The Blueprint

by Jason Lloyd

  It’s hard to say how much of that series would’ve changed if Shumpert’s shot had gone in. The Cavs obviously would’ve led 1–0, but more importantly they may have had Irving for the rest of the series. Irving’s troublesome left knee, the one that had bothered him throughout the playoffs, finally gave way for good in the overtime session. Irving was trying to dribble to the basket when he collapsed on the court, his left knee fracturing when it appeared to collide with Klay Thompson’s right knee. Irving limped off the floor with trainer Steve Spiro in obvious pain and slammed his jersey into the tunnel in frustration. His season was over. If the Cavs were going to win a championship, James would have to deliver it himself. Love and Irving were now both out with injuries.

  Back in the locker room, Irving’s father was furious. He was in a private room with his son; Irving’s agent, Jeff Wechsler; and the Cavs’ medical staff. After a few minutes, Drederick stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

  “There was a lot of mistrust from them toward us at the time,” Griffin said later, refusing to provide details. “We had a lot of work to do to repair that relationship.”

  They had even more work to do on the court. With little help around him, James was magnificent throughout the series. The Cavs turned into street fighters. They slowed down the games and beat the hell out of the Warriors physically. The plan was always to go right at Steph Curry, to be physical with him and take him out of the game. It worked.

  In Game 2, Curry shot just five of twenty-three and missed all eight of his shots while Dellavedova was guarding him. Delly had picked up a reputation as a “dirty” player in earlier series against the Bulls and Hawks. Against the Warriors he played to exhaustion and hounded Curry from baseline to baseline. James had thirty-nine points, sixteen rebounds, and eleven assists for the fifth triple-double of his Finals career and the Cavs beat the Warriors 95–93 in overtime for their first Finals victory in franchise history after they were swept by the Spurs in 2007.

  “It’s the grit squad that we have,” James said. “It’s not cute at all. If you’re looking for us to play sexy, cute basketball, it’s not us right now. Everything is tough.”

  James was going it alone throughout the series, both in personnel and in coaching. James shocked Warriors coaches and players by blatantly ignoring Blatt’s play calls. Teams scout each other enough that they know all of the other team’s play calls by June. The Warriors watched Blatt call out a play, only to have James ignore it and run whatever he wanted. It happened throughout the Finals. James was taking matters into his own hands.

  The Cavs beat the Warriors 96–91 at home in Game 3 to take a stunning 2–1 series lead. James again dazzled with forty points and Dellavedova again roughed up Curry and again played to exhaustion. The formula was simple: Never leave their guards. The Cavs’ guards were under strict orders to never leave Curry and Klay Thompson alone. If there’s a loose ball, let the bigs dive after it. It seemed to be working, right up until the fourth quarter, when Dellavedova was exhausted and Curry found his rhythm. He tied a Finals record by making five three-pointers in the fourth quarter and he scored seventeen points. Cavs executives were ecstatic to be up 2–1 in the series but nervous that the fourth quarter awakened Curry after he had been a nonfactor in the series.

  “I think I found something when it comes to how I’m going to be able to attack their pick-and-rolls and even certain iso situations,” Curry said after Game 3. “I’ll keep that in the memory bank going into Game Four, and hopefully it has a trickle-over effect into the first quarter of the next game.”

  Perhaps not so coincidentally, Curry got hot just as Dellavedova was cramping up. Delly had to leave the game with cramps and he left the arena on a stretcher, dehydrated after playing thirty-nine grueling minutes. Dellavedova spent the night at the Cleveland Clinic, but he was never the same player the rest of the series.

  Even without Love and Irving, James dragged the Cavs to a Game 6 against the healthy Warriors. James became the first player in Finals history to lead both teams in points, assists, and rebounds and made a strong case to earn the Finals Most Valuable Player award even in a losing effort. The only other time that occurred was 1969, when Jerry West won the MVP despite his Lakers team losing to the Celtics.

  James played at least forty-five minutes in every game of the series except Game 4, when the Cavs were blitzed at home by the Warriors 103–82 to even the series 2–2. But ultimately, James couldn’t do it alone. The Warriors won the final three games of the series to win their first championship since 1975. Just like the Spurs in 2007, the Warriors won the championship on the Cavs’ home court. James said he wasn’t interested in winning the MVP award if the Cavs lost the series, yet he still nearly won it anyway. The final MVP vote was 7–4. Andre Iguodala won it over James, but not by much, considering James was on the losing team.

  I was one of the eleven voters for Finals MVP and I was working for the Akron Beacon Journal, James’s hometown newspaper, at the time of the series. Somehow that fact required me to vote for James, at least in the minds of Cavs fans, who subsequently lost their minds upon learning I voted for Iguodala. My Twitter mentions quickly filled up with angry/bitter fans who thought it only right for me to fire myself, kill myself, or preferably do both.

  When the league had asked me to be a Finals MVP voter earlier in the day, I knew the scenario I’d be facing. In my mind, James had to get the series to a Game 7. If he did, win or lose, he had my vote. West took the Celtics to a seventh game in 1969 before ultimately falling. In my mind, James had to stretch the series out as long as it could possibly go in order to earn an MVP in a losing effort. Secondly, I had a hard time giving it to a player whose team lost three consecutive games.

  As for Iguodala, his impact on the series was overwhelming. When he was off the court, James shot 44 percent and the Cavs outscored the Warriors by thirty points. When Iguodala was on the court, he was James’s primary defender. James shot 38 percent in those instances and the Warriors outscored the Cavs by fifty-five. If Golden State didn’t have Iguodala, they wouldn’t have won the series. That was pretty valuable in my eyes.

  James, however, was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted after the series. While the Warriors were busy draining hundreds of bottles of Mumm Napa Brut Prestige champagne down the hall in Dressing Room H, James couldn’t move. Nearly an hour after the game ended, he remained reclined at his locker with a towel wrapped around his head and his hands holding it in place. He was an exhausted giant who had just been struck with a final stone. After he showered, dressed, and walked down the hall to the podium, James wasn’t feeling any better.

  “Of course you question it, especially when you get to this point,” James said. “I always look at it, would I rather not make the playoffs or lose in the Finals? I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I’m almost starting to be like, I’d rather not even make the playoffs than to lose in the Finals.”

  James concluded his interview, said his good-byes, and staggered into the warm summer night. He had been to five straight Finals, but he had lost the last two, and three of the five. His overall Finals record slumped to 2-4, and most painfully, Cleveland’s championship drought dragged on. Not even LeBron James was powerful enough to overcome more than five decades of misery. At least, not yet.

  CHAPTER 15

  Pool Views

  Jensen Karp is a Hollywood comedy writer who was invited to visit a friend at the posh Peninsula hotel rooftop pool in Beverly Hills one sunny day in late June, just a couple of weeks after the Cavs’ loss to the Warriors. Karp, an avid basketball fan, spotted James getting a massage in one of the hotel’s twelve private cabanas. He later told a Cleveland radio station he didn’t think much of it but kept his eye on James as he continued chatting. Soon, he saw someone who looked like Love grab a chair and join James in his cabana. This was confusing, because James wasn’t expected to try to recruit Love back to Cleveland.<
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  Love was now a free agent after opting out, as expected, of the final year of his deal. By now everyone knew the score, and the challenges ahead. After some of the tensions Love and James had throughout their first season together, it was fair to question whether Love was going to follow through, despite repeating for months that his intention was to remain in Cleveland.

  The pool at the Peninsula is sixty feet long and offers breathtaking views of the Los Angeles skyline. But it was the view inside that shocked Karp. He walked closer to the pair, snapping a picture of Love as the Cavs star was grabbing a chair. Unsure what to do with it, Karp sent it to a friend to verify that it was really Love. When his friend confirmed it was, Karp thought about what to do for another ten minutes or so before finally electing to post the picture on Twitter. It was retweeted a couple of times, and Karp didn’t think much of it. A few minutes later, however, his phone began vibrating from all of the retweets and it wouldn’t stop. The photo was retweeted more than five thousand times. Karp had unexpectedly kicked off summer free agency.

  As I, and the rest of the press, later found out, Love had pursued the meeting with James to try to clear the air. His mind was still made up—he was returning to Cleveland—but changes had to be made to their relationship. Love, however, insists there was never any sort of ultimatum.

  “More than anything I just wanted to see what he thought about where the team was going and what we wanted to accomplish,” Love said. “It was always ‘we’ or ‘us.’ It was never like, ‘You need to tell me this.’ Never.”

  The two met for no more than an hour, but Love’s message had been delivered. He followed through on his in-season promises to re-sign with the Cavs, announcing the five-year, $110 million deal on the first day of free agency—the most the Cavs could pay him.

  He arrived for his second season in fantastic shape. He spent the summer in Park City, Utah, with Alex Moore from the Cavs’ training staff. Moore is no stranger to Park City. Before he was hired by Grant in 2013, Moore spent the previous six years as the strength and conditioning coordinator for the US ski team. In one of his final moves as general manager the summer before he was fired, Chris Grant brought in Moore to help overhaul the Cavs’ training staff. Grant believed American medicine was well behind the world and team trainers had become reactive to injuries instead of proactive. They did well at taping ankles and treating sprains and tears, but there wasn’t enough done in the way of injury prevention. So he went and found Moore.

  Australia’s population is about twenty-four million—roughly the size of Texas. In order to adequately compete in the Olympics, Australia has become the world leader in studying athletics and the human body. The Australian Institute of Sport was created in 1981 to give the country’s elite athletes a place to train and to learn about nutrition and recovery. American officials agree there is nothing like AIS in this country, which helps explain why Moore was here. By the summer of 2015, Moore had become a fixture in Love’s training regimen and now spends most of the year with him—even during summers.

  Moore is the unofficial mayor of Park City after his time there with the ski team. With an elevation of nearly seven thousand feet, it’s the perfect place to work out. But these workouts consisted of paddleboards, yoga, and hiking trails that carried them to heights of nearly nine thousand feet, along with more traditional weight training and exercise bikes. They were workouts for mind, body, and spirit, a much-needed cleansing after the torn labrum prematurely ended his season and the Cavs fell short of the championship.

  A typical training day included a stretch, followed by sixty to ninety minutes of weights and then recovery, followed by more training. On-court basketball work occurred in the evening. Moore was taught that living and training in that high an altitude for a month will alter the body’s hemoglobin mass, essentially allowing the body to carry more oxygen in the blood. Therefore, the body will be capable of doing more work when it returns to sea level.

  After his time in Park City, Love arrived for the 2015–16 season in the best shape of his life. If he wanted a bigger role in the offense, he was about to get it. With Irving sidelined to start the 2015–16 season while recovering from knee surgery, the Cavs were going to have to rely on James and Love for at least the first couple of months. James began saying things like Love would be the focal point of the offense and “We’re going to ride his coattails.”

  “He’s going to have a hell of a season,” James said. “He’s going to get back to that All-Star status. He’s the focal point of us offensively.”

  In all his years in the league and with all the teammates that he had played alongside, never had James called another player a focal point or admitted to riding another man’s coattails. Not Wade, not Bosh. Certainly not anyone from his first tour in Cleveland. There was little chance James actually believed it—Love even knew he didn’t really believe it—but James appeared to be sending a message: You want it? You got it. Love was eager to prove he could do it.

  “We talked about that I can do more,” Love said. “From a comfort standpoint, I feel a lot better.”

  It didn’t take long into their second year together for people within the Cavs to finally admit the first year between the two stars did not go as planned. All of Love’s 2015 ailments—his back, his legs, his general conditioning—were connected, and none of his body parts were firing properly. James had been right to be frustrated. This wasn’t the player he’d thought he was recruiting to join him in Cleveland.

  James loves challenges and the Cavs believed he took on Love as his own project in their second season together in an effort to build him up and empower him. That’s what James has always done on the court. He empowers his teammates and makes them better than they really are—and Love was already an All-Star without him.

  “Some of the finer points and perhaps things people overlook is how he influences his teammates and how he influences the flow of the game just by recognizing what helps other guys function better when he trusts in something or someone on the court,” Blatt said at the time. “’Bron also understands this is a long season and the more he empowers those around him, the better it’s going to be going down the line.”

  Love averaged 17.3 points and 10.5 rebounds while Irving was rehabilitating. He shot 44 percent and was no longer just a decoy and a floor spacer. He was also getting about eight shots a night that were not three-pointers. The Cavs were 17-7 when Irving returned just prior to Christmas, and the coaches and front office hoped the team would continue playing so well with Love and James that Irving would fall in line. As feared, however, Love’s production again fell off. His scoring dropped to thirteen points a game the first month Irving was back and he shot just 38 percent from the floor in those first seventeen games. Love was very clearly the third wheel again, lodged behind the two guys who had the ball in their hands most nights.

  But the Cavs were winning and Love was now locked in long-term, so Blatt wasn’t terribly concerned with making sure Love got his numbers. He was rightfully more concerned with making sure the Cavs got their victories. James, meanwhile, shifted his focus to getting his All-Star point guard back up to game condition. All of which led to one fascinating afternoon in Dallas in early January.

  —

  The Mo Williams Academy is tucked away in a nondescript strip of warehouses in a nondescript section of Dallas. Williams, the veteran point guard who’d returned to Cleveland prior to the season after playing alongside James during his first stint with the Cavs, was tired of paying high-priced trainers to work with him during the summer months, so he created a gym near his offseason home to fit his hectic schedule. Williams is a husband and father and sometimes can’t get to a court until the middle of the night. His gym allows him access whenever he wants. He built the facility in 2011 and now has family running it year-round.

  “I tell guys all the time—we go out and we buy all the nice cars and big houses and the
se things like that. Invest in a gym,” Williams says. “That’s your craft. You can do what I did, which is the cheaper route [on a house] and have your facility. This is what you do for a living. Splurge on that.”

  What started as a personal luxury grew into something more significant. Now Williams sponsors summer Amateur Athletic Union basketball teams comprised of middle school kids and has worked with some of the game’s brightest young stars, such as Julius Randle and Emmanuel Mudiay. One of his more recent pupils, Billy Preston, was milling around the facility as one of the nation’s top high school players the day the Cavs were there. Preston would later be recruited by Kansas.

  Since opening his facility, Williams has played for the Clippers, Jazz, Trail Blazers, Timberwolves, Hornets, and now the Cavs. His NBA teams routinely use the facility when they’re in town to play the Mavericks, and so it was in January 2016 that the Cavs made the short drive to Leston Street for an off-day practice just hours before Alabama beat Clemson to win college football’s national championship. At the time, Irving was about a month into his return from the fractured kneecap he suffered in the Finals. He needed surgery to repair the fracture and spent six lonely months rehabbing.

  Irving had turned twenty-three in March, three months before his knee injury. Turning twenty-three is significant. It’s referred to as “the Jordan year,” named after Michael Jordan’s number 23 jersey. It’s even more significant when you play in the NBA and your birthday falls on the twenty-third. As Irving was celebrating his twenty-third birthday on March 23, his friends and family kept insisting this was going to be his golden year, his Jordan year. That’s what Irving kept thinking about as he lay around with his knee in a cast. He did a lot of reading, he worried about whether he’d be the same player when he returned, and, yes, he watched the play where he was injured.