by Jason Lloyd
“I knew at that moment I was done,” he told me. “I knew it.” The moment it happened, Irving had sat on the court feeling his right knee, then his left. The left one didn’t feel the same. He told Steve Spiro, the Cavs’ trainer, he needed to go back to the locker room.
“As I’m walking and my adrenaline and my body started to slow down, I’m like, ‘This is it right here,’” he said. “‘I’m done.’”
Long before the knee injury, Irving had developed a reputation for making big shots in big moments. His first game winner occurred during his rookie year, back when he was nineteen and Byron Scott was still joking that his breath smelled like the baby formula Similac. Irving dribbled around a screen, split two defenders, and flipped in a left-handed layup over a late-arriving Paul Pierce with 2.6 seconds left at the Garden to stun the Celtics, 88–87. His father, Drederick, who had starred collegiately at Boston University, pumped his fists in excitement from the stands.
Irving lacked confidence growing up, but it’s now one of his greatest strengths. Irving concedes that his father worried whether Kyrie would ever develop an ability to destroy his opponents. Early in his career, Scott wasn’t sure whether Irving had that “killer” gene. Chris Paul had it. Scott was Paul’s first NBA coach and he spotted it as early as his rookie year. Scott used to joke that Paul would tear an opponent’s throat out to win a game. He wasn’t sure Irving had it.
“It’s going to be scary to see him in four or five years,” Scott said toward the end of Irving’s second season. “When he figures out this league and the game really slows down for him, it’s going to be scary.”
Irving fought injuries throughout his career, first his toe and then shoulder, wrist, and facial injuries. He also struggled with learning how to lead. He was asked to carry a heavy load while James was in Miami. He was a point guard who rarely passed and was considered a ball hog by most everyone—including his teammates. Irving insists he was doing what was asked of him to try to win games, but one of James’s first goals after arriving was teaching Irving how to be a distributor.
Once James chose to return to Cleveland, he began watching film of Irving. He knew Irving was a great young talent, but he wanted to learn his tendencies. Film study may not reveal a player’s personality, but it will expose how much a point guard can help his teammates. James saw Irving wasn’t doing much in that regard. It’s part of the reason he took the ball out of Irving’s hands early in their first year together. James was teaching Irving how to be a point guard in the NBA, when to pass and when to attack.
“I just wanted him to understand that he could mean so much more to our team by also being a playmaker for the guys that can’t play-make for themselves,” James said. “Obviously, he’s able to go through two and three guys every single possession if he wants.” Referring to their first year together, James said, “My game was all predicated on figuring out how to get these guys, and mostly Kyrie, to understand how important it is getting other guys involved. And he’s a good student. Little hardheaded at times. [Young guys] all are, which I expected. I expected that.”
Now, as Irving dribbled and shot on the court inside Williams’s academy, James was subtly teaching him another lesson. The Cavs had rebounded from their crushing Finals loss and survived injuries to both Irving and Iman Shumpert to start the season 17-7. Shumpert missed the first six weeks recovering from a fractured wrist he’d suffered just prior to the start of training camp. Irving returned from his knee injury December 20 against the Philadelphia 76ers.
Before and after his return from knee surgery, Irving routinely remained on the floor long after the formal portion of practice had ended, working on his shot and rhythm. James often joined him. On this day, while Irving threw up shot after shot—from the wing, the three-point line, the corner, and all points in between—Williams spoke for more than an hour about his gym: the office space, the full laundry services, and the small lounge.
What it lacked, however, was showers. So while Irving and James remained on the floor shooting and shooting, the rest of the sweaty Cavs stood on the sidelines or sat in the bleachers and waited. As the minutes swelled into an hour, their patience waned. Sasha Kaun, an NBA rookie, was the first to be visibly irritated. Anderson Varejao saw how mad Kaun was getting and laughed at him.
“He doesn’t get it,” Varejao joked with me. “This is life with LeBron. Sometimes you wait.”
Yet after about twenty more minutes, Varejao wasn’t laughing anymore. Now he was annoyed, too. Love fidgeted with his phone. Assistant coaches made dinner plans. James and Irving, however, never flinched. They simply kept shooting.
“I will never leave the court without him,” James told me. “Meaning if he’s the only person in there shooting, I’m not going to leave. I’m not. And he knows that.”
James knew teammates and coaches were getting upset, but he didn’t care. The shooting session went on so long that even Tyronn Lue, still Blatt’s lead assistant, stormed back into the gym as James and Irving were concluding. “Let’s go!” Lue shouted across the gym. “This is fucking rude and disrespectful!” James chuckled and told him not to get so upset in front of the media, even though there were only a few of us there at the time.
“They can leave us. They don’t have to wait for us,” James told me later. “We know the way back.”
With LeBron, there is almost always sound reasoning behind a display. In that moment, he wanted the rest of his teammates to see how hard the two stars were working, and the more pissed they got, the more they’d remember.
“At the end of the day, late in games, the ball is going to be in our hands,” James told me. “We’ve got to be able to trust each other and our teammates have to be able to trust us. If they see us working like they always do, it gives them more trust in us. And then we have to come through for them.”
He was right. One hundred and sixty-one days later, Irving would have the ball in his hands in the last minute of Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
CHAPTER 16
Christmas Mourning
The life of an NBA writer is equal parts exhilarating and depressing, fulfilling and fruitless. It’s earning Marriott platinum status while living out of a suitcase eighty nights a year, answering four A.M. wake-up calls to get to the next city, and choking down bad arena food (usually lukewarm pasta or something fried, things that are cheap to make and that can be cooked in bulk) before tipoff. Catch a quick nap and risk getting beat on a story; let your cell phone die at the wrong time and it’s career suicide. I was out to dinner with my family one fall night when my cell phone died. In the twenty minutes it took to finish eating, pay the check, buckle the kids in the car, and plug my phone in, Tristan Thompson ended his holdout and agreed to a five-year contract. I was the last to know.
Baseball was always my first love, but the life of a baseball beat writer is personal-life homicide. With a wife and three kids, the grind of a baseball season (45 days at spring training and then a 162-game season) is even harsher than that of basketball. At least with the NBA, I’m home most of the summer when the kids are out of school. I’ve done college football and the NBA, but family is a big reason why I stayed in this lane and never pursued a career covering baseball. It’s difficult at times choosing between career and family. David Blatt has been forced to continually make that decision year after year. He also has a wife and four children, although his kids are grown now. When they were younger, however, Blatt was rarely with them. He bounced from Israel to Russia to Italy to Turkey for various coaching jobs while his wife and kids remained in Israel. Even when Blatt took the Cavs job, his family stayed behind.
In 2015, I skipped the Christmas Day game at Golden State to watch my kids open presents. I caught up with the West Coast trip the next day in Portland, where the Cavs were scheduled to play the Blazers that night. Shortly after I landed, it became clear something was wrong. Players were angry with the way the Cavs lost at the Warr
iors on Christmas Day and they were taking it out on Blatt.
“It’s hard when you go from playing overseas where you’re playing one or two games a week, kind of like in college, to come here where you’re playing four games in five nights,” former Cavs center Brendan Haywood said. “You can’t play LeBron, Kevin Love, and Kyrie all these minutes. You’ve got to play a Mike Miller or develop him for later in the season. Maybe it’s Joe Harris. Somebody. You have to develop your bench during the season. You can’t burn these guys out during the regular season and that’s something eventually he was going to learn, but he didn’t understand that.”
Richard Jefferson didn’t play at all in the loss, which upset some of the veterans. Blatt’s approach, which was to treat every night like a Game 7 and win at all costs, rather than trying to develop a consistent rotation and style of play, was aggravating the players. So was the way he refused to hold James accountable in film sessions and seemed to be intimidated by his star.
“I saw the tepidness in how he was trying to correct LeBron at times. In film it was uneasy,” Haywood said. “As a coach, you have to have control of your team. That’s what T-Lue does very well. There’s no uneasiness. He says, ‘LeBron, I need this.’ When you dance around hard topics with your upper-echelon players, the middle tier and lower tier guys see it. Then what happens is it slowly eats away at your credibility. I think that’s what happened to David.”
“He’s losing them,” one person told me the day after the Cavs lost at Golden State. In truth, he never really had them. Even at 19-8 and first place in the East, a mutiny was mounting. The Cavs played one of their worst games of the season the next night at Portland. James seemed disinterested, rarely engaging on either side of the ball and spending most of the night half-heartedly jogging up and down the floor. The Blazers were without star guard Damian Lillard, but that didn’t even matter. The Cavs trailed 34–12 after the first quarter and it never got better. The team with one of the highest payrolls in league history was embarrassed 105–76.
“We got kicked in the keister,” Blatt said.
James was more direct and even hinted at some of the players’ frustrations over an ever-changing lineup and rotation.
“For the first eight weeks, we had built chemistry, we knew who was playing, we knew who wasn’t playing. We had rotations. Coach had rotations down, so we’ve got to get back to that,” James said. “We have no rhythm. We have some guys who don’t know if they’re going to play and it’s hurting our rhythm a little bit.”
Suddenly it became evident that the record didn’t matter anymore. The players were sick of their coach. They tolerated him when they won and blamed him when they lost. His inability to stand up to James was just one of his many issues. These holidays were happy for no one. The entire locker room was fed up.
“They’re going to fire him, aren’t they?” one person who knew the team well asked me during that Blazers game. It was a stunning turn of events. David Griffin was standing in the corner of the locker room with his arms folded when I approached him after the game.
“Guys are pissed,” I said, and he nodded in agreement. I told him the players were done with Blatt and revolting against him. Griffin didn’t say much, but he didn’t deny it. I asked if Blatt was going to be fired. He said no.
But he was going to be fired, actually—just not yet, because Griffin had yet to convince Lue to take the job. At some point in December, the Cavs again approached Lue about taking over as head coach. He refused, instead calling Rivers, his mentor, and telling him he couldn’t do it.
“People didn’t know the behind-the-scenes that they had already asked him a month before and he said no,” Rivers said. “Ty called me and said, ‘I’m not taking this job. This is just going to make me look terrible. I’m loyal to David.’”
So the Cavs trudged on with Blatt in charge. It was an unusual situation, certainly, but everything with Blatt was unusual. No coach had ever been fired with his team atop the conference. But while the Cavs had beaten the easy teams, they struggled to beat the league’s elite. They won eight straight after the embarrassing loss at Portland but lost to the Spurs on the road in a close game to end the winning streak. Then the Warriors returned to Cleveland on January 18 for a much-anticipated rematch of the Christmas Day shootout. The Warriors swaggered in with a glistening 37-4 record, but they had been drilled two nights earlier at Detroit. No matter. Steph Curry said he hoped the visiting locker room in Cleveland still smelled like champagne from the hundreds of bottles of Mumm Napa Brut Prestige the Warriors had drenched Dressing Room H in the last time they were here. The champagne comment irritated James, who was further rankled when the media didn’t ask him about it the morning of the game. James had a retaliation ready, but no one ever heard it because of what happened that night.
The Cavs were dismantled by the Warriors 132–98. They showed no fight and no heart. The energy was lacking for such a pivotal game—one of the few of consequence in a monotonous eighty-two-game march through the regular season. The Warriors were terrific defensively, packing the paint to cut off drives while staying with the shooters on the wings. With all of their options neutralized, the Cavs were reduced to isolation, with James and Irving dominating the ball while the Warriors built a forty-three-point lead early in the fourth quarter. It was the largest deficit James had ever faced during his twelve years in the NBA.
“They came in and just kicked our ass,” Irving said.
James’s criticisms were getting more pointed. When I asked him before the game about the possibility of facing the Warriors again in the Finals, James shook his head in disgust, saying it was “absurd” and “ridiculous” to be thinking about June in the middle of January. The Cavs had plenty of issues to fix before they could worry about the Finals. A few hours later, the Warriors exposed them all.
“Against the top teams, you want to play well. And we haven’t done that,” James said after the beating. “We’re oh-and-three versus the top two teams in the West. We’ve got to play better basketball.”
Despite Lue’s resistance, the decision was made. The loss to the Warriors was the knockout punch. David Blatt was going to be fired. If Lue didn’t want the job, they’d go find somebody else. But Blatt’s time in Cleveland was over. Knowing how close Lue was to Rivers and how much he admired his mentor, a high-ranking Cavs official called Rivers the day after the Warriors loss to tell him Blatt was going to be fired.
“That’s when I knew it was definite,” Rivers said. No one from the Cavs ever explicitly told Rivers to convince Lue to take the job, but Rivers didn’t see any other way to interpret the phone call. “When I’ve got them calling me to say, ‘Hey, this is going to happen,’ I think that was their message. They didn’t say that at all, they just said, ‘We’ve got crazy stuff, we’re going to let David go.’ I’m no dummy. I knew.”
Blatt stayed on long enough for the Cavs to beat a terrible Nets team two nights later, and Griffin maintained he didn’t like the way the locker room felt after the victory. It was dead inside, even after a win.
“Their heart was gone,” Griffin said. “It was completely undermining the team.”
The truth is, the decision to fire Blatt had been made even before that game in Brooklyn. Rivers and the Clippers came to Cleveland the night after that win against the Nets for a back-to-back. Rivers walked into the Q already knowing Blatt’s fate.
“It was actually a tough game coaching against David because I like him,” Rivers said, but ultimately he did as the Cavs wanted. He convinced Lue to take the job. He had no choice.
“You’ve got to take the job,” Rivers told him. “They’re going to fire David. Whether that’s right or wrong, they’re going to fire him. And if you don’t take it, someone else is going to take it. You have to take this job. You’re getting a great job. Now go do the job.”
At 30-11, with the best record in the East at the exact midpoin
t of the season, Blatt was fired the day after the Cavs beat the Clippers. He was then replaced by Lue in an announcement that shocked the league.
“I’m embarrassed for our league that something like this can happen,” said Dallas Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle, who is also the president of the coaches’ association. “It just leaves you with a bit of an empty feeling because Blatt’s a great guy and he did a great job there.”
Other coaches, such as Gregg Popovich and Stan Van Gundy, also took shots at the Cavs over the firing. The faux outrage across the league was widespread and nauseating. Some of the coaches feigning shock and disappointment at Blatt’s firing were the same ones crushing him privately during his first season in charge.
“What the hell is he doing?” one rival head coach had asked me during Blatt’s first week on the job, when he bragged about how he delivered a tongue-lashing to his team before his second game as a head coach. Coaches around the league were surprised at his demeanor, the way he interacted with the media, and his confounding substitutions and use of time-outs. Now, however, they were going to stick up for him. After all, the Cavs had reached the Finals with Blatt in charge and again owned the best record in the East. If he could be fired, then none of them were safe.
“We just really caught fire in a unique way during those playoffs and found a way to overcome. It’s because that team dealt with adversity so incredibly well, I almost think the David fit being bad was the adversity that they needed,” Griffin said. “But it wasn’t David’s fault. You can’t run a team that’s trying to win a championship that has the best player in history on it and not be a gangster. It’s just not going to work that way. Especially when you have two other kids who were as good as Kyrie and Kevin. That’s a lot of personalities, it’s a lot of talent, and it requires a very strong hand. And it just wasn’t the right fit.”