Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (23 page)

“We spend more time focusing on, and trying to understand, the character traits,” Wilcox added. “That’s our focus. Highly competitive, highly focused, hardworking, highly skilled, mentally tough, resilient, curious . . . these are the things that I think we have identified and that we try to add.”

The end result was one of the league’s most surprising—and surprisingly watchable—teams. The Hawks effectively locked up the
Eastern Conference’s top seed so prematurely that they lost a bit of momentum down the stretch of the season, and they weren’t helped by a spate of injuries to key players, including the big one—Sefolosha having his leg fractured by a New York City policeman during a police-provoked altercation outside a club in the aftermath of an incident that involved the stabbing of Indiana Pacers forward Chris Copeland. While the Hawks made it to the Eastern Conference Finals, they didn’t impress very much on the way there, and then they were taken out in four straight by the Cavaliers, who themselves were shorthanded.

Regardless, 2014–15 was a landmark season for the franchise that, buoyed by new ownership, the resolution of the Ferry situation, and a rebranding as the Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club, was primed to move forward. Despite all the hype about trying to become “Spurs West” with the coaching and management connections to San Antonio complementing an unselfish and measured style of play, the Hawks really developed their own identity in year two of the Budenholzer era. It was fun, it was different, and it was an interesting test case on how to build a championship-caliber team. The fuller answers will be found in the seasons ahead.

The Cleveland Cavaliers and the Seven Faces of LeBron

It’s fair to say that no one on the Cleveland Cavaliers signed up for the season they ultimately had in 2014–15.

Head coach David Blatt, who had long excelled at multiple stops in Europe, accepted the job in late June 2014 without knowing whether he was going to have star point guard Kyrie Irving around. Irving was eligible for a five-year contract extension that would tack on to the remaining year of his rookie deal, but there were a lot of rumblings during the 2013–14 season that Irving might look for a way out of town.

On July 1 of that year, Irving, who came to Cleveland via the No. 1 overall pick in 2011 after the Cavaliers fell to a nineteen-win season after LeBron James left for Miami the previous summer, ultimately agreed to stay without knowing what help he was going to get after his first three seasons with the franchise yielded an overall record of 78–152 and no playoff appearances. He had no assurances at the time that James would mend fences with team owner Dan Gilbert and return to his quasi-hometown four years after his departure became very public and contentious.

Since James didn’t mention either 2014 No. 1 overall pick/superprospect Andrew Wiggins or 2013 No. 1 overall pick Anthony Bennett in his “I’m Coming Home” essay in
Sports Illustrated
that announced his
plan to re-sign in Cleveland, it’s safe to presume that he was informed of/approved/requested the Cavaliers’ eventual August 2014 trade of the duo as part of a deal to land star forward Kevin Love from the Minnesota Timberwolves. He did not, however, sign up for a season spent finding different ways to motivate Love to fit in better, eventually including a thinly veiled shot on Twitter.

Love surely did not agree to join James and Irving in Cleveland to spend much of the season as a 3-point-chucking glorified decoy in an offense that didn’t look much like what Blatt liked to run.

And none of them—coach or players—signed up for the angst, jousting egos, and injuries that required a tireless tamping down of in-house storylines that went public, a midseason two-week injury break/vacation for James, and two key in-season moves to reshape the roster—all as they limped to an underwhelming fifty-three wins and the Eastern Conference’s 2-seed behind the Hawks.

From the outset, Irving spoke as if he understood the overall deal, but there were still some gaps in his understanding of how things were about to radically change. He was about to get paid like the face of a franchise, and seemed eager to continue in that role after three years of a slow rebuild, all the while knowing that LeBron—and
everything that comes with him—was back in town, and on a short-term contract, to boot. LeBron had realized in Miami as the roster fell apart around him due to age and injuries that he shouldn’t lock himself into a new long-term deal. Yes, there were financial considerations involved in his decision to take a one-year deal with a second-year player option, but it also kept pressure on ownership to make sure everything was exactly to his liking.

At the US National Team tryout camp in Las Vegas in late July 2014, Irving told assembled media that he had never wavered on re-signing with the Cavaliers.

“It was just confidence in our management, our coaching staff, the direction we’re going, I wanted to be a part of,” Irving said. “That was the leading reason why I came back. Just the opportunity we have in Cleveland with things going the right way. Whether or not LeBron was coming back, I was still going to sign. We got it done on that first day, we agreed to terms, and I signed on the tenth, and that’s the way it should go. They wanted me to be a part of the organization long-term, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Concerning LeBron’s return, Irving added, “At first, you can’t believe it. It’s more or less . . . I’ve been watching LeBron for a while now, and now that I’m going to be running alongside of him and be his point guard, it’s an honor. Hopefully, we can do great things,” but “the only thing that matters right now is what we do out there on the court.”

But there’s a marked difference between talk and action, especially when you are creating the highly combustible combination the Cavaliers were stirring together. You had a young, budding star who needed the ball in his hands; a six-year veteran standout in Love who was imported from a different losing situation and never had made the playoffs, let alone been tested in the crucible of truly meaningful games; and the world’s most talented and demanding player, a basketball savant who was coming back home not just to attempt to nail
down Cleveland’s first-ever NBA title, but to basically reinvent the entire culture of the franchise he himself had once left.

Bleacher Report
’s Ethan Skolnick, in a July 2015 feature on how the Cavaliers reinvented themselves around LeBron’s personality, provided insight to just how commanding James immediately was after
his return to Cleveland. From the outset of the season, James demanded total accountability from everyone in the organization, from management through the head coach through the fifteenth man on the roster. There was an immediate urgency to win.

But it wasn’t working, at least at first. LeBron, asked to be the team’s best player, leader, and club culture overhauler, was wearing down physically and mentally. Love didn’t seem happy or well used by Blatt. Irving was still feeling out his new role on the floor. It was a grind, with an adjustment period that seemed much steeper than when LeBron went to Miami and had to figure out a potent pas de deux with Dwyane Wade.

The Cavaliers started 5–7, then won eight straight games. They headed to Miami for a Christmas meeting with the Heat at 17–10, and then lost there in LeBron’s return, with the major talking point afterward being how James connected much more readily on the court with Wade than any of his new teammates. A win at Orlando preceded a desultory twenty-three-point loss at then 6–23 Detroit on December 28, and then LeBron was done playing for a couple of weeks. Mostly without him, the Cavaliers ended up on an eight-game losing streak and bottomed out at 19–20 overall on January 13, 2015.

Statistically speaking, the Cavaliers only had a plus-3.4 net rating (net points per one hundred possessions) in November, and actually had a negative team rating in December and through the first half of January. Then things began to change in a hurry.

A week before the loss in Phoenix that dropped them back below .500, the Cavaliers had swung a three-team trade with the
New York Knicks and Oklahoma City Thunder that offloaded inefficient shooting guard Dion Waiters for mercurial, semi-inefficient shooting guard JR Smith and “3-and-D” wing Iman Shumpert. The move solved a couple of issues for the Cavaliers, as Smith overall was a shooting upgrade on Waiters, and they added defensive depth on the perimeter, too.

The next day, the team acquired center Timofey Mozgov from the Denver Nuggets, providing them with a physical rebounder and rim-protecting presence that the roster, thanks in part to an injury to Anderson Varejao, had sorely been lacking.

The Mozgov trade was expertly tailored by Cleveland general manager David Griffin, and very well explained by ESPN’s Brian
Windhorst in a January 2015 column. To do it, the Cavaliers carved out enough room to take on Mozgov’s $4.4 million salary through a series of barely reported transactions that turned an initial, paltry $1.6 million in cap space into a trade exception worth more than $5 million, all the while only using second-round picks as enticements to get other teams to work with them. It was the subtle kind of masterful cap manipulation that ultimately can be the difference in championship aspirations, and in this case, delivered the Cavaliers what they desperately needed.

It’s not quite as simple as saying that the Cavaliers took off from there, but they proceeded to go 34–9 the rest of the way, even while throwing away a couple of late-season games as they rested key guys ahead of the playoffs. In February, the Cavaliers had a plus-8.8 net rating, and they followed that up with a plus-8.3 net rating in March as the revamped roster hit its stride and made them, especially on the offensive end, an extremely formidable force. In fifteen March games, the Cavaliers averaged 111.6 points per one hundred possessions, which would have led the NBA for the season.

The subtext, though, was how their big three were meshing together, and what happened when various combinations of James,
Love, and Irving were on the floor, and that is something that remains a work in progress.

Per unpublished lineup information culled by Jacob Rosen, a writer for Cleveland sports blog
Waiting for Next Year,
the Cavaliers’ season-ending numbers when all three stars were on the court—even with all the early on- and off-court drama—were extremely potent. In the 1,441 minutes the trio was together on the court (about 36 percent of the Cavaliers’ total for the regular season), the Cavaliers had a plus-13.3 net rating and were very good on both sides of the ball. Those numbers, though, fell precipitously when either Irving or Love went to the bench, with neither a LeBron/Irving nor LeBron/Love combo even reaching a plus-3.0 net rating in a combined 720 minutes on the season.

Somewhat interesting—both in how the roster was bolstered, and as foreshadowing for the playoffs, when both Irving and Love were injured—was that Cleveland was actually quite good when, of the three stars,
only
LeBron was on the court. In 333 regular-season minutes of “LeBron Plus Four Others,” Cleveland was a surprising plus-13.1 net rating, and defensively, only conceded 88.2 points per one hundred possessions. The Cavaliers had become a fuller team around LeBron, but they also were finding a scheme that worked when LeBron was the one and only orchestrator.

Management must have noted, because they basically brought back every piece of the 2014–15 team to make another run at it. Irving was already locked up; Love signed a five-year, $110 million extension; and Shumpert inked a new four-season deal for $10 million per year. Cleveland also brought back Matthew Dellavedova and Smith on low-cost deals, and finally agreed to new terms with power forward Tristan Thompson on the eve of the new season. LeBron was always going to come back, and perhaps he reached a detente with Blatt, off a playoff run where the rookie NBA coach worked over more experienced coaches like Tom Thibodeau and Mike Budenholzer.

It’s also worth noting that LeBron won titles in his second and third seasons in Miami, and man for man, Cleveland’s roster is better than those Heat teams. Expectations heading into 2015–16 were understandably huge, especially after Cleveland survived the growing pains of the initial season of immense change.

CHAPTER 8

No Single Path to Mining Talent

            
I think there’s that pressure when you’re a top-ten, top-five pick that you want to come in and put up numbers . . . but once you’re in the league six, seven years, you realize that numbers aren’t that important. . . . You get the W, that’s more important. . . . No one’s really going to talk about a guy who averaged twenty and ten on a team that was terrible.

—Andrew Bogut, center, Golden State Warriors

P
layers can work to push themselves to reach the level of quality required to succeed in the NBA, but it takes more than an individual’s skill to become successful. We read every year about supposed “busts” who don’t live up to their draft status, but so much of player success depends on the environments in which they land, and NBA rookies don’t have much control over that process. The questions persist for any player that’s not a franchise-level star, though. Is this the right coach for that player? Does the coach get to stay awhile so continuity can develop? Is the franchise well-run at the owner and management level? Are there quality veterans in the locker room? Are the facilities and services that help players stay healthy up to current standards?

Likewise, there are a wide-variety of talent acquisition strategies (and sub-strategies) that teams can pursue, depending on where they
are in the competitive cycle, how much money they have available, and how desirable a location they are for players. While the draft and free agency are the two most direct ways for teams to acquire the kinds of players they want, trades and player development can be even more potent because they often are less impacted by outside market factors dictating who you can have and for how much money.

Good teams find players from all of those avenues, although smart drafting and development is really crucial. Smart players develop and evolve to make themselves as valuable as they can be for as long as possible. The dance goes on and on, with a healthy dose of right time, right place also factoring in. To show the variety of ways teams can find the right players, here are five case studies from the NBA that show the different ways teams can obtain and nurture extremely valuable talent, and how certain players find a way to extend their value in the league.

Andrew Bogut: From No. 1 Overall Pick to Pivotal Role Player

Andrew Bogut is tired of talking about his injuries. There were the two most notable ones—the broken ankle he suffered when he landed on the foot of then-Houston Rockets guard Kyle Lowry, and the dislocated elbow suffered when he was nudged slightly on a fastbreak dunk against the Phoenix Suns and landed awkwardly on his arm—but there have also been a broken rib, another long-term ankle “sprain,” and the constant assortment of bumps and bruises that an NBA big man suffers when he plays as physically as Bogut does night in and night out.

Bogut considers the vast majority of his injuries to be flukes rather than a byproduct of his favored playing style, but they certainly have had an impact on his career trajectory. He had a promising start to his NBA career in Milwaukee after the Bucks made him the No. 1 overall pick in 2005, maturing to the point where he averaged 15.9
points, 10.2 rebounds, and 2.5 blocks a game with the Bucks in 2009–10. The injuries kept mounting, though, and as they started to impact his shooting and mobility, he had to begin reconsidering his path as an NBA player.

Things didn’t start much better when the injured Bogut was acquired by the Golden State Warriors at the trade deadline during the 2011–12 season in a deal for guard Monta Ellis, a popular mainstay who was deemed expendable as Stephen Curry grew into his stardom. At a jersey-retirement ceremony for team legend Chris Mullin the following month, team co-owner Joe Lacob was booed by the Oracle Arena crowd when he attempted to speak because of the fans’ displeasure with the trade.

Bogut’s recovery from his various injuries was difficult. In an article written by Yahoo’s Marc Spears in December 2014, Bogut explained how badly his body had been failing him during the 2012–2013 season, going as far to suggest to his agent that
he couldn’t play anymore.

So Bogut had a choice to make. He couldn’t be a thirty-plus-minutes-a-game player anymore and stay effective and healthy, so he had to recast himself. He had retained his skillful passing ability and his affinity for setting screens, and as the league moved to a drive-and-kick spread offense motif, Bogut’s rim-protection skills remained very much in demand. So, he set out to be the best crucial role player he could be, all the while cognizant that some considered him to be a disappointment.

“I’ve been in the league long enough. I was on a bad team where I put up numbers, and unfortunately had some bad injuries that have kind of changed my game a little bit,” Bogut said while sitting on top of an advertising board on the baseline of Atlanta’s Philips Arena. “I had two injuries where I was told I probably wouldn’t play again, so I’m happy to be out here playing. Obviously, as a No. 1 pick, I haven’t exceeded expectations, but I haven’t been a bust, either. I’ve kind of been in the middle, in my opinion. Probably average. I really
hit my stride my third, fourth, fifth year, and obviously had some issues. So I don’t buy into [the perception] right now.”

Bogut’s injuries may have been a possible red flag, but the Warriors were pretty determined to bring him in, and his elbow injury provided them the opportunity they needed. According to assistant general manager Kirk Lacob, team management had conducted a study of past Warriors teams as well as what kind of roster combinations were working in the league at the time, and came to the conclusion that they really needed to add a physical screen setter and rim protector to help out their perimeter players on both ends of the floor.

“We basically found that the Warriors never had a center,” Lacob said. “They tried to draft one a million times. We need[ed] a center badly, a big guy. And not just like a center, we want[ed] someone very specifically who is a monster defensively, protects the rim, and can pull off rebounds. That’s specifically what we went after. I mean, I’m not going to pretend that we didn’t get very lucky to get Bogut—a lot of things had to go right, he had to get hurt, they had to want to trade him. That trade was like a twelve-month thing, but it’s definitely a guy that we targeted.”

Fast-forward to the 2014–15 regular season, and while most of the attention on Golden State was focused on Curry and fellow “Splash Brother” Klay Thompson, or the emergence of multifaceted Draymond Green as the team’s very high-quality glue guy, Bogut’s defense, picks, and passing from both the high and low post were all enormous factors in the team’s success.

Individual player net ratings, or the team’s point differential per one hundred possessions when they’re on or off the court, can be somewhat misleading and can be impacted by playing fewer minutes, but it’s worth noting that Bogut’s plus-16.6 “on court” net rating, per
NBA.com
, was the second-best on the team, just behind league MVP Curry. Bogut also had the team’s fourth-“worst” off-court net
rating, meaning the Warriors struggled a bit more than usual when Bogut wasn’t playing. Additionally, the team’s 95.2 points allowed per one hundred possessions while Bogut was on the floor was the lowest for any regular rotation player, underscoring his rim-protecting importance. When Bogut was off the court during the regular season, the Warriors allowed a more pedestrian 100.2 points per one hundred possessions.

Since Bogut only played a bit less than twenty-four minutes a game, it was almost like the Warriors had two separate teams, with very different approaches. That flexibility—whether it was Bogut conceding minutes to fellow bigs Marreese Speights or Festus Ezeli, or whether they went very small, with 6-foot-7 Draymond Green playing the role of de facto center—proved very difficult for most opponents to handle, and was extremely crucial for the Warriors in the postseason.

To Bogut’s credit, he didn’t really care how much he played, and the team understood his unique value. Lacob said early in the season that, if told that Golden State would have Bogut and Andre Iguodala healthy for seventy-five games apiece, he wouldn’t have to ask for anything else in terms of a basis of great expectations for the season. Come springtime, he looked very prescient.

In Bogut’s sixty-seven appearances in the regular season, the Warriors went 58–9 (versus 9–6 when he didn’t play). In the playoffs, he served crucial strategic roles in some series (like when Steve Kerr switched him onto poor outside shooter Tony Allen in the second round against Memphis, which allowed Bogut to roam freely in the paint and help deter the Grizzlies’ excellent inside duo of Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph), and played a total of two minutes and forty-six seconds in the Warriors’ final three games in the NBA Finals, when his skill set was not required given the specific matchup with the Cavaliers. That was OK by Bogut, who endured a long and painful road to get to this point and has moved team success well ahead of personal kudos on his priority list.

“We have enough scorers and guys who will get stats,” Bogut said, “so [we need someone] setting good screens, getting the rebound, block[ing] shots, protect[ing] the paint, and I predicate the way I play on those things.

“I think there’s that pressure when you’re a top-ten, top-five pick that you want to come in and put up numbers,” he added, “but once you’re in the league six, seven years, you realize that numbers aren’t that important. To me, they’re not that important. To other guys, they are. I think letters are more important to me. You get the W, that’s more important to me at this point of my career. No one’s really going to talk about a guy who averaged twenty and ten on a team that was terrible.”

Khris Middleton: From Trade Toss-In to Leading Role

One of the NBA’s most impactful young players was a mere footnote in a trade that happened in the summer of 2013, when the Milwaukee Bucks and Detroit Pistons swapped point guards, with Brandon Knight heading to the Bucks in exchange for Brandon Jennings.

As part of the transaction, Milwaukee also received Ukrainian 7-footer Viacheslav Kravtsov, who had played 224 minutes in his debut NBA season for Detroit (and who was subsequently dealt to Phoenix as part of a trade to obtain veteran swingman Caron Butler before ever playing a minute for Milwaukee), and Khris Middleton, a second-round pick from Texas A&M who had shown some flashes both in college and during his rookie campaign in Detroit (he played 475 minutes in twenty-seven games), but was far from a finished product on either end of the floor.

Two years later, some advanced metrics considered him to be
one of the best players in the NBA.

ESPN.com
’s real plus-minus (RPM) is best described as a next-generation attempt to refine an already-complicated metric called regularized adjusted plus-minus (RAPM), which was a calculation
that tried to determine just how much of a positive impact individual players had on team performance on both offense and defense. These calculations were improvements on the original adjusted plus-minus calculations, which were a rough approximation of how many points better or worse a team performed while a player was on the floor, adjusted for his teammates on the court with him.

For the 2014–15 season, the real plus-minus leaderboard doubled as a who’s who of NBA greats. League MVP Stephen Curry led the category, followed by LeBron James (the best player in the world), James Harden (league MVP runner-up and a first-team All-NBA guard), Anthony Davis (the next huge thing), and Kawhi Leonard (a destructive two-way force for the San Antonio Spurs). Of the top nine players on the list, four made first-team All-NBA for that season, and three more made second-team honors.

At number ten overall was Middleton.

Furthermore, if you round up Middleton’s offensive RPM score of 1.97 to 2, he was one of only seven players in the league with a rating of 2+ on both ends of the floor.

Moving on to ESPN’s wins above replacement player (WARP) calculation, which attempts to calculate how many wins a player is worth over an average player, Middleton finished ninth overall, once again only trailing eight of the sport’s best players (everyone on the RPM list besides Sacramento’s DeMarcus Cousins, who was sixteenth in this metric).

No one metric is the gospel, but it’s indisputable that Middleton emerged as one of the sport’s bright young talents through a combination of hard work, player development, and a positional switch that helped unlock everything he has to offer on the court.

“When I came into the league, everyone looked at me that I was going to be a better defender, and that’s how I earned my way to play—towards the end of Detroit and [in 2013–14 with Milwaukee], just playing defense and playing as hard as I can,” he said while icing down his knees after the Bucks’ morning shootaround at Denver’s Pepsi Center.

“I think [positional certainty] has [helped] in a way. I felt like I had a pretty good year [in 2013–14] at the small forward position, but at the two-guard this year, I’m able to use my length a lot more. A lot of threes now are my size, so being able to guard smaller guys, it’s helping me at the defensive end and the offensive end.”

In a 2013 writeup for SB Nation’s
BrewHoop
site examining the
trade with the Pistons, Eric Buenning actually sniffed out Middleton’s upside potential, writing that he “
might
have the potential to become a rather nice 3-and-D type, with a little more versatility on offense. Middleton developed a rep as a guy who could get his own shot while [at] Texas A&M, which he should be able to get off over most small forwards. The question is whether he can find reliability in his stroke from distance, which tailed off during an injury-plagued junior season in 11/12,” but what’s happened has blasted through the ceiling of that projection.

Middleton started to emerge as a small forward on the 2013–14 Bucks, playing around thirty minutes a game and doubling his scoring output from his rookie season while knocking down 41.4 percent of his 3-point attempts, but the Bucks’ decision to switch coaches to Jason Kidd ahead of the 2014–15 season initiated a move of Middleton to the shooting guard role. There, he was able to use his 6-foot-7 frame and nearly 7-foot wingspan to disrupt smaller players’ shots while still having the athleticism to guard them in space. In 2014–15, Milwaukee often used Middleton as their primary defensive stopper as well as a leading source of offense on a team that didn’t have a ton of reliable options on that end of the floor.