by Jason Lloyd
Lue, however, was the gangster Griffin needed.
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The annual Fourth of July party Tyronn Jamar Lue throws is one of the perks to living in Mexico, Missouri. Well, that and the Miss Missouri pageant, which is held there every year. Lue was born and raised in the small rural town about 110 miles northwest of St. Louis and returns there every summer to throw a daylong party that concludes with a fireworks show—paid for by Lue. He began the tradition early in his playing career and now thousands attend.
Lue rents out the city pool that day so all the kids can swim for free. He hires a blues band for entertainment and purchases hot dogs and hamburgers to feed the entire city and even folks from neighboring communities. The town proudly considers itself the “soybean capital” and even has a soybean festival every summer, but a biodiesel refinery serves as its biggest industry now. The coach, however, remains their finest export.
Lue played for seven teams during his eleven-year career as a backup point guard. He wore cornrows as a player but shaved them before he went into coaching. Now his blunt honesty and charming smile are his trademarks. He was listed as a six-foot guard during his playing days, although those height measurements are known to be generous. What Lue lacked in size he compensated for with smarts and grit.
“Sometimes you’ve got to see the game a step or two ahead and he’s got that,” Cavs assistant coach Larry Drew said. “We’ll be sitting on the bench during games and things will be happening and he could dissect the play. We would go through the options of our play and as it’s happening, he would see things that would be there as the fourth and fifth option. Guys like that, man, they’re rare. They’re rare.”
Lue broke into the league as a backup with the Lakers. He was part of the reserve unit scrimmaging the starters one day near the end of practice when Kobe Bryant drove baseline while Lue was standing at the elbow—the area on the court where the free-throw line meets the lane line. Lue met Bryant at the rim and pinned his shot against the glass for a clean block. Devean George made a layup at the other end and Lue’s team won. Bryant was furious.
“Kobe wanted to fight me at first,” Lue said. “Second, he wanted to play one-on-one after practice. I said, ‘No, I’m not playing you one-on-one.’ After that, every day we stepped onto the court, he just went after me. Every single day. It was crazy.”
Rivers coached Lue for only one season in Orlando and was so enamored with him, Rivers gave him an open invitation to join his coaching staff whenever Lue retired. Five years later, Lue took him up on the offer. He remained with Rivers for five years, working his way up the coaching bench before the Cavs stole him away to be Blatt’s top assistant. His job was to acclimate Blatt to the NBA, and while no one ever said it out loud, it was clear that Lue was also the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency if the Blatt experiment went off the rails.
Now the time had come. The glass was broken, and Lue was in charge of a first-place team with championship aspirations. And the organization was behind him in every way, both publicly and privately. “I feel like we won’t miss a whole lot,” Griffin said when he made the change. “But I do feel like we’re going to gain a lot in some areas that were critical to us.”
The most important of those areas was accountability. Blatt never stood up to LeBron, either publicly or privately. The most uncomfortable he ever made James was the one night he emerged from his office after a game wearing only a towel. “C’mon, Coach,” James said. “I can’t talk to you like this.” But they did. After a brief chat, James turned and walked toward Tristan Thompson. “That man was naked,” he said.
Lue was respected and revered around the league. In seemingly every arena he enters, players and former players seek him out to say hello. That credibility extends to superstars such as James. In his first few days after taking the job, Lue criticized the players for not being in proper shape, and told his Big Three to stop worrying about their brand and focus more on winning.
“If you win, everybody’s brand is better,” Lue said. “We still have a young group of guys. Just gotta keep instilling that message. If we win, everybody is taken care of. That’s the message.”
Lue vowed to hold LeBron accountable. He called out James’s mistakes during film sessions and addressed his chummy on-court behavior with Dwyane Wade after the Heat whipped the Cavs in a March road game. He was also the one who had cussed out James, back when he was still just an assistant, for staying so long at Williams’s facility and forcing the rest of the team to wait.
But he also had problems of his own. One of his biggest issues was trying to implement Love into the offense. James’s talk of making Love the focal point had slowly dwindled after Irving returned, and he again looked lost on the court. When the Cavs suffered an embarrassing 104–95 loss at Brooklyn during Easter weekend, the wheels were threatening to come off the cart again just a week before the playoffs. Firing Blatt from a first-place team left a target squarely on Griffin, who wondered whether he would be fired at the end of the season.
Rumors about Tom Thibodeau began to resurface. Gilbert has long had an affection for Thibodeau’s defensive style of coaching. The Cavs had asked the Bulls for permission to speak with Thibodeau prior to hiring Blatt. The Bulls denied them, then fired him anyway at the end of the season. Whispers were growing louder that if the Cavs failed to make the Finals, another housecleaning would be in order. Blatt’s firing was all on Griffin. If this went sideways, Griffin and Lue could be out, and Thibodeau would be in, with the title of president and head coach. He would have full control and answer only to Gilbert.
It was a long night within the organization following that loss to the Nets. That was also about the time that Lue got in Love’s face and told him to start playing like an All-Star. Love scored eleven points and grabbed twelve rebounds against the Nets but shot five of fourteen and missed all five of his three-point attempts. Lue was tired of watching how passively Love was playing. He wanted Love to be more aggressive and demand the ball. The gangster in Lue that Griffin loved so much came firing out. He wanted Love to shoot with confidence and to stop hesitating.
“You’re a bad motherfucker,” Lue told Love. “Play like it.”
Love ended the regular season averaging 18.9 points and 9.9 rebounds. He shot a dazzling 46 percent from three-point range. There were only nine games before the end of the regular season, but Love got back to playing the way Lue wanted. The Cavs ended the regular season 27-14 under Lue, three games worse than they were under Blatt. No one cared about the record. Griffin believed when he made the coaching change that the Cavs might regress before taking a step forward. The record indicated they had, but everyone within the organization believed they now had a chance to win. Lue, meanwhile, was simply saving his finest coaching performances for when they mattered most.
CHAPTER 17
Gambling Man
Tyronn Lue insists he’s never smoked and doesn’t touch alcohol. If he has a vice, it’s gambling. He loves the tables in Las Vegas and can often be found there during Summer League or even during the All-Star break. That helps explain why he was so quick to bet on himself after replacing Blatt as head coach. Gilbert fired Mike Brown one year into a five-year deal and he fired Blatt less than two years into a four-year deal. Lue, however, didn’t like the figures the Cavs were offering and chose instead not to sign. He’d coach the team, but he wasn’t signing a new contract. Part of it was money; part of it was not wanting to look like he was undermining Blatt and negotiating a new deal behind his back. So he bet on himself and a team that finished the season 57-25, tops in the East. He took his chances with a deep postseason run to prove he was worth more.
Lue had more confidence in himself than many others. Sporting News ranked him fourteenth among all sixteen head coaches entering the postseason. The only ones below him were the Thunder’s Billy Donovan and the Rockets’ J. B. Bickerstaff, who were also rookies. I was near the back of the media
scrum one day shortly after the rankings were released when Lue threw his shoulder into me on his way by. “Fourteen,” he muttered, glaring at me. Lue often likes to joke and body-check me on his way by, so I didn’t think much of it, but I had no idea what he meant by “Fourteen.” A few days later he signaled “fourteen” to me with his fingers and shouted at me from across the practice court on his way into his office. Again, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I walked over to talk to him.
“Man, you ranked me fourteenth out of all the coaches!” Lue barked. I laughed and told him he had the wrong guy. It wasn’t me. “He told me you did!” Lue exclaimed, driving the bus over Cavs assistant coach Damon Jones, who immediately denied culpability. Regardless, it didn’t take long for Lue to outperform the ranking as the fourteenth-best coach of the playoffs.
He outcoached highly respected names like Stan Van Gundy and Mike Budenholzer in the first two rounds. The Cavs entered believing the Pistons could be a bad matchup to begin the playoffs. The pick-and-roll combination of Reggie Jackson and Andre Drummond was dangerous because of the fear it would expose Irving’s deficiencies defensively, while the undersized and athletic Marcus Morris at power forward was a bad matchup for Love.
The Pistons were not a prolific three-point-shooting team, but after they made ten in the first half of Game 1 and led the Cavs 83–76 on Reggie Bullock’s three-pointer early in the fourth quarter, an uneasiness filled Quicken Loans Arena. Eight years earlier, Van Gundy had brought an underdog into the Q and stunned the Cavs by spreading the floor with four shooters around one dominant big man. The Orlando Magic had eliminated the Cavs in the conference finals in 2009, inching James a little closer to his ultimate exit. Now Van Gundy was eleven minutes away from replicating that formula and taking a stunning 1–0 lead against the heavily favored Cavs.
Lue flipped the game—and the series—when he called a time-out following Bullock’s three and rolled out a smaller lineup when the game resumed. James began the fourth on the bench because he needed a quick breather after playing nearly all of the third quarter. When Lue reinserted him at power forward and shifted Love to center with 11:04 to play, the Cavs erupted. The game was tied in less than two minutes and they scratched out a 106–101 win. Lue was praised for his lineup maneuvering while Van Gundy left the arena second-guessing his decision to stick with ineffective Tobias Harris so long and leave rookie Stanley Johnson on the bench.
“The first thing that comes to my mind is things I could have done differently to give us a better chance to win the game,” Van Gundy said. “I’m not really looking to stay close, that’s not my objective here. We’re here to try to win games and we didn’t get it done tonight and I think I had a considerable amount to do with that.”
Johnson made quite an impression in the series, but not all of it was for his play. The brash nineteen-year-old went right at James on and off the court in the series, insisting after Game 2 he was in James’s head.
“He jabbers. He moves his mouth sometimes. Their whole team does, kind of like they’re little cheerleaders on the bench,” Johnson said. “Every time you walk in the right corner. They’re always saying something like they’re playing basketball, like they’re actually in the game. There’s only seven or eight players who play. I don’t see why the other players are talking. They might as well just be in the stands, in my opinion.”
It’s nothing new for young guys to try to make a name for themselves against James, particularly in the playoffs. DeShawn Stevenson tried and failed with the Washington Wizards; then Lance Stephenson tried engaging James in the postseason. Stephenson infamously blew in James’s ear during an Indiana-Miami playoff series and James responded with an eye roll and head shake. By now, he was used to inferior players using him to make headlines. He had consistently responded the same way: by not engaging.
“The game is played in between the four lines,” James said. “Everything outside that means absolutely nothing.”
While Van Gundy was addressing Johnson about his comments and trying to get him to quiet down, Lue was impressing with his quick-change lineups and play calls. Lue had the awareness to get James and J. R. Smith back into the game for an out-of-bounds play with 1.6 seconds left in the first quarter of Game 1, a foreshadowing of things to come. James made a layup to give the Cavs the lead in what was the first of many out-of-bounds plays Lue drew up that worked perfectly. Plays drawn up after time-outs, or “ATOs” for short, are crucial in playoff series.
Lue has kept a notebook that dates back to his playing days full of different notes, scribbles, and play ideas. Within the notebook is a full section on ATOs. Van Gundy changed the Pistons’ defensive schemes on ATOs during the series and Lue knew he needed a counter, so he sat down with Larry Drew shortly before Game 3 to brainstorm. “We’ve got to be able to burn them,” Lue told Drew, and the two spent about ten minutes scribbling out ideas. Three hours later, they flipped Kevin Love and LeBron James’s positioning on an inbounds play and it worked. Irving made a crucial three-pointer in the corner in the final seconds and the Cavs took a commanding 3–0 series lead.
The Cavs led 95–90 with forty-five seconds left when Lue gave the ball to Matthew Dellavedova to inbound from the far corner of the court. Irving began the play at the elbow, then turned his back to the play and set a screen on Harris to create a mismatch. When the bigger, slower Harris switched onto the guard, Irving flashed to the far corner on the other side of the court. Dellavedova heaved a perfect pass about forty-five feet to a wide-open Irving, who made the corner three-pointer to seal the victory and essentially the series.
“It’s crazy that play right there sealed the deal for us,” Lue said. “And we worked on it right before the game.”
Much like the first-round series with Boston a year earlier, however, the series with the Pistons was growing more physical with every Cavs victory. They felt Detroit was targeting James at one point, repeatedly hitting him with hard elbows around the neck and body with no fouls called. Drummond caught him twice in the series and Morris hit him once—on one play during Game 2, they hit him at the same time. It was Love’s turn in Game 4. Morris picked up Love on a switch and twisted his right arm behind him before throwing him down to the court. Love was furious in the locker room over that play.
“Was he trying to even me out?” Love asked, referring to his surgically repaired left shoulder. If he thought the Olynyk arm bar was bush league, then this certainly was. Nothing about it resembled a basketball play and it spoke instead to Morris’s threat after Game 1, when he said the Pistons wanted to rough up Love. By the time Morris wrenched Love’s arm and threw him to the ground, however, it was too late. The Cavs swept the Pistons with a 100–98 victory in Game 4 and were moving on to the second round.
“We’re able to get hit and keep moving forward,” Lue said. “We’ve been harping on that all season—not to drop our head, not to have bad body language when teams make runs. This series we got down a lot. Every game we were down and we just kept pushing, kept moving forward. That’s the biggest growth of this team right now—staying with it and not giving in when things get tough.”
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Beyond the X’s and O’s, Lue was masterful with his lineups throughout the postseason. He surprised the Pistons with small lineups, then came back to surprise the Hawks with a bigger lineup in the conference semifinals. The Cavs had swept the Hawks out of the postseason in the conference finals the year before when Love was out and Irving was hurting. Now that both players were healthy and the Cavs were making shots, the Hawks had no chance.
Lue is friendly with Bill Belichick from his time as an assistant coach with the Celtics. One of Belichick’s best attributes as a coach is his ability to eliminate an opponent’s greatest strength. The same is true of Lue, who forces teams to beat the Cavs left-handed. Whenever the Cavs face the Warriors, they’ll run multiple defenders at Steph Curry. Guards are given explicit instructions
never to leave Curry’s side. Loose ball? Don’t leave Curry; let someone else get it. Marreese Speights open on the wing? Don’t leave Curry. Ever. They treated Kyle Korver and the Hawks much the same way in every playoff series with the Hawks.
It wasn’t an identical duplication of the schemes used against Curry and the Warriors because Curry is Golden State’s entire engine; Korver is simply the Hawks’ best shooter. The key was not to leave him alone in transition, where he does most of his damage on threes. Korver shot 40 percent from three-point range during the regular season and shot 55 percent in the final six games of Atlanta’s first-round series against the Celtics. He shot 50 percent in the conference semifinals against the Cavs, but he took two three-pointers or fewer in three of the four games. Much like the year before, the Cavs successfully eliminated Korver from the Hawks’ plans.
“They don’t leave Kyle anywhere,” Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer said. “They’ll send two people at him, they’ll send three people at him and leave other people with opportunities. A lot of the shots we get, we’ll take. We’ll continue to take the same opportunities and if they’re going to run two, three guys at Kyle, other guys are going to have good looks and good opportunities.”
With Korver neutralized, Cleveland dared the rest of Atlanta’s roster to win games and it couldn’t. Dennis Schröder made five threes and scored twenty-seven points in Game 1, both career postseason bests, but the Cavs took Game 1, 104–93.
When the Cavs set an NBA record with twenty-five three-pointers in Game 2, it became clear the Hawks still had no idea how to defend so much shooting. The Cavs and Warriors seemed to be locked in a subtle battle of one-upmanship. The Cavs matched the previous record of twenty threes in a game—shared by the Warriors—in their win in the first round against the Pistons. When the Warriors countered by making twenty-one three-pointers in a playoff game four nights later, the Cavs reclaimed the record with a booming night of deep balls against the Hawks.