On the first day of training camp in September 2014, LeBron James asked new coach David Blatt if he could hold a players-only meeting before practice. Blatt hadn’t planned for it and it put him behind in his practice schedule for his first day. But he granted the request, and for more than a half hour, Blatt and his coaches and staff wandered around the floor killing time as James spoke to his new teammates.
James had two primary messages. One was to set a tone that when issues came up during the season, it was vital to keep them in house. He knew from experience there would be intense media coverage and essentially wanted no leaks. James himself, though, didn’t always follow this mandate. Then he went player to player and told them what he expected their role to be on the team. Role definition is important in the NBA; players desire clarity. It’s not uncommon for roles to be discussed in front of the group, and the veterans had been through these sessions before. Only never was a player leading the meeting, it was always the coach. James had put a lot of thought into his comments, and he had a role for everyone, even the young camp invitees who were there primarily as practice bodies.
James never would’ve attempted something like this in his first tenure with the Cavs. It was his way of showing confidence and leadership. Whether he intended it or not, though, it also sent a message about the coach. James didn’t wait to see if Blatt was going to say these things; he did it first.
After he’d signed, James spent almost no time with Blatt during the summer. They didn’t meet face-to-face for nearly a month afterward. It happened on the set of the movie Trainwreck in New York City. James talked with Blatt between scenes. He told him that he’d been watching film of Blatt’s offense on YouTube.
James’s early days with new coaches had sometimes been trying. His first weeks with Mike Krzyzewski, who coached him over four summers with Team USA, were rocky. His first months with Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra were a challenge, and even after they’d won two titles together, their relationship remained sensitive. James was hard on coaches, even those with lots of NBA experience.
James also was great for them. He’d been a reason they’d gotten contract extensions, awards, or their next job. Not to mention rings and medals. Generally, most found it a palatable and profitable bargain, even if some days were miserable. Mike Brown, who coached James for five years, said he appreciated James “allowing me to coach him.” He was questioned for that sentiment and called weak in some circles. But it was a comment based in reality.
During Summer League the previous July, Cavs executives had been impressed with Blatt’s coaching, both in games and practices. He had a different yet skilled way of teaching and running plays, and it was refreshing. After games when the front office would have debriefing sessions at Vegas restaurants, they started to believe they indeed had found a possible difference-making coach. Then again, he was coaching rookies and free agents, and the star he’d tried to bond with, Andrew Wiggins, had been traded.
Blatt thought his forays into almost every league in Europe prepared him for anything. But he’d never dealt with a force like James, and it became evident that first day. As Blatt struggled a little bit in the early going, he sometimes made it worse with behavior that ruffled players, and he and James failed to develop a reliable working relationship.
Just two weeks into camp, the team departed on what promised to be a bonding experience. After a home preseason game, the team took a chartered 777 from Cleveland on an overnight flight to Rio de Janeiro. But instead of sleeping, many players gathered around the first-class cabin in the wide-body jet telling stories and laughing for much of the ten-hour trip. Kevin Love later described it as being like the first day of school.
Their first morning in the city found James exercising along Copacabana Beach in what looked like a shoe commercial coming to life. Here was James running along the coastline with a pack of joggers, some perhaps recognizing him and others just wondering what the commotion was, growing behind him. He followed it with a beach workout with Tristan Thompson and Dion Waiters, the team’s mercurial guard, whom James had made a personal project.
The Cavs were in Brazil to play an exhibition as part of the NBA’s Global Games series, where they export teams each preseason. But it was awkward—the Miami Heat were in town too. James had broken some of the ice a month before when he attended Dwyane Wade’s wedding at a castle in Miami with most of the Heat franchise also in attendance, but it was still uncomfortable.
As he evaluated his former teammate’s new situation, Chris Bosh gave it a dose of knowing skepticism. Bosh, who re-signed with the Heat after James left, was closely watching Love’s situation. Bosh’s game is similar to Love’s, and in some ways so is his laid-back demeanor. He predicted Love would be in for some challenges, much like Bosh was when he was thrust from a starring role into a supporting role next to James four years earlier.
“It’s going to be very difficult for him,” Bosh told Bleacher Report in an interview that week. “Even if I was in his corner and I was able to tell him what to expect and what to do, it still doesn’t make any difference. You just get your entree and that’s it. 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! It’s a lot different.”
It echoed the warning Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor issued when he traded Love to Cleveland. Taylor predicted Love would be a target for blame as the third wheel.
Running practices in an antiquated Rio gymnasium that reminded him of some of the dank spaces he used to work in at his lesser stops in Europe, Blatt seemed to be at ease. The early returns from the players on Blatt, just as with Cavs management, seemed positive. Players had prepared themselves for some of the authoritarian Blatt they’d heard about from European contacts, but that wasn’t who they were encountering.
Blatt had gone to Princeton, where he studied literature and played under Pete Carril, who is credited with perfecting the Princeton offense with all its backcuts and ball movement. Blatt was not a standout player by any means; his stats were anemic and he couldn’t even shoot free throws. But Carril trusted him and he knew the game. Blatt was named captain as a senior.
In the first weeks of the preseason, Blatt was teaching his players what essentially could be termed a modified Princeton-style offense, which used some of Carril’s principles but was geared for more talented players. Though the Princeton offense is hardly a revolutionary concept, players hadn’t quite seen anything like it.
“His offensive stuff is borderline genius,” Mike Miller said after a few days of practice. “It takes a little time, but you see why he’s done such a good job leading teams to championships. He’s a good coach.”
“People always say the Princeton when you have four guys above the free throw line. A lot of teams have played it in the past,” James said. “There’s a lot more options to this than I’m used to seeing.”
During the preseason game in Rio, the Cavs ran some of Blatt’s plays to perfection. Much of the action was set up that night for center Anderson Varejão, the Brazilian native who was being honored during the team’s time in his home country. Varejão joined the Cavs in 2004 and quickly made a name for himself as a hustler and rebounder but also as a flopper. He was one of the best in the league at exaggerating contact. He’d been with the team for ten years now and was popular for his style of play and his mop of curly reddish-brown hair.
At one point during the game James appeared for a moment to forget which team he was on. While playing defense, he jumped out and essentially screened new teammate Matthew Dellavedova while former teammate Norris Cole had the ball as he’d done hundreds of times over the previous few seasons. Dellavedova was certainly caught off guard. But James said it was just a miscommunication on a basic defensive maneuver—which was certainly possible—and mocked anyone who thought differently.
“Non-basketball people, they like to critique everything that I do,” James said. “It’s stupid.”
James’s experience told him, however, the critiques were just beginning and plenty more would be arriving when the team got back to the United States. And he was right.
The first game of the 2014–15 season was momentous. The restaurants and bars in Cleveland were packed. ESPN set up a stage on West 4th Street, a popular pedestrian plaza, for a day full of coverage. A new ten-story-tall Nike billboard featuring James was installed across the street from the arena four years after the previous iconic banner was quickly disassembled after James’s free agency departure. On the new one, James’s arms are spread with his back to the street and “Cleveland” across the back of his uniform. During the day, hundreds of fans posed for photos in front of the football-field-sized structure. The energy in the arena at tip-off, where James caused a frenzy when he brought back his once signature move of tossing chalk into the air, was extraordinary.
The game, however, did not live up to the moment. The Cavs played sloppily and were out-executed by the visiting New York Knicks. Carmelo Anthony, who had re-signed with the Knicks the previous summer, outplayed his friend James and the Cavs lost, 95–90. James had 17 points, well below his standard, and turned the ball over eight times, including two in the fourth quarter that crushed his team’s chances.
Then, in an event that would become commonplace, James and Blatt seemed to be on different pages when it came to reviewing what happened. Blatt suggested, reasonably, that the emotions of the night had affected James negatively. James, a veteran of many emotional games, denied it and said unfamiliarity with teammates caused most of the issues.
The team flew to Chicago after the game for the next night against the Bulls. Late the next morning, the team had a breakfast meeting in a hotel ballroom, standard for such situations. As the team went over film and that evening’s game plan, Blatt chided the players for their poor play the night before. His tone was harsh and perhaps a bit aggressive for it being the second day of the season, but not something out of the ordinary for a coach upset over a poor regular-season performance.
That night, the Cavs did play much better, starting with James. He was more under control and confident, scoring 36 points as the Cavs won, 114–108, in overtime. The Bulls were expected to be a team that would compete with the Cavs to win the Eastern Conference. So this was a quality victory, even though the Bulls lost star Derrick Rose with a sprained ankle.
James waited for Blatt at the final buzzer and congratulated him on his first win with a hug. When Blatt arrived in the locker room he praised the team for executing much better than the previous game and concluded his remarks with “good for you” as he turned to leave. In unison, players called for him to stop. Irving had grabbed the game ball and had it ready for Blatt. The players gathered around him as Irving presented it and they began rubbing Blatt’s head in a sign of congratulations.
“That was a big win for him,” Thompson said. “We messed up his hairdo.”
“That’s his first NBA win,” Irving said. “He deserves the game ball. It’s his first time in the NBA. I call him the virgin of the NBA.”
Blatt did not feel like a virgin, though. Not at all. A few moments later he stepped into the hall to meet with the media and attempted to fix his hair.
“You know, I didn’t even think about it,” he said regarding his first win. “That was so beautiful what LeBron did right after the game, what the team did in the locker room.”
He could’ve left it there. It was a nice gesture from team to coach, a bonding moment. But Blatt had something he wanted to point out and he did.
“You know, the funny thing about that is, not all of you know me that well, but I’ve probably won about 700 games in my career. Just none of them have been here,” he said. “So, it was a little bit odd on one hand, but that’s the first NBA game and that’s a bit of history for my friends and my family, and I’m glad I did it with the Cleveland Cavaliers.”
Since the day he’d been hired, Blatt had routinely pointed out how his experience in Europe was applicable to the NBA. He frequently told players how certain situations were similar to those in Europe. While these were valid points, in general European accomplishments were not valued greatly in the NBA. Not only did few fans or players track what happened in the EuroLeague, but it was regarded as a lesser league. This was in part because over the previous decade numerous players who’d been stars in Europe had come to the NBA and struggled. Blatt’s European success, fair or not, was deemed to have been achieved in a minor league.
Blatt’s sentiment somewhat undercut what the players had done to make the night special. The divide between him and the players on this issue ended up becoming symbolic. Players viewed Blatt essentially as a rookie NBA coach. Blatt saw himself as experienced as any of the head coaches in the league—actually, one of the most experienced in the world.
Then Blatt said something else that would become a touchstone. He said he’d ripped into the players during that morning meeting at the hotel and that the team had “responded beautifully” to his lashing. When the locker room opened for interviews, instead of the focus being the bounce-back win and how the team had celebrated earning the coach his first victory, players were being asked about how Blatt’s morning speech had led to their better play.
“He got on us from the time we started our meeting to the time we left. And it’s great. For a team like us, we need that. I love constructive criticism,” James said as he soaked his feet in ice after the game. “I never took it personal. It’s just an opportunity for us to get better, and it definitely put a fire into us.”
James and others were diplomatic. But privately they wondered how the subject had become Blatt’s speech from twelve hours earlier. The joy of victory in the league is often fleeting, part of the nature of the relentless schedule, and the Cavs were facing a three-game western trip. But the joy of this win diminished more quickly than usual and players were wondering about the way Blatt handled what should’ve been a good night.
That too proved to be an indicator of things to come.
The team flew to Portland to open their first long trip and were blown out, 101–82, by the Trail Blazers. As the game unfolded, James began to disconnect from his teammates. Irving and Waiters kept taking shots out of the flow of the offense and at times essentially stopped making passes. James watched with growing dismay and eventually started what looked like a boycott. As the Blazers built a huge lead, he started standing in the corner, a few feet from the Cavs bench, watching Waiters and Irving bomb away. He didn’t say a word and sometimes would run to the spot without even looking back to see if someone wanted to pass him the ball.
Blatt called several timeouts, but nothing he said in the huddle seemed to change anything. When it was over, James had gone scoreless in the second half and taken just four shots. He finished the game with 11 points, his fewest in a regular-season game in nearly six years. Irving had taken 10 second-half shots, missing eight. Waiters had taken nine, missing six. Neither had an assist. Of the team’s six assists in the second half, James had three of them.
James didn’t display anger in the locker room. The mood was downtrodden. Dellavedova sat on the training table getting his knee examined. He’d sprained it. James looked around and made some rather somber proclamations as he tried to explain why he’d been so passive.
“It’s going to be a long process, man. There’s been a lot of losing basketball around here for a few years,” he said. “There’s a lot of bad habits; a lot of bad habits have been built up over the last couple of years and when you play that style of basketball it takes a lot to get it up out of you.”
James had just witnessed what had driven coach Mike Brown mad the year before: Irving and Waiters ball hogging and not playing together. The preseason was devoid of these sorts of moments. Waiters, whom James had been trying to mentor, had been on better behavior. Now James was giving a lecture to both Irving and Waiters and doing so in front of the microphones.
“I’m here to help and that’s what it’s about,” James said, brightening a little. “For me, it’s like building a car from scratch. I’ve done that before. I hated the process, it got on my nerves, I sent it back to get repainted a hundred times, and it came back and it still wasn’t done right. Once it was completely finished, you’re excited about it. So that’s what it feels like.”
James was the last out of the Cavs locker room, the bus to the airport waiting for him in the loading dock. The Cavs flew to Salt Lake City, not landing until after 2 a.m. as they faced having to play another back-to-back against the Utah Jazz that night. On the flight, James pondered what he needed to do. Already, he was feeling problems. He’d already become perplexed by his coach. And he was already resorting to tough love for Irving and Waiters. He was beginning to realize this was going to be a tougher job than he’d first thought, breaking this team of bad habits.
The next night, he went through his extensive pregame stretching routine, being twisted, turned, bent by trainer Mike Mancias. As they went through the process, James kept his eyes closed and bounced his head as he listened to music through a pair of customized Beats headphones. Three months earlier, Apple had closed its $3 billion purchase of Beats. James had equity in the company and realized more than $35 million personally out of the transaction. It was a reminder that even on tough days, James often comes out the winner.
“I’ve had two games where I’ve played a little passive and been more of a setup guy and it’s resulted in two losses. And I’ve had a game where I’ve been very aggressive and we won,” James said as he put on his uniform, explaining what was going through his head. “It’s a fine line. Is winning the ultimate thing? Is being the best we can be as a team or winning one game better? It’s something that’s going on in my mind right now, I’m trying to figure out.”
James was asked if he’d talked to his teammates about it, especially after he’d gone public the night before with rather pointed quotes that seemed to be fingering Irving and Waiters for hogging the ball.
“I don’t know if the guys saw it, but I continue to preach it and they will get it,” he said. “No need to tell them. It’s not the time for it.”
He was then asked if he’d talked to his coach about the issues he was seeing and dealing with.
“I didn’t look for his guidance,” James said.
From the first day of practice, James had set the tone that he planned to operate independently of Blatt at times. It’s not unusual for a star and a coach to be on different wavelengths, but it was also clear Blatt wasn’t being made a partner as James was evaluating how to go about sending messages. The coach was left to read James’s quotes and try to guess like everyone else.
“I think what he’s referring to is just having a winning tradition to hang your hat on and to be able to get through things because of that,” Blatt said. “I really think that’s what he’s referring to more than anything else. You got kids? Then you know the answer. I’ve got four, I taught a lot of them. You watch. You show. You speak. You use examples. You hug. You never hit. But you do admonish. How’s that?”
Blatt smiled as he said it, happy with his metaphor but also with a little acknowledgment he was trying to sell the concept to the media he knew exactly what James was doing. In fact, he did not. There was no doubt he recognized the issues James was talking about. At the film session that morning he’d stressed the need for the Cavs guards to set up the forwards, James and Love. And that night he took Waiters out of the starting lineup for good and replaced him with respected veteran Shawn Marion, whom general manager David Griffin had brought in to add experience.
Waiters went to the locker room during the national anthem and starting lineup introductions that night. It looked like a form of protest, though he later gave several conflicting reasons why he’d left the floor. A few days later Blatt dismissed questions about Waiters losing his starting job. In a type of exchange that would become commonplace, where Blatt would pick seemingly needless fights with the media, he said that Waiters wasn’t a bench player.
“We didn’t move him to the bench,” he said. “I never saw guys that play as many minutes as Dion played as bench players. To me they’re just second starters.”
No matter how Blatt wanted to rebrand the concept of benching a player, Waiters never started another game in his time with the team.
The starting lineup became trivial when the team then suffered a brutal defeat to the Jazz. Gordon Hayward, the young forward whom the Cavs had been courting the previous summer before James made his move, made a jumper at the buzzer to win the game. James was guarding Hayward but got caught in a screen, as was the Jazz plan, and lost him. Thompson had scrambled and switched onto Hayward and was able to challenge the shot. Hayward just made a great shot, and the sold-out crowd thundered in response. The Cavs dragged themselves back to the locker room with a 1–3 record.
James was angry. But he was not angry about the loss. He was not angry that his man had scored the game-winning basket, though he grumbled Thompson needed to be quicker. He was not angry about his 31 points or Irving’s 34. Irving had made some fantastic plays as the team tried to pull off a second-half comeback; he scored 12 points in the fourth quarter alone.
No, what James focused on was seeing zero assists under Irving’s name. He’d had no assists in the second half in Portland. The Cavs had just six as a team for the entire game, the lowest in the history of the franchise, and James had four of them.
James approached Irving in the locker room. The night before, he’d tried to send a message through the media. Irving, it seemed, hadn’t gotten it. The 34 points were impressive, but what James perceived as continued ball hogging was a bigger issue. Irving seemingly had ignored Blatt’s strategy session too, but James wasn’t interested in involving the coach.
“He came up to me and was like, ‘One, you can never have another game with no assists. You can damn near have just one, two, three, but you can’t have zero.’ And I was like, ‘All right, cool, it won’t happen again,’” Irving told Cleveland.com.
James made it clear he did not re-sign with the Cavs because of the team they had, he did so because he felt a calling to come home and to change the viewpoint on his career. Privately, he believed Irving’s potential was attractive, but Irving’s re-signing to stay in Cleveland for five more years didn’t affect his feelings on his choice. However, the reality was James joined a team where Irving was the established star who had been at the centerpiece of everything.
James knew Irving was a potential superstar who could help him win, and, like he’d done in Miami with Wade, he was committed to finding a way to make things work. But it didn’t fully work in Miami until Wade willingly took a step back to allow James to be the central figure. Wade was older than James and already a champion with a secure legacy, none of which the much younger Irving had. Irving hadn’t made the choice to play with James as Wade did. When Irving signed his extension the previous July it was after he’d been sold on a vastly different scenario. Though playing with James had undeniable advantages, it was something that was forced on Irving. That awkwardness was manifesting itself quickly.
Leading up to the season, James and Wade had talked with each other about this dynamic. They were closer friends and had played together several times on Team USA before becoming Heat teammates. And yet there were still plenty of nights when they left the locker room upset with each other as they went through the process. Irving and James had no such background to lean on and they came from different eras. James grew up idolizing Michael Jordan, who ruled his teams with an iron hand and led by example and brute force. Irving grew up idolizing Kobe Bryant, who led by sheer will and often viewed his teammates as inferior and so just took what he felt was needed. It was clear the two Cavs had a journey to go together and the turbulence was arriving quickly.
“You know, LeBron can do it again, because he’s a little younger, but I wouldn’t want to do it all over again. That was a grind, man,” Wade told Bleacher Report about James having to go through another assimilation process with a fellow star. “It was a great grind, because we got success out of it. But I wouldn’t want to do it all over again. More kudos to him for doing it all over again. You’ve got to go through the same process, you know.”
As James left Salt Lake City, next stop Denver, he had some clarity. The fine line he was considering over the first week of the season got a little bolder in his mind. If Irving couldn’t be counted on to share the ball and if trying to force it with passivity didn’t work, James would move into active mode. It had started with his scolding of Irving in Utah and was soon to be followed up.
Irving did show a different mind-set in the game against the Nuggets; in fact, he broke his streak of 70 minutes without an assist just 90 seconds into the game when he set up Love for a basket. He only tried one shot in the first quarter and didn’t score. But James also grabbed the wheel. That night, a 110–101 win, James essentially took over much of the point guard duties from Irving. He had six assists in the first quarter alone and 11 for the game.
After the game, Blatt and James explained it was a strategy decision because of the style of defense the Nuggets used that night. It was one of the few things the coach and player agreed on over the following few weeks.
After the win in Denver, the Cavs launched into a four-game win streak. Irving kept passing the ball—he even had a nine-assist game—and it appeared the team was finding some rhythm. To get there, however, Blatt was riding his stars with heavy minutes. He slashed the playing time for Waiters and Mike Miller and started giving more to rookie Joe Harris, the team’s second-round pick from the previous summer. With Dellavedova out with the knee issue and Miller, Waiters, and even Marion struggling, the Cavs started to look like they had depth problems they hadn’t expected.
The winning streak ended with a sluggish home loss to the Nuggets, a team that had been 2–7. It kicked off a losing streak and a period of growing tension between James and Blatt as they traded a series of barbs.
After the loss, Blatt said the team “didn’t come with the proper mind-set and with the energy level that we had the other night and have had the last several games.”
James refuted Blatt’s analysis, saying, “I didn’t feel that. It’s easy to say that after the fact.”
The next day, James raised the issue of his minutes. This was often an evolving topic for him—for years he would express concern at minute totals, but he’d also sometimes not want to come out of games when he was on a hot streak. At that moment, though, he thought Blatt was playing all the stars too much. A few weeks into the season, James was third in the league in minutes at more than 41 a game. Irving and Love ranked fourth and fifth in minutes played. Some of the veterans James had brought in, specifically Miller and James Jones, weren’t playing much.
“I think we have to give our guys on the bench more of an opportunity. I looked at a stat and myself, Kyrie, and Kevin are three of the top five guys in the league in minutes per game,” James said. “That has to come down. I don’t want to do that all year… You want to be smart about it.”
Blatt again was on a different page. “Right now LeBron has said and has told me that he’s feeling good and he’s starting to feel his real game shape,” he said. “So this is not the time to think about resting him. He’s feeling good. Let’s not overlook the fact that he’s been playing great basketball and he looks good physically. He looks excellent. So for the foreseeable future we’re going to ride that.”
In a game that was deemed to be a possible Finals preview, the San Antonio Spurs came to Cleveland and beat the Cavs by two points. Blatt had heard LeBron’s comments and slashed his minutes to 34 after playing him more than 40 in seven of the previous nine games. But his rotations were all off as he sat James, Irving, and Love all at the same time, which didn’t make much strategic sense, and it twice led to Spurs runs. He played the rookie Harris the final 18 minutes of the game without substituting him, perhaps forgetting about it. Harris was gassed at the end and the Spurs’ Manu Ginobili beat him to score the game-winning points.
Late in the game, Blatt called several timeouts in succession. During one, James was talking with players without Blatt in the huddle. At one point, Blatt had to force his way in. This visual soon became a talking point, especially for those who remembered Blatt throwing players off the bench when they attempted to talk over him in the Olympics.
Eventually, the Cavs ran out of timeouts. Early in the season, Blatt relied on top assistant Ty Lue to help manage timeouts, which are handled differently than in Europe because some are compulsory at various stages of the game, tied to television commercials. There’s an art to it and some experience is needed, and Blatt was learning. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, one of the most experienced coaches in the world, perfectly managed his timeouts and had three available in the final minute.
On the deciding play of the game, James had to try to push the ball up the floor after a rebound with nine seconds left instead of perhaps using a timeout that could’ve been saved for such a situation. He turned the ball over and the Cavs lost.
After the game, when questioned on his timeout usage and his substitution patterns, Blatt hinted he shouldn’t be the one blamed for the loss. “I don’t take all the credit for anything,” he said. “I’d like not to take all the blame for everything, but that’s part of my job so I have to do that.”
James did take the blame for the turnover, but things were quickly getting to the point where James and Blatt appeared to be bickering via the media. They were having conversations before, after, and during practice, but it seemed both were satisfied in sending at least some messages indirectly. The chill started to become more clear.
The veteran Popovich was watching and, gracious in victory, he waved away the suggestion the Cavs were having problems. “They’re going to be one hell of a team. But it’s a new system, new bodies, and it doesn’t happen quickly,” he said. “I’m glad we played them now. They’ll be a whole lot tougher later on in the year.”
Then he reflected on what it was like when he was a first-year coach, as Blatt was dealing with, and he put it very succinctly. “You either know what you’re doing or you don’t,” Popovich said. “You either can develop or garner respect from players or know how to deal with a group and be able to lead it or not.”
Two days later, the Cavs were blown out by the Wizards in Washington. The body language of the team sagged, including James, who became visibly upset and didn’t run back on defense once when Waiters took an ill-advised three-pointer. Love scored just eight points, his fewest in two years. The Blatt offense that had flourished and been praised in the preseason was unrecognizable.
“We’re a little bit in the dark,” Blatt said, “and we’ve got to find our way out.”
As the Cavs rode the bus to Dulles International Airport for their charter flight home, James posted a message on his Twitter account that quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.” It didn’t exactly defuse the situation or help calm nerves that it was still so early in the season.
A day later, the Toronto Raptors blasted the Cavs by 17 points back in Cleveland, dropping their record to 5–7. The team’s reserves were outscored 91–25 over the two games. The front office had already started to realize the team wasn’t as deep as projected. General manager David Griffin believed he might have to make a trade during the season to add to the bench. That timetable looked like it had to be moved up. As Waiters had another subpar game—he scored just six points—Griffin and his staff began to discuss how they might be able to trade him.
James spent the last six minutes of the Raptor loss on the bench, staring out on the floor as Blatt stood silently. This wasn’t going how any of them thought.
“We’re a very fragile team right now. Any little adversity hits us we shell up,” James said. “But I’m very optimistic. I’m very positive, more positive than I thought I’d be right now.”
James was positive because as he’d sat there on the bench he’d gotten closer to making a decision. He was about to make a change. He was about to execute a bloodless coup. His star teammate, Irving, didn’t know it. Neither did his coach.
“Nah, I can do it on my own,” James said later. “I’m past those days where I have to ask.”