt had heard about enough.

  “You people like to talk about a lot of the things that are, in my mind, less important,” Blatt said. “We win twelve games in a row and everybody is talking about Kevin’s five-point game. I mean, really, who gives a damn? What’s important is that the team is winning and Kevin knows that.”

  Blatt certainly was correct: Winning is all that matters. At least, that’s true in the playoffs. But as James often says, the regular season is all about building the proper habits. And leaving Love without a clearly defined role might have worked to beat the Wizards on a random night in February, but it wasn’t going to help beat the Spurs or Warriors in the NBA Finals. Furthermore, Love was entering free agency in a few months. The Cavs had given up a blossoming talent in Wiggins, who could grow into a superstar, to obtain him. Losing him after one season because he didn’t fit well with the system would be disastrous.

  Love remained adamant that he only cared about winning, but it was fair to wonder what would happen if the Cavs finished the year failing to win a championship while Love continued to flounder in their system. I spoke to one rival general manager who believed Love could leave at the end of the season for the Lakers and Kevin Durant could follow him there the next summer. Love, however, kept maintaining he was committed long-term. After so many years of rumors in Minnesota, he was used to the speculation by now.

  “If we lose two or three games in a row, or there’s a game where my stats aren’t what they should be, people are always going to talk,” Love said. “I’ve said since day one that I’m a Cleveland Cavalier long-term and I plan for it to be that way. I want to grow with this team. If I could end all the speculation now, I would. But people are going to continue to talk no matter what.”

  His words were reassuring to a certain degree, but problems obviously remained. And Love wasn’t the only, or even the biggest, issue facing the Cavs at the time.

  CHAPTER 13

  Crutches, Calves, and Contracts

  David Griffin’s first season in charge included navigating plenty of land mines. He had to deal with a coach who didn’t know the ways of the NBA, a mismatched roster that didn’t have all of the necessary pieces to compete for a championship, and an aggressive owner pushing to win. Fortunately, Griffin’s background in public relations is one of his strengths. He is an excellent communicator, both within the o
rganization and when speaking publicly. Where Grant was private and secretive, Griffin was one of the league’s most accessible general managers. He believed strongly in winning with peace, joy, and love and even convinced Gilbert to dial back his public appearances significantly.

  “Griff,” as he’s known throughout the league, has been a fighter all of his life. He beat the odds to fight his way up the Suns’ organization from an intern to an NBA general manager. He has fought and beaten cancer twice—once in 2006 in Phoenix and again in 2011, shortly after he joined the Cavs. Once the Cavs added Love and James, they supplemented the stars with key veterans such as James Jones and Mike Miller, both of whom had been with James in Miami. James trusted them implicitly and believed he needed them to turn the Cavs’ immature culture of losing. By now, however, cap space had become an issue, so they delayed the signings of Jones and Miller and even their draft picks, including Wiggins. Griffin did a terrific job of finding cracks of space and turning them into usable trade exceptions. After the initial flurry of signings following James’s return, for example, he took the remaining $1.6 million in available cap room and spun it into a $5.2 million trade exception. He needed four separate trades spread out over two months and eight second-round picks to get there.

  The Cavs traded Carrick Felix to the Utah Jazz in July in exchange for Erik Murphy, John Lucas III, and Malcolm Thomas. It was presented as one trade, but it was actually two separate deals under league rules. Felix was swapped for Murphy as one trade, while Lucas III was absorbed into their sliver of remaining cap space. Thomas was making the league minimum and therefore could be traded around without penalty. All players making the league minimum can be traded regardless of the acquiring team’s salary cap situation—one of the many complicated exceptions to the league’s salary cap structure. The cost for the complex, trivial trade? The Cavs sent away their 2015 second-round pick and $1 million to the Jazz for their trouble.