By Vegas standards, July 11, 2014, was mild. It was still below 100 degrees in the morning when Trent Redden, the Cavs’ assistant general manager, made a three-mile run from the team hotel in the Mandalay Bay complex down the perimeter of the airport to the Thomas & Mack Center on the UNLV campus. As is his tradition, he ran to Summer League practices and had given his phone to assistant coach Phil Handy as the team bus departed for the gym. A short time later, Redden arrived at UNLV, sweating and disconnected, to some excited staff members.
Mark Cashman, the team’s longtime equipment manager, looked at Redden and raised his eyebrows. For a man who rarely shows emotion—Cashman’s nickname is “Cobra”—this meant something was up. Koby Altman, the team’s director of player personnel, held up his own phone and asked Redden, “Is this real?” Redden sprinted onto the floor to get to Handy, interrupting a drill he was running, and asked for his phone. It was ringing. Nate Forbes, the part owner who only a day before had left a meeting with James’s agent unsure of what would happen, was calling.
Yes, it was real. Then came the screams.
Eighteen hundred miles away inside Cleveland Clinic Courts, the Cavs’ suburban practice facility, David Griffin found himself on his knees inside his office. The building was mostly empty, as all the coaches, staff, and front office members were in Vegas for the start of Summer League games that night. A television was tuned to SportsCenter, which was reading James’s letter. The walls around him were made out of magnetic whiteboards that were covered in plates with players’ names and scenarios written in grease marker. Some of them were dreams. Dreams for this moment.
Griffin was still trying to come to grips with the news and what the next steps would be, sending texts and talking to staff, when a call came in. It was from Jeff Schwartz, Kevin Love’s agent. The Cavs had been making trade pitches to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Love for more than a year. At that moment, the Timberwolves were in negotiations with the Golden State Warriors surrounding him. Cleveland hadn’t been a realistic option. But the world had just changed.
As Love, like the rest of the NBA world, was digesting the huge news James had just made, he too got an unexpected call. It was James. The two knew each other from their time together during the 2012 Team USA experience, a typical two-month crash course that creates fast bonds because international travel and security keep the players together virtually all the time. Love and James weren’t particularly close. James palled around with Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony in London, while Love spent time with his UCLA teammate Russell Westbrook, among others. In fairness, Love wasn’t particularly close to many of his teammates throughout his career, a personality trait that sometimes led to criticisms of him as an ineffective leader, as the Wolves never made the playoffs with him on the roster. The bottom line was Love and James weren’t friends but they had a relationship. More important, they’d played and practiced together and had some understanding of each other’s games.
James told Love he wanted him to come to Cleveland and that he felt they could be great complementary pieces. Many in the NBA would’ve quickly agreed, a good-shooting big man is an ideal teammate for James, as Chris Bosh had proven the previous few seasons in Miami. Also, Love’s strong rebounding and ability to throw excellent outlet passes to start fast breaks seemed like it could add an element James had never enjoyed before. Of course, a trade would have to be arranged, and that was not an insignificant hurdle. But before that could even get serious, Love and James needed to have this conversation. And it was James who was instigating it.
Love had been displeased with several things in his six seasons in Minnesota. Though the rules somewhat forced their hand, the Wolves prioritized the future of young guard Ricky Rubio while in contract extension talks with Love in 2012, leading him to sign a three-year extension instead of the five-year deal he wanted. That moment essentially started his slow march out of town over the following seasons. Previous general manager David Kahn bungled a number of draft picks, trades, and free agent moves, which disillusioned not just Love and many fans but even the owner, who put the team up for sale. But the Wolves became frustrated at Love’s injury history, including when he broke two bones in his hand doing knuckle push-ups at his house the fall after signing his extension. Questions about that injury lingered longer than the breaks did.
While Love had deep West Coast ties—he grew up in Oregon and played collegiately in Los Angeles—he tried his best to make it clear that what he really wanted was to be on a winning team. That would be a case he’d have to repeat numerous times, but it was a stance he never dropped. And the call from James was a transitional moment in his life.
“I’m in,” Love told James on the phone.
The Cavs’ situation had been dramatically altered in just a few hours. Their team with a single and still-developing franchise player in Kyrie Irving, an experimental coach brought over from Israel in David Blatt, and a collection of young prospects and future draft picks was now transformed. Now they had one of the best players in league history coming back and working to bring another All-Star with him. The team’s plans and timelines were shoved into the garbage. A completely new reality was staring them in the face.
The excitement from the fan base was of course extraordinary—season tickets sold out within ten hours of James’s announcement—and the NBA began remaking its schedule with its television partners to turn the Cavs into a feature attraction. There were headlines across the world, and quickly the concept that Love could be coming too made it into the media, with SportsCenter using graphics and salary-cap experts to illustrate exactly how the Cavs could construct a trade to bring him in. Those trades all included Andrew Wiggins, who that night was making his debut wearing a Cavs uniform in a Summer League game against the Milwaukee Bucks, who were debuting No. 2 pick Jabari Parker.
James’s Sports Illustrated letter, which quickly received heavy praise for its tact and tone, included references to a number of Cavs teammates he was looking forward to playing with. Wiggins’s name was omitted. James’s team attempted to quell speculation that a Wiggins-for-Love deal was implied by this omission, saying there was no such message intended. But that was not entirely true. James was interested in playing with Wiggins and hoped the Cavs would find a way to trade for Love without needing to trade Wiggins. But that was unlikely and James and his agents knew it. James had rushed to call Love. He never spoke to Wiggins. And therefore Wiggins’s name was not in the letter.
Below the layer of hype, the Cavs front office was trying to come to grips with what exactly they’d been presented. Though James’s words about coming home were moving, he was essentially signing a one-year contract. Love was now only under contract for one more season, and trading the No. 1 pick for him plus other assets was an unacceptable risk. One thought that came up was if Love wanted to play with James, as he was now saying, why not wait until the following summer when the Cavs might be able to clear enough cap space to sign him outright as a free agent?
In James’s letter he wrote, “I’m not promising a championship. I know how hard that is to deliver. We’re not ready right now. No way. Of course, I want to win next year, but I’m realistic. It will be a long process, much longer than it was in 2010. My patience will get tested. I know that.”
But here was James looking to bring in Love and yet only committing to a one-year deal. That was not a process, that was a mandate: Let’s go now! Griffin, Gilbert, Forbes, and the rest of the Cavs front office had to grapple with this sudden situation. This is what they said they’d wanted, to accelerate the team’s makeover. Now they were mainlining jet fuel but were tentative on tapping the afterburners, worried going too fast came with dangers. If this all blew up in their faces, a year later they could be right back where they were in 2010. They were elated at James’s decision, but there were still only the seedlings of trust. And as for Love, there was no relationship there at all.
As Griffin sat in his office and conferenced in his staff and his bosses, he soon realized what must be done. He’d talked again to Flip Saunders, the Wolves’ president, and quickly understood the landscape. The Wolves thought they had a deal with the Golden State Warriors as they advanced in discussions to trade Love for a package including young star Klay Thompson. A deal was nearly finalized when team adviser Jerry West threatened ownership he’d resign if the Warriors ownership allowed such a trade. New coach Steve Kerr was also against a deal. It threw Love back into limbo and left him on the market.
Just as he wouldn’t bend on Thompson, Saunders was only willing to trade Love if he got Wiggins in a package back. The Cavs had to pick a path; they could not straddle the fence. And James was yanking them toward going for broke now. They’d gotten themselves in James’s poker game, and now they were on the verge of going all in.
Before committing, the Cavs asked if they could have an in-person meeting with Love. Usually something like that would’ve been prohibited by league rules. But the Wolves, getting excited at the prospect of landing Wiggins as the foundation of their rebuilding process, granted formal permission. And so yet another vital step to the Cavs’ future was planned, and once again it went down in the NBA’s summer capital, Las Vegas.
The next few days turned into a whirlwind. James finalized his contract the same day the letter came out, signing it in Miami before reboarding the Nike jet to fly to Rio for a weekend of appearances around the World Cup final. Meanwhile, in addition to Love, James started doing full-time recruiting elsewhere. When Griffin had pitched James’s agents the week before, James had a list of free agent shooting specialists he thought would be a good fit. He’d contacted many of them during the free agent process.
One of them was Mike Miller, the veteran wing who’d played with James for three years in Miami. A year earlier, Miller had been released by the Heat in a cost-cutting move and because he’d been injury-plagued, needing five surgeries for hand and shoulder issues plus back problems. When he was put on waivers by the Heat, the Cavs seriously considered claiming him and bringing him to Cleveland. Not just because he was a veteran shooter, but because then general manager Chris Grant was launching his “get LeBron back” plan, and having Miller, a close friend of James, might’ve helped.
Miller, though, wanted no part of Cleveland. His own powerful agent, Arn Tellem, asked the Cavs not to claim him. Miller even leaked a story to the media that he might need back surgery, which wasn’t true, to try to deter the Cavs from grabbing him. Ultimately the Cavs decided to pass and Miller went on to sign as a free agent in Memphis, where he had a great season and played in all 82 games.
Now, a year later, Miller was on the verge of signing with the Denver Nuggets, and Griffin didn’t think he had enough money left at that point to outbid them. And he wasn’t sure Miller wanted to play in Cleveland. After a call from James, however, things quickly turned. By the end of the weekend as James was getting ready to come home from Brazil, Miller was agreeing to a deal with the Cavs.
A day later, Griffin closed a deal with James Jones, another veteran shooter whom Griffin had a relationship with from when both were with the Suns. Jones had also become close with James over the previous four years with the Heat. Nicknamed “Champ,” Jones was highly respected in the league not so much as a player but as a leader—he was a high-ranking member of the players’ union—and a tone setter. A diligent worker, he was always one of the first to arrive and the last to leave the facility, plus he was always willing to pull younger players aside.
While Griffin was happy to make the deal, Jones was also a symbolic signing. He is from Miami, played in college at the University of Miami, and played with the Heat for the previous six years. In 2010, he restructured his contract to help the team make salary room for James. He was seen as a future coach or front office member, perhaps with the Heat. And he was coming to Cleveland with James. The Cavs roster was filling with talent, experience, and James’s influence.
The next step was important. Love, his agent, Griffin, and Gilbert assembled in Vegas for a sitdown. Love wanted to come play with James. The Cavs wanted him, seeing the formation of a “big three” with Irving. This was the formula that had been winning titles for teams for decades—three stars at different positions. But what to do about the situation, with Love headed into the last year of his contract? How could the Cavs be comforted that Love wouldn’t leave in a year to play for the Lakers or the Suns or the Blazers? How could Love be sure to protect himself in case the fit wasn’t good?
As soon as the meeting opened, Schwartz made one position clear: Love would be expecting a max contract offer from the Cavs the following year if a trade went through. The Cavs understood the position, though they legally couldn’t agree to the terms at that point. The team had its preference, but stopped short of making it a demand.
Love had a player option for the 2015–16 season in his contract, which was for $16.7 million, and the Cavs wanted him to pick it up as part of the trade process so he’d be under contract for the following two seasons. Something similar took place back in 2011 when the New Orleans Hornets traded Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Clippers. The Clippers wouldn’t do the deal without Paul picking up his player option, ensuring he was under contract for the following two years. The Cavs felt they had precedent and, with the price being asked and Love’s apparent quest to play on a (suddenly) winning team, that it was a reasonable ask.
But Love and Schwartz weren’t willing. Much of it was purely economic; projections for increases in the salary cap showed that Love might cost himself $3 million or more by opting in and not becoming a free agent and signing a brand-new deal. These projections were also the central reason why James only signed a one-year deal with the Cavs. As for Love making a “promise” he’d re-sign with the Cavs in a year, that was out as well.
It’s strictly against league rules for players and teams to come to agreements on contracts before they are free agents. So-called “wink-wink” deals certainly take place. But if those making them are caught, the league has been known to hand down franchise-destroying penalties. In 2000, the Wolves were caught in an under-the-table deal with former No. 1 overall draft pick Joe Smith, where the two sides inexplicably signed a document that was later unearthed in a lawsuit between agents. Minnesota was stripped of five first-round draft picks, fined $3.5 million, and the owner and general manager were suspended for a season. So this was not an option for the Cavs and Love, especially given how high-profile this situation was.
Outside of the accounting, though, Love expressed his future commitment to the Cavs. In his mind, he wasn’t coming to Cleveland for a year, he was coming for the long term. He was sincere, or so it seemed, and focused on wanting to be on a championship contender and playing with James. So, while no explicit agreement was reached and taking care to stay within NBA rules, they reached an uneasy and unofficial understanding. Love expressed that he didn’t want to leave the Cavs high and dry; if things didn’t go well during the 2014–15 season, he said he’d be willing to revisit picking up the player option, which he had until the following June to do. If the parties wanted to part either during the season or the next summer, this would give the Cavs a chance to trade him. Under the challenges presented, this was probably the most reasonable scenario.
“I asked a lot of people what we should do and some people just came up to me,” Gilbert said. “When I was in Las Vegas for the meeting, I was at dinner and a college coach I didn’t even know came up to my table. He said ‘Love is a no-brainer, you have to do it.’ There were people making the argument to me to keep Wiggins. We thought he was going to be a stud and he brought us things we didn’t have, especially on defense. Ultimately it was Griff’s decision. You have to go with your basketball guy. He’s been doing it twenty years. He felt Love was the way to go.”
The Cavs had one additional request, and it was a hard one for Love to accept. They didn’t want him to play for Team USA that summer, a year when the 2012 gold medalist was a lock to play on the team that was going to Spain to play in the World Cup of Basketball. Love cherished his time with Team USA in the Olympics two years earlier. But now with so much riding on the 2014–15 season, there were concerns an injury would totally derail their plans.
Love ultimately agreed and USA Basketball ended up putting out an odd and opaque statement saying Love was pulling out “because of his current status,” without saying exactly what that status was. It was really because of his informal future commitment to the Cavs, even though he was still a Timberwolf at the time. A week later, Indiana Pacers star Paul George suffered a horrific broken leg during an exhibition game while playing for Team USA. Everyone felt terrible for George. The Cavs privately were relieved they’d requested Love stay home.
All this was happening as Wiggins was playing games in a Cavs jersey at the Vegas Summer League. As the top pick, he was a marquee attraction, and he was being asked in interviews about playing alongside James. After he was drafted, the Cavs requested that they hold off on signing him because it gave them some salary-cap benefits. Wiggins agreed and the Cavs took out insurance to make sure he was covered in case of any injury before signing. Now the fact that he wasn’t signed was suddenly extremely relevant.
Six days after James signed, on July 17, rumors that the Cavs had made Wiggins available in trade talks with the Wolves hit the media. The report was a little premature; the Wolves had only granted permission for the Cavs to speak to Love.
It was clear Wiggins believed the rumors. In a moment that would repeat itself several times in the future, Wiggins seemed mad in a game that night against the Houston Rockets—mad, it seemed, at the Cavs for deciding to trade him. He relentlessly attacked the basket and repeatedly drew shooting fouls.
At one point, after he’d turned the ball over on another quasi-reckless drive, he sprinted full speed down the floor to swat what looked like an easy basket in a “chasedown”-style block that James had made famous. With Summer League in its dog days, it was striking to see Wiggins play at a different speed than everyone else. When it was over, he’d set a Summer League record by getting to the foul line 20 times. It turned out to be the last game he would ever play in a Cavs uniform. As the trade became realistic, the Cavs pulled Wiggins from their last Summer League game to protect him from any injury that could’ve halted what was now a full-speed train to get Love to Cleveland.
Wiggins’s agent, Bill Duffy, went to his client and told him he was about 90 percent sure he was going to be traded. Duffy had been working with Saunders all summer. Duffy and Saunders were close, Saunders once hosting Duffy on a recruiting visit at the University of Minnesota when both were teenagers. Duffy also represented the Warriors’ Thompson, and he’d been on the front lines of those discussions involving Saunders. So when Saunders felt he was in range on making a deal for Wiggins, Duffy was well aware.
“It was a way for Andrew to understand that he now was in the business of basketball,” Duffy said. “He knew that at the end of it he was going to be playing professional basketball and he was going to get his contract. He also knew that he had to act like a professional and not talk about it publicly, which is what he did.”
The haggling lasted another few days, and soon a package was agreed to. Anthony Bennett, the 2013 No. 1 overall pick who’d had a miserable rookie year, would go to Minnesota. Wiggins, the Cavs’ prized pick who only a few weeks ago was being counted on to be a foundational piece, would be traded with him. Cleveland would also send the Wolves the Miami Heat’s 2015 first-round pick, the last piece of silver the Cavs had from the James sign-and-trade deal back in 2010. It was symbolic in a way that the Cavs were using something they got from the Heat to help rebuild the team around James, and a fact that only rubbed salt in the wounds in Miami.
It was an excellent haul for the Wolves but not something the Cavs were focusing on. It came with a tinge of melancholy, losing Wiggins, plus what they were going to have to put him through over the following month.
Never before had anything like this ever happened, a No. 1 overall pick traded just a few weeks after being selected. Making it more difficult, the rules and pacing of the summer schedule weren’t designed for such a situation, which ended up making it miserable for the nineteen-year-old Wiggins.
The Cavs had explored trades where they could have executed the deal immediately, but the Wolves wanted to take back as little salary as possible. That meant the Cavs would need to sign Wiggins so his salary could be used to make the trade work under league rules. NBA trades require the exchanging salaries be within 25 percent of each other, and draft picks who haven’t signed don’t count. There is another rule that says draft picks can’t be traded until thirty days after they sign.
Finally, on July 24, Wiggins signed a four-year, $24.8 million contract with the Cavs knowing that he’d never play for them. The Cavs then did what James had essentially done with his letter two weeks earlier—they scrubbed Wiggins from as many promotional materials as possible while at the same time refusing to publicly discuss Love. Within a week, Wiggins’s Cavs jersey had been discontinued at the NBA’s website.
In early August, Wiggins had to go through an uncomfortable week at the league’s rookie transition program in New York, wearing Cavs jerseys for photos even though he knew he was being traded. He attended a required photo session for the league’s official trading cards despite the fact that the pictures would soon be obsolete. He did an interview with SportsCenter and had to deal with the uncomfortable questions. He summed it up by saying, “I just want to play for a team that wants me. So, whichever team wants me, I’ll play for.”
By the second week in August the pretense that Love wasn’t already a Cav had essentially been dropped. Glen Taylor, the Wolves’ owner, said in an interview that Love would be traded on August 23. Though he didn’t say where, that was the first date Wiggins was eligible to be dealt, and it was clear.
When the deal was official, Taylor fired off a few salvos to kick Love on the way out the door. “I think he’s around a couple guys who are awful good,” he said. “Now, I’m not saying that Kevin’s not good, but I think where maybe he got away with some stuff, not playing defense on our team, I’m not sure how that’s going to work in Cleveland. So I would guess they’re going to ask him to play more defense. And he’s foul-prone. I question if this is going to be the best deal for Kevin because I think he’s going to be the third player on a team. I don’t think he’s going to get a lot of credit if they do really well. I think he’ll get the blame if they don’t do well. He’s going to have to learn to handle that.”
Taylor also questioned the Cavs for being interested in a player who missed 112 games due to injury in his six years in Minnesota, though he averaged 26 points and 12.5 rebounds per game in his last season there.
On August 8, James took part in a formal welcoming party when more than 25,000 fans attended a rally at the University of Akron’s football stadium. The event was wrapped around James’s annual foundation gathering, which was aimed at keeping at-risk children in his hometown in school. It was his first public appearance since re-signing with the Cavs.
The evening was emotional and highly produced. After several speakers, James emerged like a boxer with his family as an entourage as he performed a slow lap around the stadium waving to fans. Awing the crowd, singer Skylar Grey suddenly appeared onstage with a grand piano to play her hit song “I’m Coming Home,” which had become an anthem of sorts for James over the previous month.
James then took the stage and made a speech, which he concluded with “I love you, I’m back.” He dropped the microphone on the stage and immediately a fireworks show started over the stadium, completing the moment.
But he also made it clear that night that he’d soon have a new teammate, Love, even if it was supposed to be a forbidden topic, openly saying, “I’m going to be very excited to have him.”
Meanwhile, Love kept a low profile and wasn’t able to talk to anyone about what was happening. To pass time, he started working through a list of the 250 greatest movies of all time, watching 40 of them. He watched every episode of Seinfeld. He later said he felt like he was in purgatory.
The ruse mercifully ended on August 23 as the Cavs and Wolves made the deal official. It had been settled for so long that the Wolves had already agreed to trade the draft pick the Cavs were sending them to Philadelphia for veteran forward Thaddeus Young, another player who found himself caught in bureaucracy of waiting for the moment when Wiggins was eligible to be traded.
Three days later, Love arrived for his press conference wearing a dark three-piece suit with a lavender tie. He’d been in Cleveland for days already. He had already found a place to live, an apartment in a high-end downtown building, because he’d had weeks to look. Smiling with his new jersey, No. 0, Love said he was committed to being in Cleveland for the long term, a mantra he would repeat over and over for the next eleven months.
It had been a hundred days since the end of the season, a little over three months since Griffin had officially been made the general manager. Only weeks earlier the team was getting told no by their top coaching candidates, and were politely told to forget about trading for Love. They’d even put their elaborate plan of getting James on a back burner.
“We seem to be doing quite a bit of these this summer and I think it’s a good thing,” Griffin said with a smile as he kicked off Love’s introductory press conference. “This is an exciting time for the franchise. This is really special for all of us.”
The memory of Griffin sitting in the same spot explaining why the team had fired another coach and talking brashly about the team’s plans had already faded from memory.
Target acquisition mode indeed.