Kyrie Irving was gulping for air, his chest burning so badly from exertion that he fouled Jimmy Butler, the Chicago Bulls’ All-Star guard, out of fatigue so he could get out of the game. When he got to the bench, Kevin Love was already sitting there with the same symptoms.
A few seconds later there was LeBron James slumping onto a chair near him, chest heaving and asking for the water bottle. There were five minutes left in the first quarter; why were all of the Cavs stars on the bench?
“We’re not in good enough shape right now to play the way I want to play,” Ty Lue said, explaining why his players were gassed moments into his first game as coach.
Lue’s first forty-eight hours on the job were forceful. He was a popular teammate and coach, and congratulatory messages from friends and acquaintances poured in when his promotion became public. In the hours after taking the job he received 716 text messages.
“It was a good day for me,” Lue said. “And a bad day for Blatt.”
Amid the stress of the changeover, Lue was concerned about the perception that he’d undercut Blatt to get the job. It’s natural for there to be speculation when an assistant replaces a head coach. In Lue’s situation, it was unavoidable despite all parties denying it. Lue had been preparing himself to be a head coach, and there were times during Blatt’s tenure when he must’ve wondered about his boss’s job security. But on this move he’d been in the dark.
“I know how loyal I was to Coach Blatt and the people that know me understand that,” Lue told Cleveland.com. “I have no control over what people think. I have a job to do and I’m going to do my best.”
Lue didn’t even get to hold a full practice before his first game, but he used his new authority anyway. He said he wouldn’t be doing things differently from Blatt but he planned to do them better. One of his first moves was to tell the players they were going back to a traditional approach when it came to pregame introductions.
For months, the Cavs players did not run out and high-five teammates when the starting lineups were called. With the scoreboard flashing elaborate videos and fire shooting from giant swords in the ceiling, the team had adopted an approach where they huddled together. It was James who came up with the concept; he wanted to promote focus before tip-off. Blatt agreed—this was the sort of thing he would not challenge James on anyway—and it became policy. In an effort to lighten the mood, Lue said that policy was finished, at least for home games.
“When they call your name, run out, be introduced,” Lue told the players.
“That’s what the coach wants, that’s what we do,” James said. “There’s no fighting. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
It may have seemed trivial, but from the start, Lue was setting a tone that he would be issuing some edicts. The concept of calling his players, many of whom were proud of their world-class athlete status, out of shape on day one was a little more complex but took guts.
Lue wanted to play more uptempo. He didn’t like that the Cavs ranked as the third-slowest team in the league in possessions per game under Blatt. He intended to hit the accelerator and called players out by name who couldn’t keep up.
The Bulls trounced the Cavs in Lue’s first game, beating them 96–83. The result was secondary to Lue’s objective of changing attitude and focus.
Two days later, James put a shirtless photo on social media following a 7 a.m. workout in his home weight room as he stood next to his personalized golden lion Nike logo emblazoned on the padded floor. He was clearly in top physical condition, which was the point he was making in his own way after Lue had implied his players were out of shape.
“I don’t think I’m in bad shape at all, just need to get in better shape for what we want to do,” he said. “I’m not that far off. I can get there in less than a week.”
Lue had other pieces of business. He hired a past colleague, Mike Longabardi, to join his coaching staff. Lue had previously been in charge of the Cavs defense, with Blatt, such as it was, in charge of the offense. He wanted to take over the offense, and he brought Longabardi in to handle his old role. Part of what Lue wanted was to engage Irving more. Lue thought he sometimes worried too much about his role in the offense and did not focus enough on pure aggression. A year after James had chided Irving for not passing enough, Lue said to worry about attacking first and passing second.
The team won the next two games, slaying league weaklings Minnesota and Phoenix. The victories assured the team would have the East’s best record going into the All-Star break, and therefore Lue would be the All-Star coach. It was unprecedented and awkward, a coach who’d been in charge for three games being declared an All-Star. Lue suggested Blatt be allowed to come back and coach the game in Toronto, fully knowing there was no way that would happen.
Other than James and Lue, though, there would be no other Cavs who would make it. The Raptors’ Kyle Lowry passed Irving in votes, getting in as a starter. And the league’s coaches passed over Love for the second straight year. He answered by putting up 29 points with five three-pointers in a win over Detroit as Irving added 28 and James 20. It was the first time all season the three each scored over 20 in a game. The pace was growing, as Lue wanted, and the scoring was going up.
The questions to the players started pouring in, asking them to compare Lue and Blatt. For the most part, they avoided direct comparisons. However, James dropped hints, repeatedly praising Lue and adopting a submissive role.
“Coach gets on us in film sessions.”
“Coach Lue is the captain of the ship. We’ve got to do whatever he barks out.”
“It’s great to have a leader like Coach Lue.”
Then again, he had given Blatt lip service at times too. James had taken some criticism from fans and media after Blatt’s exit. The term “coach killer” was used, which James found insulting. While his feelings toward Blatt were mostly out in the open by then, plenty drew their own conclusions. The coach killer tag ate at James because he felt just the opposite. He felt that throughout his career he’d uplifted coaches. He’d helped them win awards, helped them get raises, helped them get other jobs. His first high school coach, Keith Dambrot, got a college job and then was a successful head coach at the University of Akron. James had been pulling coaches up since he was sixteen. In short, he felt he was worth any sort of challenges that may have come with him.
More important, James and the team appeared to be responding to the changes Lue was pushing, and the distractions involving the coach had been eliminated.
A big moment came when the Cavs whipped the San Antonio Spurs, 117–103. The Spurs came with the league’s best defense and the Cavs ran them out of the gym. It was the first victory against one of the top teams from the West, a flaw that had been gnawing at the team. Once again Irving, Love, and James all topped 20 points. The next night they won in Indiana with four players scoring 19 or more points.
Over the previous two seasons, though, it had become apparent the Cavs were rarely able to hold on to positive vibes. General manager David Griffin had developed a saying, partly out of despair, that the Cavs hated prosperity and loved adversity.
So right after Lue looked like he was getting some traction and the changes were paying off with a five-game win streak, the team dumped back-to-back games in Charlotte and at home to Boston. The loss to the Celtics was harsh: They managed to blow a four-point lead in the final seven seconds after an ill-timed foul and a defensive breakdown let the Celtics construct a stunning five-point possession.
With the offense in overdrive, the team’s defense started to rapidly decline. That had been a calling card and had carried them in the postseason the year before. Lue’s proficiency in running that aspect had been one of the things that had impressed both the players and the front office. Now that he’d given it up and preached speed and scoring, attention to detail on defense was predictably slipping.
“Right now, we’re still kind of running old stuff and new stuff and trying to combine it and it’s kind of messing the guys’ heads up,” Lue said. “That’s on me, that’s my fault.”
James’s positive vibes came to an end after the Boston loss. After scoring 30 points, he was so frustrated that he immediately reported to the weight room for an unusual postgame workout in an effort to get his anger out.
The Cavs won the next three games, with their offense continuing to zoom. They beat the Pelicans by 15, with Irving scoring 29 as Lue continued to urge aggression. Smith made six three-pointers in that win and six more in the next game as they smashed the Sacramento Kings by 20. Irving had 32 in that one, hitting five three-pointers of his own after he entered the game shooting a career-worst 25 percent on them.
In the final game before All-Star Weekend, the Cavs put up 120 points on the Los Angeles Lakers and Irving was terrific again, scoring a season-high 35. Lue’s pushing helped, but Irving’s knee getting healthier was a factor.
James and Kobe Bryant had been connected for the previous decade as the faces of the NBA, but the real relationship was between Irving and Bryant. They had become friendly. Bryant isn’t really friends with many, especially competitors, and it gave Irving tremendous pride to play so well against him as he went through the final season of his twenty-year career.
Irving knew that in Bryant’s final game against his hero, Michael Jordan, he’d scored 55 points. The Cavs and Lakers were to play once more, but Irving wanted to deliver such a game to guarantee a memory. Bryant didn’t play very well with a bad knee and shoulder, scoring 17 points. For Irving, it was a dream.
“Going against your mentor, one of the guys that you want to prove something to every time you go out and play, there was definitely some added incentive going in there,” Irving said.
“He has a killer mentality,” Bryant said of Irving. “He can shoot the long ball. His midrange game is excellent. And he can finish at the rim. He has all the tools there. The way he played tonight, he can do this pretty much every night.”
The team broke for All-Star Weekend, a plane waiting to take James and the coaching staff to Toronto after the victory, with other players having their own flight plans to Mexico and the Caribbean. Irving went to Los Angeles to spend Valentine’s Day with his girlfriend, the singer Kehlani Parrish.
There would be no vacation for Griffin, who was engaged in trade talks with several teams. He was trying to find a way to add some more shooting, as he felt it was going to be vital to have versatility in the upcoming playoffs.
He also was on the lookout for another big man. Timofey Mozgov had been in and out of the starting lineup all season. He had moments, but his knee wasn’t fully healthy and it affected his confidence. A year before, the Cavs had traded two first-round picks for him, and he’d been a key piece in their playoff run. But as he headed toward free agency, the Cavs were having a tough time seeing him as a long-term answer.
The issue for Griffin was making a move without adding to the payroll. The Cavs were sitting at about $110 million in salaries, and that would come with luxury tax charges approaching $70 million for going so far over the salary cap.
The player Griffin wanted was Channing Frye, a good-shooting big man who played for the Orlando Magic. The Cavs had seen Frye as a great fit alongside James as far back as 2009 when they chased him in free agency. In 2014, Griffin went after him again, but both times Frye took better offers. He was now having a down season, averaging just five points, and the Magic had made him available. But his salary was $8 million and Orlando didn’t want to take back long-term salary in a deal. The Los Angeles Clippers were also in the bidding and felt like they might be able to get him.
Several things fell into place in the last twenty-four hours before the trade deadline. The Clippers couldn’t close the deal with Orlando and moved on to a different trade. Griffin then found a way to make the deal work financially as he got the Portland Trail Blazers to trade for Anderson Varejão, taking $10 million off the team’s books and making room for Frye in a three-team deal. It cost the Cavs a first-round pick, their 2018 selection, and they had to trade a popular player who’d been with the team for twelve seasons. But Griffin got his desired shooting big man, and in the transaction the Cavs were able to save about $10 million in salary and taxes.
“That was a very difficult phone call to have,” Griffin said. “There’s very little I’ve enjoyed less in my professional career than letting Andy know he was traded.”
Varejão was crushed. And it got worse when the Blazers immediately cut him—they’d only done the trade to get the first-round pick. The NBA is a business. So Varejão responded with his own business move and signed with the Warriors, his old team’s central rival.
The first game after the deal was against the Bulls. Now, several weeks into Lue’s regime, the performance was more stable and honed. James tossed in 25 and Love added 15 points and 14 rebounds as they beat the Bulls for the first time all season.
Two days later they went to Oklahoma City on a Saturday afternoon, arriving in the early evening ahead of their nationally televised Sunday afternoon game against the Thunder. As with the Spurs game two weeks prior, this was a test. They’d been putting together wins, but real progress was choppy.
After dinner, players headed back to the Skirvin Hotel, a grand old building three blocks from the arena where all visiting teams stay. It has a reputation for being haunted. Over the years players have reported hearing strange noises, including crying babies in the middle of the night. When Wesley Johnson was playing for the Phoenix Suns he awoke one morning to find his bathroom door closed and his bathtub inexplicably filled with water.
At 3 a.m. Irving woke up in his room with an itching feeling on his body. It wasn’t a ghost. He flipped on the light and saw bedbugs crawling around his sheets and pillow.
“Just imagine how freaked out you’d be if you saw friggin’ five big bedbugs just sitting on your pillow,” Irving said. “I woke up itching, and I’m just looking around and I’m like, ‘Are you serious right now?’ I was so tired at that point.”
Irving yanked off his clothes and tried to sleep on the couch in his room. He abandoned most of the clothes he had in the room and left shaken. Midway through the first quarter the next afternoon, he told the trainers he was feeling ill. He went to the locker room and was done for the game. The critters seemed to have gotten into his head.
“I was freaked out, then I started feeling nauseous,” he said.
Hilton, which runs the Skirvin, admitted what Irving knew—that management had found the bugs in the room. The hotel offered a formal apology.
While Irving was trying to keep it together, the team didn’t seem all that affected by his departure. They smashed the Thunder by 23. The enigma that was Love did it again. Sometimes when James or Irving missed a game, Love became ineffective. Other times he took advantage of the extra shots and space. This game was the latter—he had one of the best performances of the season, with 29 points and 11 rebounds. In one of the pinnacle moments of the season for the team, they played terrifically in all facets and looked every bit the championship contender they were in vanquishing a high-quality opponent on the road.
In typical fashion, they then went back home the next day and lost momentum by losing to the Detroit Pistons, though Irving was over his bedbug-induced anxiety and scored 30 points. Just when it looked like they had gained some acceleration with the Bulls and Thunder wins, they unexpectedly slid into a dark period.
A visit to Toronto, the team with the second-best record in the East, went poorly when the Cavs blew a nine-point lead with five minutes to play. Lowry was sensational and repeatedly burned Irving as he scored a career-high 43 points, including the game-winner at the buzzer. He’d played against Irving many times, and Irving had plenty of victories on his belt from the rivalry, but this one was lopsided. Irving had just 10 points and one assist.
“He had a hell of a game,” James said. “But that’s what All-Stars do.”
That could’ve been just a compliment. Or it could’ve been one of James’s little digs in referencing how Lowry had beaten out Irving for an All-Star spot. Lowry got it because of a huge Canadian voting push to have one of their players start the game, which was being played in Toronto. Irving wasn’t voted in by the coaches because he had missed so much time with injury. Irving had been an All-Star twice before; his status wasn’t in question. Nonetheless, it felt like a bit of a jab after he had been so outplayed.
Whatever it was, it was a tremor before a passive-aggressive James storm was about to arrive.
James skipped the next game. He’d been worn down a little and took the night off in Washington. The underachieving Wizards drilled the Cavs, getting up by as many as 29 points against a lifeless defense. James was so frustrated he left the bench with five minutes to go and was off to the bus within minutes of the end of the game.
Lue yanked all his frontline players except for Irving, whom for some reason he played until the bitter end. Irving ended up scoring 28 points, but he was in the game either as some form of punishment or because it reached a point where he didn’t want to come out.
Against the Pacers, the team was headed for a third straight loss at home but rallied in the fourth quarter to win. “When our backs are against the wall, that’s when we tend to play harder,” Lue said. “It’s annoying.”
At this juncture, annoyance was growing around the team. A report appeared in the media that Irving had grown unhappy in Cleveland playing alongside James. In truth, many of James’s teammates got unhappy with him at times. Love and Irving had their bouts with it the season before for sure. But Love and Irving also knew they’d never seen the playoffs before they got on the same team with James. There were rewards to dealing with occasional downsides.
Irving, however, didn’t exactly kill the story when the chance arose after the win over the Pacers. “There’s nothing to really address,” he said. “Obviously there’s going to be some misunderstandings, it’s part of being on a team.”
The team had three days off and some decompression was needed. Lue told the players they’d have two straight days with no practice. James and his wife got away and flew to Miami. The time was his to use. It was warm in Florida and cold in Cleveland. But he allowed his dinner and workouts with Dwyane Wade to make it onto social media, letting the world know of his midseason side trip.
Then, while in Miami, he sent out a cryptic tweet that read, “It’s OK to know you’ve made a mistake. Cause we all do it at times. Just be ready to live with whatever comes with it and be with… those who will protect you at all cost.”
Just like the year before with his tweets about Love, many assumed this was directed at a teammate. With the Irving events, some concluded it was aimed at him. James denied it was for anyone on his team and brushed off people who wondered why he’d go hang out with Wade in the middle of the season. “I don’t care,” he said dismissively.
Then it was back to Twitter with another pointed comment with an uncertain target: “Can’t replace being around great friends that reciprocate the same energy back to you in all facets of life.”
Again assumptions were made that he was saying he liked being with Wade more than with his own teammates. Again, James didn’t explain himself. That he was scheduled to become a free agent in the summer fed some unwanted speculation.
On a video that Richard Jefferson took and put on social media, James mocked the media and the overheated analysis. As he was eating a banana, James pretended he was a reporter asking him, “Why are you eating a banana, LeBron? Does that mean you’re going to slip on a banana peel out of Cleveland?”
Then again, James had left in free agency twice before in his career. The idea wasn’t exactly ludicrous and his behavior was a challenge to read.
There were more important things going on. While the team was on hiatus, the front office was working hard to land Joe Johnson, the veteran shooting guard who secured his release from the Brooklyn Nets and was now a free agent. The Cavs put on a strong recruiting process, believing he could help as a role player off the bench and that he would want to come compete for a title. James made several recruiting pitches; the two knew each other from Team USA.
But Johnson rejected the Cavs and instead signed in Miami, visiting the Heat at the same time James was there on his mini-vacation.
As they seemed to do in such times, the Cavs pivoted. They came back from their break with two excellent wins, getting retribution on the Wizards by winning by 25 points and then making up for the ugly loss to the Celtics by beating them by 17.
And, on cue, they backed that up with a miserable loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. Missing five of their top seven players because of injury, the Grizzlies only had eight players in uniform. Tony Allen, the team’s veteran defensive specialist, came away with 26 points, the most he’d scored in more than five years.
“We didn’t respect them,” James said. “I can sit up here and say that we’re a team that’s ready to start the playoffs tomorrow, but we’re not.”
The team rebounded by winning three of four on a western road trip. They won in Sacramento, putting up 120 points as Irving had 30 and James 25. The team spent four days in Los Angeles, where James played his final game against Bryant.
The two stars never had much of a relationship when they were both in their prime. They played together on the 2008 Olympic team, but there was a distance between them even as teammates, which Bryant preferred anyway. Between 2007 and 2016, either Bryant or James would be in every Finals, but they never played against each other. The nearest miss was in 2009 when James’s Cavs lost to the Magic in the conference finals. That left a hole in their rivalry.
In 2010 after the Lakers had won back-to-back titles, Bryant needled James when he signed with the Miami Heat. Just after the announcement, he sent James a text: “Go ahead and get another MVP, if you want. And find the city you want to live in. But we’re going to win the championship. Don’t worry about it.”
James won two MVPs and two titles in Miami. Bryant was done winning as the later stages of his career were wrecked with injuries. But he had his five rings to lord over James. As Bryant mellowed in his final two years in the league, the barrier between the two started to come down. Searching for a way to overcome the injuries to pull off the upset in the 2015 Finals, James communicated with Bryant. Never in his career had James been an advice-seeker. But he was willing to listen to Kobe.
Because of injuries and circumstance, Bryant and James only played each other 22 times even though they were in the league for 13 seasons together. James polished off his 16th win against Bryant with 24 points. Bryant gave a final strong performance against James, making 11 of 16 shots and scoring 26 points.
“We’re two sportsmen and we love the lights,” James said. “We get up for the best moments, and for us to give the fans and give our beautiful sport one last opportunity to watch us both on the same floor and give them a show. It was great.”
As he left the James rivalry behind, Bryant had a few words of wisdom to impart. “You have to be true to who you are and authentic,” he said, “and I think every team should have that lightning rod because the happy-go-lucky stuff doesn’t work, I don’t care what anybody says. You have to have that inner conflict, you have to have that person that’s really driving these things. From the Cavs’ perspective, it’s hard for me to tell from afar who should be that person. LeBron’s not that person. He brings people together, that’s what he does naturally and he’s phenomenal at it, but you have to have somebody else that’s going to create that tension. Maybe it’s Kyrie.”
Bryant was half right. Some more inner conflict was coming. But it wasn’t from Irving, it was from James. And it left his new coach and his general manager irate.