The rooftop pool at the five-star Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills has twelve private cabanas, each with its own flatscreen, sound system, and telephone for ordering refreshments from the adjacent juice bar. It has long been a popular spot for secretive meetings because of its seclusion and amenities. LeBron James often used the hotel as a Los Angeles base during the summer months. Even after he bought a $21 million six-bedroom mansion in nearby Brentwood in 2015, he frequently returned to the rooftop restaurant and pool.
On a sunny day in late June, less than two weeks after the Cavs’ season ended and three days before the start of free agency, James and some friends rented out several of the cabanas for an afternoon of relaxation. James was in town on Nike business and enjoying some rest before starting offseason workouts.
Kevin Love arrived and grabbed a chair from a cabana next door and pulled it over to sit next to James, who was expecting him. The meeting had been arranged and was informal but still important. The loss to the Warriors was still raw and his shoulder was still healing. Several days earlier, before he left Cleveland for the summer, Love had met with David Griffin and they discussed his big free agent decision that was coming up. For nearly a year, Love had professed he never wanted to leave Cleveland and he intended to re-sign long-term. Over and over he was asked about it, and over and over he repeated versions of the same answer: He planned to stay. He had discussed his contract with teammates, and when he talked about options, it was usually about how long a deal to sign, not where he would sign.
Love told Griffin he wanted to have a meeting with James before he made a decision. Griffin wouldn’t make a formal offer until after July 1, but it was clear the Cavs were prepared to give Love a maximum contract offer. Numerous teams had coveted Love for years, including the Lakers. There would’ve been a great deal to consider, especially considering the various little dustups Love had had with James and David Blatt during his transitional season. But his mind was essentially made up.
In the aftermath of Game 1 of the Finals, the night when Kyrie Irving limped out of the arena after a bitter overtime loss, Love sat in a corner with a smirk on his face and a light in his eyes. “I want to be in a moment like that, I’ve never wanted to be in a game more than that one,” he said in an interview with ESPN after the game. He may have already been close in his mind, but seeing, if not touching, a Finals game had convinced him he couldn’t go back to a non-contender as he’d lived with for years in Minnesota. He was going to stay.
Even as speculation raged about what teams Love might consider, all he wanted was to have an air-clearing session with James as the final step. When they found out they were going to be in L.A., James invited Love to the Peninsula.
“He wanted to have a sitdown with me and talk about everything,” James said. “He wanted to talk about the season, what could happen with the team going forward. I was absolutely open to it. I was one of the people that wanted him there when we made the trade. The fact that he committed to us let me know the type of guy we have.”
Love was in a moment NBA players dream about, an unrestricted free agent with huge offers about to come from teams across the league. He was about to bypass all the other options. Before he did, he wanted to get a feel for where James was. Because James too was about to become an unrestricted free agent. Several days after the Finals, he informed the Cavs that he was not picking up his player option and would hit the market. The assumption was he’d re-sign as well. Love, who was also about to pass on a player option, wanted to make sure James was staying and how he felt about their partnership continuing.
“A lot of stuff was very honest, and we came to a really good place and we agreed on a lot of things, so I think that was also a very big deal when you’re talking to the best player in the world,” Love said. “Truthfully, I expressed this to LeBron, and he’d been through [free agency] a couple of times. Now, I could actually go wherever I want and pick the team I want to play for. But every time I went through the different scenarios, I always came out at the same place, and that was to be in Cleveland and try to win championships. I would be able to really help this team win, and going forward make a very big impact on this team and on this city, trying to bring home a championship or championships.”
James and Love parted on good terms. Both had decided, even as they basked in the L.A. sun, that they’d be staying in Cleveland. On July 1, even with teams bombarding his agent to set up pitch meetings, Love agreed to a five-year, $112 million deal to stay with the Cavs. After trading away Andrew Wiggins, who’d subsequently gone on to win Rookie of the Year with the Timberwolves, getting Love to commit long-term to stay was a huge victory for the team. Especially after his first season hardly went to script.
With little fanfare, James let the team know he’d be re-signing and eventually did a one-year deal as he had the season before.
These were the important decisions for the Cavs, although they were in the players’ hands and not the team’s. But Griffin’s work was far from over. The roster was littered with free agents—Iman Shumpert, Tristan Thompson, J. R. Smith, and postseason hero Matthew Dellavedova in addition to James and Love.
The contract extension Kyrie Irving had signed the season before was set to kick in on July 1, more than doubling his salary from $7 million to $14.7 million. Love’s new deal raised his salary from $15.7 million to $19.5 million. James’s salary went from $20.6 million to $22.9 million. Owner Dan Gilbert was thrilled his stars were locked down and was happy to sign off. Those new star deals added $14 million to the payroll from the year before, and all the other free agents were anxious to get large raises as well.
The previous December, Griffin had prioritized getting Shumpert in a trade with Smith as a throw-in piece. Smith had proved he was more valuable than that. His playoffs were uneven—the suspension and an ill-timed shooting slump in the Finals left a sour taste—but he’d made a generally positive impact. But it was Shumpert, who was younger and seen as a better defender, that the team had prioritized all along. When Griffin and Gilbert mapped out their offseason strategy, they decided to focus on locking down Shumpert over Smith.
In the first moments of free agency, the Portland Trail Blazers agreed to a four-year, $30 million contract with journeyman small forward Al-Farouq Aminu, who’d averaged 10 points and nine rebounds a game the previous season in Dallas while playing for less than a million dollars. It stunned the market and shook the Cavs a little. They’d projected Shumpert on a higher level, and with Aminu setting the market fast, they realized Shumpert was going to be more expensive. Shumpert was a restricted free agent, meaning the Cavs had the right to match any offer. But instead of letting him test the market, they quickly increased their offer. Before the sun set on the first day of free agency, Shumpert had agreed to a four-year, $40 million deal even though he’d averaged just nine points and five rebounds during the playoffs. It represented a $6.3 million raise, kicking Gilbert’s payroll additions to more than $20 million for the upcoming season. It also pushed the team into the luxury tax, meaning it would cost millions more.
The huge new outlay had consequences. The team had an option for the following season on Timofey Mozgov. In meetings, members of the front office pondered not picking up the $4.9 million option and looking to negotiate a new, longer contract. But with so much money coming on the books, the team was wary of adding more.
Dellavedova was caught in the same situation. Like Shumpert, he was a restricted free agent. He and his representatives were looking to cash in on his amazing postseason run. They were hoping for a three-year deal for between $3 and $4 million per year. Ultimately the Cavs didn’t do the long-term deal and instead got Dellavedova to accept a one-year, $1.2 million deal so he could be a free agent again the next year. It worked out for both as both Mozgov and Dellavedova ended up signing huge free agent contracts a year later in 2016.
It was not so simple with the remaining restricted free agent, Thompson. He’d proven to be a valuable role player because of his rebounding and defensive abilities. Just twenty-four and a big man, Thompson had plenty of value. He also hadn’t missed a game in three and a half seasons, a reliability that was almost unmatched in the league.
Thompson had something that was hard to quantify but relevant in this situation—he was excellent playing alongside James. He was a strong screen setter and could free James with a pick and then roll to the rim to grab offensive rebounds. His quickness for his size made it easier to play smaller and quicker lineups that favored James, because Thompson was effective in switching to smaller players on defense. Finding these sorts of partners was valuable for James, but it wasn’t valuable to the entire league, which set the stage for a complex negotiation for Thompson.
In the fall of 2014 as he was about to start his first season with James, Thompson and the Cavs had contract extension talks that failed. On October 31, the deadline for players to extend their contracts, the team offered Thompson a four-year, $50 million deal. He’d averaged 11.7 points and nine rebounds the season before, strong numbers but not star quality. He was represented by Rich Paul and Mark Termini, the same agents who had put together James’s deal to return to the Cavs. Paul and Termini had done extensive research and salary-cap projections and they believed Thompson could get more if he waited until he got to the open market the following summer. They advised him to turn down the deal and he did.
That night, Thompson had 16 points and 13 rebounds in a win in Chicago. As Blatt was in the hallway telling people it wasn’t really his first career win, Thompson sat at his locker and looked at texts from Paul. Part owner Nate Forbes, who sometimes handled contract talks, had made a final offer, pushing the total to $52 million. Thompson and his agents again said no. The number eventually leaked to the media and there was surprise that Thompson had turned down so much money. As the season went along he was heckled by fans about it, especially when he had an off night. Sometimes even rival players would pester him, often to try to get under his skin at the free throw line.
Thompson then played all 82 games again, and his offensive rebounding in the playoffs plus his ability to guard a variety of positions was vital for Blatt’s game plans after the team lost Love to injury. He’d bet on himself and it was looking like it paid off. The turned-down $52 million over four years was forgotten and the Cavs started new five-year offers at more than $70 million. Thompson again said no. Paul and Termini had another number in mind: around $90 million over five years.
The Cavs, with so much money already committed, froze. As they had matching rights, the team knew it could still keep Thompson if another team made such an offer. But other teams, seeing how much the Cavs were spending, believed they would match and none made an offer. By mid-July, talks had broken off and the sides settled into a stalemate.
Other moves happened. Shawn Marion retired and Mike Miller, looking for a bigger role elsewhere, was traded. The Cavs replaced them with Mo Williams, a veteran guard who played with the team from 2008 to 2011, and Richard Jefferson.
A star in his younger days with the New Jersey Nets, Jefferson had transitioned to a valued role player. He’d committed to playing for the Dallas Mavericks, but when LA Clippers star DeAndre Jordan reneged on an agreement to sign there, Jefferson asked Mavs owner Mark Cuban to be let out of his agreement. Cuban obliged and Jefferson turned to Cleveland. After making the Finals his first two seasons in 2002 and 2003, Jefferson had not been back. He hoped James would be his ticket.
“I came to Cleveland for one reason,” he said. “To play with LeBron James.”
As Thompson waited the Cavs out, J. R. Smith was going through his own restless summer. He opted out of the final year of his contract, which had promised him $6.4 million. As he talked with the Cavs prior to the decision, they’d suggested he opt in. Smith believed he was in for a raise and so he opted out. Then the Cavs gave a big offer to Shumpert and not him. As the days in July passed, Smith watched as numerous other shooting guards got huge contracts. His phone didn’t ring.
“The market was going crazy, I mean it was ridiculous,” Smith said. “You see so many people getting paid. I started to look at myself in the mirror and was like, ‘Damn, am I really what everybody saying I am? Am I really a cancer?’ We’d just gotten to the Finals and I’m not trying to toot my horn, but I thought I’d had a major part in that.”
Smith had thought he’d proven to teams he was changed man. His friends believed it; that summer he surprised them when he broke up with a girlfriend and proposed to Jewel Harris, whom he’d dated on and off for years and with whom he had a seven-year-old daughter, Demi. Smith missed seeing his daughter regularly when he was traded to Cleveland, and it convinced him to focus on family. This was a compelling narrative of maturation, but teams just remembered him getting suspended for that wicked elbow in the playoffs a few months before.
In early September, Smith accepted a one-year offer from the Cavs for $5 million, a pay cut. Shortly thereafter, he fired his agent. But he really didn’t have many options other than trying to prove himself again. At age thirty, he’d gotten tired of it.
A week after signing, Smith flew to Miami, where he joined his Cavs teammates at a three-day minicamp that was put together by James. It had become commonplace for teams to hold informal training sessions in the summer, often in places that doubled as vacation spots for players, like Southern California, Florida, or New York. But this was no vacation. The veteran players who arrived at the University of Miami, where James had set up full use of the facilities, expecting some scrimmaging and shooting while music was blaring, were surprised. There were drills, weight training sessions, and two-a-day workouts. It was organized like a real training camp with Cavs coaches there observing.
On the sidelines doing some very light work was Irving, who had rented a home in Miami to do rehab on his knee after the June surgery. So was Love, still in the midst of rehab on his left shoulder from his May surgery. It was clear that both were quite some time away from being able to play, especially Irving, whose progress was slow.
Thompson wasn’t there. Even though James and Thompson were both represented by Paul, James stayed out of the contract dispute other than to make some public comments that the team needed him back. A perception existed that James ran the Cavs front office, fostered after his influence in executing the Wiggins-for-Love trade became known. Gilbert and Griffin chafed at this and so did James and Paul, who was establishing a reputation as an agent independent of James. In all honesty, had James truly been running the Cavs, Blatt likely would’ve been fired early in the 2014–15 season and Thompson would probably have had a contract on July 1 along with Love and Shumpert.
James was irked at the coverage of his treatment of Blatt during the previous season, accurate or not. In mid-July, he attended a Summer League game in Las Vegas where Blatt was working with some of the team’s young players. James walked up to Blatt during the game, embraced him, and sat down beside him in a very public manner. There was a lot of surprise at the moment, including from Blatt, who’d just barely survived months of James’s challenges.
So Blatt was back for a second season but Thompson was not. In 2007, two years after Gilbert bought the Cavs, two unsigned restricted free agents skipped all of training camp in contract impasses. Sasha Pavlovic, a role-playing wing, ended up signing just before the start of the season. Anderson Varejão, who was still on the team, ended up not signing until December. Also involved was Termini, who represented Jim Jackson when he held out of the first 54 games of his rookie season with the Dallas Mavericks in 1992 in a contract dispute. These were two sides who weren’t afraid to dig in.
A problem for the Cavs was their leverage was limited by injuries. Love was still hurt, Varejão was recovering from his Achilles’ surgery the previous year, and in the offseason, Mozgov had knee surgery and was entering camp out of shape and sluggish. After the workouts in Miami, Shumpert went back to his home in Atlanta and snapped a ligament in his wrist while dunking, requiring surgery that would keep him out several months. James’s back was also a concern as camp started. And there was the springy and energetic Thompson, who hadn’t missed a game in nearly four seasons.
Paul attempted to maneuver in the talks, dropping requests for a five-year deal and instead asking the Cavs for a three-year deal worth $53 million. This offer, at $17.6 million per season, was still higher than the Cavs were willing to go. Another issue was the Cavs wanted to have a team option year or non-guaranteed money at the end of the deal. So while they upped their offer to $80 million over five years, it wasn’t all guaranteed. The stalemate extended.
Finally, with just days to go before the start of the regular season, the sides found their common ground. Thompson got a five-year deal for $82 million, all of it guaranteed. It was for $30 million more than he’d turned down 12 months before.
When the numbers were totaled up, Gilbert had green-lit $290 million in guarantees to Love, James, Shumpert, Thompson, and Smith, and that didn’t count Irving’s new deal, which technically had been signed a year earlier. The Cavs were facing a luxury tax bill of $60 million, the second-highest ever. The promise Gilbert had made to James when they met near Fort Lauderdale in early July 2014 was being kept: The billionaire was going deep into his coffers to pay to put a high-priced team around James.
The night the deal was completed, Gilbert stepped onstage at an event for season ticket holders. He told the crowd the news without mentioning the salary number they’d all been reading on their phones. “I gave David Griffin and Nate Forbes an unlimited budget,” he said. “And they exceeded it.”
One thing the reassembled Cavs couldn’t exceed was expectations. For months as their players healed from surgeries, they quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—complained that their loss to the Warriors had been a matter of bad luck. With the team loaded and its health coming back, Gilbert had put them in a position where they no longer were going to have any excuse.
The Cavs had bristled watching the Warriors celebrate, feeling there was an unfairness they couldn’t do anything about. “We ran out of talent,” James told USA Today in an interview about the loss. “There was a lot of talent sitting in suits. I’ve been watching basketball for a long time, I’m a historian of the game. I don’t know any other team that’s gotten to the Finals without two All-Stars.”
James’s implication was that they’d faced extreme, in his mind historic, obstacles. The Warriors had been fully healthy throughout the season and the playoffs. Not only had they played the injury-riddled Cavs, but some of their other opponents had had significant injuries as well.
Irving took it a step further. “I felt like we would have definitely won an NBA championship if everyone was healthy,” he said. “But almost doesn’t count.”
The concept of luck playing a role upset the Warriors, who felt they’d been the best team from the start of the season. They felt as if some, including the Cavs, were attaching an asterisk to their accomplishment. It was apparent the Warriors were paying attention to the slights, almost keeping track of them. It’s sometimes challenging for the defending champions to come back the following season with the same focus. In this case, the veiled shots at their legitimacy provided a fresh layer of motivation to see the Cavs again.
“I apologize for us being healthy. I apologize for us playing who was in front of us. I apologize for all the accolades we received as a team and individually,” Steph Curry said. “I’m very, truly sorry, and we’ll rectify that situation this year.”
Interestingly, the Cavs felt the same way.