After dinner on the evening of June 3, LeBron James came back to his hotel suite at the Four Seasons in downtown San Francisco with his small group of friends that he kept close during the playoffs. The room looked over Yerba Buena Gardens, but the focus was on the room’s 50-inch flatscreen.
Earlier that day, Muhammad Ali had passed away and the entire nation was engaged in remembrance. James had an affinity for Ali as a child, but his respect for him had grown dramatically as he got older and felt a kinship with him as he went through a similar experience of becoming a global sports celebrity. James came to understand that Ali had been a pioneer for someone like him. They would eventually meet as Ali attended several games James played in Phoenix, where Ali lived.
Ali also held a special place in the heart of Lynn Merritt, the Nike vice president who oversaw James’s partnership with the corporate giant. Merritt was a role model for James, and he sometimes played the part of father figure. He’d been by his side throughout his highs and lows during his entire career. Not only had they done hundreds of millions in deals together, but Merritt was an adviser on some of the biggest moves James made. Merritt was always around James, flying in from his home in Portland for hundreds of games during the seasons. He’d ride to and from playoff games with James, acting as a sounding board or just a support system. In the playoffs, he was ubiquitous.
Merritt is from Louisville, Kentucky, where he grew up in an underprivileged section of town near where Ali was raised. As Ali rose to prominence and worldwide fame, Merritt watched as a young man trying to advance in the world himself. He felt a connection to Ali—both had gotten out of Louisville and made it. Though he took efforts to stay out of the spotlight, Merritt was one of the most powerful people in basketball. He is a kingmaker. Before his relationship with James, he acted as Ken Griffey Jr.’s main connection to the company.
Merritt would never admit it out loud, but the Finals rematch between the Warriors and the Cavs took on special meaning. The Warriors had rallied from being down 3–1 to the Oklahoma City Thunder to win three straight and get back to defend their title. In Game 6, they trailed by eight points going into the fourth quarter in OKC and Klay Thompson bailed them out with a breathtaking shooting performance, scoring 19 points with five three-pointers in the fourth quarter. Then Stephen Curry shot them into the Finals by making seven three-pointers and scoring 36 in Game 7 in Oakland while he was still recovering from the knee injury earlier in the playoffs.
Curry was fast becoming the most popular player in the league. James, who finished third in MVP voting behind Curry and the San Antonio Spurs’ Kawhi Leonard, conceded Curry deserved the award but pointed out, “I think sometimes the word ‘valuable’ or best player of the year, you can have different results. When you talk about most ‘valuable’ then you can have a different conversation.”
The conversation James wanted to have but couldn’t was that he didn’t see any player who could touch his value. The Cavs were the worst team in the NBA the four years he was gone, and when he came back were in the Finals twice. Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love were great players but never played in the playoffs before joining James. Though they had injuries, the Miami Heat cratered and missed the playoffs the year after James left them following four straight Finals appearances. That, James believed, is value.
Beyond that, Curry was a deeper rival. In 2013, Nike had passed on matching Curry after a lucrative offer from competitor Under Armour. Nike hadn’t prioritized Curry, whose early career was marred by ankle injuries, and they had a deep roster with James, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Durant among many others, including Irving. Curry had gone on to an explosive three seasons where his sweet-shooting ability, attractive baby face, and beautiful family had made him a marketing superstar. Young kids adored him and Under Armour had mirrored that rise as they continued to emerge as a thorn in Nike’s side.
So for Merritt this was more than just supporting James. It was, in many ways, Nike versus Under Armour at the highest-profile level. It was James and Irving, two players with their own Nike lines, against UA’s signature man. Yet Merritt knew the task for James and the Cavs was going to be extreme. The Warriors had staggered a little in the postseason, but they were almost unbeatable at home and they had momentum after beating the Thunder three straight.
When he came to San Francisco for the start of the Finals, Merritt brought with him a DVD of Ali’s famous “Thrilla in Manila” fight, the 1975 bout between Ali and Joe Frazier that was regarded as one of the greatest fights of all time. Ali and Frazier were bitter rivals and this fight settled their rivalry, the third fight after each had beaten each other once. Merritt got the disc and slipped it in for James to watch.
The room quickly got emotional as the forty-year-old footage played, not just as they watched the fighters work—Frazier smashing Ali with two vicious left hooks that sent him to the ropes and then Ali coming back with a series of bruising blows that ended up forcing Frazier’s corner to stop the fight after the 14th round—but at Ali’s accomplishments in his life that had just ended.
“It was just an unbelievable pound-for-pound slugfest, just two greats just seizing the opportunity and seizing the moment to be in it and do what they love to do,” James said.
“He paved the way for guys like myself, I understood that he is the greatest of all time, and he was the greatest of all time because of what he did outside of the ring. Obviously, we knew how great of a boxer he was, but I think that was only 20 percent of what made him as great as he was. What he stood for, I mean, it’s a guy who basically had to give up a belt and relish everything that he had done because of what he believed in and ended up in jail because of his beliefs. It’s a guy who stood up for so many different things throughout the times where it was so difficult for African Americans to even walk in the streets.”
Within a few months, James donated $2.5 million for an Ali exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. His production company also made a deal with HBO to make a documentary about Ali’s life.
The Cavs had lost Game 1 to the Warriors, 104–89. It was a missed opportunity. Curry and Thompson, the Warriors’ two great weapons, had not played well. Curry missed 11 of his 15 shots and Thompson made just one three-pointer. But the Warriors bench, led by lanky and talented backup guard Shaun Livingston’s 20 points, had felled the Cavs.
The Cavs were briefly ahead in the third quarter, leading Warriors coach Steve Kerr to angrily smash a clipboard on the bench in a rare outburst. But they didn’t have enough down the stretch, a feeling that was all too much like the previous season. J. R. Smith, whose contributions were needed, burned off the outer layer of skin on his right hand diving for a ball in the first quarter and was in so much discomfort he didn’t shoot for the rest of the game.
This was all on James’s and Merritt’s minds as they finished the night and finished the fight. They talked about what was ahead of James, down 0–1 in the Finals to the Warriors again. They knew he was going to need something special to pull this off. He was going to need a few heroic performances to beat Golden State. A few Ali-esque moments. Maybe three, they thought.
But one didn’t come the next day. Some within the Warriors privately felt beating the Thunder—a team that had given them problems throughout the season—was the tallest mountain they needed to climb. It would be hard to argue that: The bookies and the computers agreed they were heavy favorites coming into the series, and it only appeared to confirm that when they totally smashed the Cavs, 110–77, in Game 2.
It was the seventh consecutive time they’d beaten the Cavs, dating to the previous Finals, and the third time by double digits in the four meetings that season. Draymond Green, a player the Cavs struggled to defend, scored 28 points. Again neither Thompson nor Curry got red hot, although combined with Green the All-Star trio had 13 three-pointers, and Golden State still won easily. The 48 total points they’d outscored the Cavs by set a record for widest margin for the first two games in Finals history.
With the confidence flowing, the Warriors couldn’t help themselves as they started to brag about their destined place in history.
“I don’t really look at are you the best team of all time, are we the best team of all time? Because I think it’s all subjective. To say we’re better than the Showtime Lakers, how can you say that? We never played them,” Green said before Thompson cut him off.
“We are better than the Showtime Lakers,” said Thompson with confidence. His father, Mychael, won two titles with the Showtime Lakers in the 1980s.
Green then compared the Warriors to the 1995–96 Bulls, the team whose regular-season win streak the Warriors beat that season. “Like saying we’re better than the Bulls, it’s like we’ll never play them. It’s two completely different eras. So I don’t really get off on the are you the best team of all times.”
Regardless of the argument, that Green and Thompson were openly indulging it midway through a series was a window into their feelings. They were confident they were a few days away from finishing off a title and taking their place among the all-time greats.
The Cavs could’ve been miffed at the perceived slight, but they had bigger issues. They’d been embarrassed. A year of talking about getting a chance at the Warriors with their full team and things being different—well, there was a difference: They were getting beat worse. As the team was getting ready to pack up and head home, assistant coach Phil Handy asked Lue if he could address the team.
Handy is a development specialist. He works with players individually on skills before and after practices and games. He was a holdover from Byron Scott’s staff in Cleveland, now two coaches ago. Irving and Handy had a close relationship, mostly from all their workouts together. He was rarely vocal. During games he sat behind the bench and didn’t take part in much in-game strategy. But he was an Oakland native and he was furious that the team had been crushed in his hometown.
Handy unleashed a stream of expletives admonishing the team for lackluster play. He couldn’t believe they’d allowed themselves to get whipped in such a vitally important game. The players were taken aback; most of them had never seen this side of Handy. It wouldn’t help defending the three-pointer, but it was a new voice rattling the situation to get them thinking.
Love didn’t hear it. He was already gone from the locker room, feeling nauseous and disoriented. Late in the first half, the Warriors’ Harrison Barnes caught him with an elbow. Love dropped to the ground and clutched his head. Lue called a timeout, but Love stayed in the game and finished the half. A few moments later, he made a three-pointer. He went to the locker room with his teammates.
“I didn’t even know what happened, but at halftime he showed no symptoms,” Lue said. “He didn’t talk about it.”
Early in the third quarter, though, Love started to get woozy and couldn’t run in a straight line. He was quickly pulled from the game and diagnosed with a concussion. It left his ability to play again in the series in doubt because he had to enter the league’s concussion protocol, which meant his return time was undetermined and based on an independent doctor’s review.
It was just another problem. So was Irving. He was subpar in Games 1 and 2, shooting just 12-of-36 and repeatedly getting beaten on the defensive end. The Warriors deployed defensive strategies aimed at isolating Irving, switching on pick-and-rolls to limit his ability to attack. The result was some of Irving’s bad habits returning, specifically his tendency to hold the ball and not pass. He didn’t have an assist until the fourth quarter of Game 2, opening up some old wounds.
Irving was polarizing in this way. His greatness as a player who could create his own shot was unquestioned, but his reliance on it sometimes irritated his teammates. It had gotten under James’s skin in the first games they’d played together. When he was playing this way, his defensive issues felt more pronounced. Even with all the fine performances he turned in along the way to the Finals, the magnifying glass of June made it harder on him.
Before the series, a think tank made up of Harvard students called the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective released a paper titled “A Modest Proposal: Bench Kyrie Irving.” The argument was his offense, as great as the highlights looked, wasn’t statistically worth his ball hogging and his lack of defense. By its nature it was overly academic and meant to be shocking, but it did represent a way of thinking that Irving wasn’t always a positive influence.
James, frustrated by the losses, didn’t mention Irving by name but did make it clear he didn’t think everyone was on the same page. He even seemed to indirectly hint at what the Harvard analysts suggested, that Irving might need to be benched at times against Golden State.
“If guys are out there not following the game plan, then Coach has to sub them out, and other guys have to come in and do what he wants to do,” James said. “If guys aren’t competing then Coach Lue can make a decision at that point.”
Lue didn’t go to Harvard; he went to Nebraska. And while he studied the numbers and could quote detailed analytics off the top of his head when needed, he was also a former player who took part in Finals games. He understood the pressure and he understood the need for support. He had been in Irving’s corner since those early days in 2014, when he helped convince him to sign a contract extension based on promises and trust, even though James wasn’t in the picture and the Cavs had done nothing but lose.
Lue did go to Irving to talk. But he didn’t tell him to pass more. He told him to attack more. He wanted Irving to shoot, he didn’t care if he didn’t pass. He just didn’t want Irving to wait 15 seconds before making the decision. Lue told Irving to block out the noise and to be himself, and that was not a guy who was frozen with indecision. Perhaps he couldn’t shut down Curry on defense—no one in the world could on some nights. But Lue told Irving no one on the Warriors could stop him either.
“No one can stop you one-on-one when you have the ball,” Lue told him.
Game 3 was back in Cleveland and was vitally important to the Cavs. The doctors didn’t clear Love to play. He was angry when he found out the morning of the game, believing he was symptom free. But he hadn’t met all the requirements and it wasn’t in the team’s hands. The Cavs would have to play without him.
Lue decided to insert Richard Jefferson in his place, to play with an ultra-small lineup to attempt to match the Warriors’ versatility. As the crowd roared just before tip-off, James gathered the team outside the locker room.
“Look at the man in front of you!” James said. “Do your job. Follow my lead and do your job!”
Whether it was Handy’s speech, Lue’s pep talk with Irving, the skin growing back on Smith’s hand, or the comfort of being at home, the Cavs looked like a different team. They looked like the team that had won their first 10 playoff games.
James played loose and with force, putting up 32 points, 11 rebounds, and six assists. Irving was back to playing with speed and making quick decisions, forcing the Warriors to their heels as he racked up 30 points. Smith made five three-pointers. Jefferson played well in place of Love, leading some to wonder if the lineup switch should remain permanent. Lue dusted off Timofey Mozgov, who’d barely played after the trade to get Channing Frye, and Mozgov leveled Klay Thompson with a screen, kneeing him in the thigh. Thompson hobbled to the locker room and later called it a dirty play.
Curry had another meek showing and failed to score 20 points for the third straight game, the first time that happened in his playoff career. Now it was his turn to face questions as he appeared to lack acceleration and ability to get open that had been a cornerstone of his MVP season. Just how much his wounded knee was bothering him became an issue.
In the second half after a whistle had stopped play, Curry grabbed the ball and went to harmlessly lay it in the basket as the officials reported the foul. James saw it and leapt in the way, reaching up and blocking the practice shot.
“I didn’t want him to see the ball go in,” James said. “Whether it’s after the whistle or not.”
The Cavs ended up winning by 30, the most lopsided loss the Warriors had absorbed all season. It had been a year since the Cavs tasted a win over Golden State, and it was cathartic, even if they still trailed in the series and remained a heavy underdog.
“They came out and played like a team with a sense of desperation, like their season was on the line,” Green said. “We came out and played like everything was peaches and cream.”
Love came out of the locker room to greet his teammates in the hallway as they arrived after the final horn. They embraced him—he’d felt sick that he couldn’t play in what was the biggest game of the season. When they got inside, Love was handed a piece of the puzzle and honored by placing the thirteenth golden peg into its place.
Just three spots were left to be filled.