Every Cleveland Cavaliers fan remembers where they were the night of July 8, 2010. LeBron James publicly announced his intentions to head to Miami, leaving behind a 61-21 team that had championship aspirations. The 2009-10 Cavaliers had the second-highest attendance in the league and were a top-seven team in the NBA in both offensive and defensive ratings. Surely the loss of LeBron would remove the chance of a championship, but the Cavs could still compete for the playoffs, right?
I remember having these conversations back then. How the team still had a veteran, playoff-tested roster with enough pieces to stay relevant. I had these same conversations this past summer, but replace Antwan Jamison with Kevin Love. Yes, Love is vastly better than Jamison was at that time, but the point still remains: There was real optimism, just like in 2010. Fans made the same mistake then that they did now.
Turns out, some members of the fanbase aren’t the only ones making critical repeated errors. The Cavs front office did too.
The 2010-2011 Cleveland Cavaliers went 19-63, dead-last in attendance. They were 29th in the league in both offensive and defensive rating. They lost 26 games in a row. The following three years, while James was winning championships in Miami, would be some of the worst basketball in Cleveland history.
The Cavs attempted to reset that culture with Byron Scott as head coach. But he turned out to be a pumpkin, and one of the worst coaches in Cavs history. He consistently mismanaged in-game decisions, and the team did not grow nearly enough. In his three years as coach, Scott coached Cleveland a positive record in just one month. Some of that is because the roster was putrid. Some of that falls on the shoulders of Scott.
The front office? Discombobulated in that tenure. General Manager Chris Grant was overruled on the drafting of Anthony Bennett No. 1 overall, and Bennett became the biggest bust in NBA history. Waiters did not pan out. The signing of Andrew Bynum was nothing short of terrible. After Scott, the front office gave Mike Brown a five-year contract worth $20 million. Cleveland was paying him through last season, despite firing him after his first year.
The results of those four years of Cavaliers basketball? No playoff appearances, no more than 33 wins, poor management on and off the court, and a 26-game losing streak.
So why did people think, when James left for Los Angeles, this time would be different? Well, we all had hoped ownership had learned from its mistakes.
What the Cavaliers seem to not understand, now for a second time, is that LeBron James creates the culture of whatever team he is on. He sets the tempo, controls the mood and voices opinions that many times turn into reality. His teammates respect him, his coaches need him and the NBA craves him. James brings an aura of the undying requirement to win. When he is focused, he brings the best out of teammates and elevates them to unbeknownst levels. And when absent, either physically or mentally, the loss is substantial. It is why many basketball fans said James was the head coach and GM of the team; he drives both positions so much.
No team that loses LeBron’s services has recovered the following season to make the playoffs, and this year’s Cavaliers will most definitely not buck that trend. But many of the decisions they have made since LeBron’s agency announced on Twitter the star forward’s intentions to play for the Lakers have been baffling. But, sadly, they should not be surprising.
The front office telling the remaining veterans, like JR Smith and Kyle Korver, that the Cavs intended to compete even without LeBron, and then retracting that two games into the season, is disrespectful. What free agent would want to come to a team that lied to two veterans, one of whom helped bring the team’s only championship home? According to The Athletic, the Cavs informed Korver that if James left, they would trade him or buy him out to let him seek another opportunity. Months into the post-LeBron era, Cleveland has not followed through. Smith, understanding that Cleveland has no intention of competing, despite what he was told, has left the team while a trade is worked out.
General Manager Koby Altman then told the veterans they were not going to play anymore. Former head coach Tyronn Lue and the then-winless Cavs reverted back to the veterans, ignoring the front office’s “direction.”
Lue was fired, a move that pissed off many of the Cavaliers veterans, according to Joe Vardon of The Athletic. So now a disgruntled locker room with veterans who have been duped, taken out and then put back in the rotation are without a coach. And what about Collin Sexton, the Cavs’ eighth-overall draft pick? Surely losing his first NBA coach six games into the season hampers his development cycle some. Lue was part of the scouting team that selected Sexton, and the now-former head coach was interested in developing players for the first time in his career.
Larry Drew, a longtime Cavs assistant, naturally stepped in to fill Lue’s role. But he was not named head coach nor given a contract for the position for more than a week. Drew was disappointed and openly voiced that opinion to the media, comparing his position at the time to that of a substitute teacher.
In order for the Cavaliers to officially move on from LeBron and begin rebuilding, there are foundational pieces that need to be in place. At the very least, plans to get those pieces in place must exist. But having no clear message on the path of the franchise, lying to veteran players, firing a head coach six games into the season and failing to fill that spot for nine days are not the ways to accomplish that. All of this feels very much like the 2010-11 Cavs, losers on and off the court. The front office and ownership have not learned from their mistakes, similar mistakes that led to the team winning 77 games in four seasons.
Winning cures everything, or at least that is the saying. Well, the definition of “winning” is subjective. For the bumbling Cavs, wins off the court, like a finding a stable head coach or committing to a franchise plan, will be just as valuable as the few they get on it.
