Best. Decision. Ever.
Why LeBron James’ Original Sin probably saved the Cleveland Cavaliers four years ago.
As the world held its collective breath (again) last week in advance of LeBron James’ latest Decision, the fallout from James’ last Decision was rightfully at the forefront of the resultant discussion. In 2010, when James infamously and publicly spurned his hometown Cavaliers for the bluer skies and sandier shores of South Beach, reactions out of Cleveland were predictably and (mostly) justifiably outraged. The modifier mostly, of course, has been attached to account for the existence of one Daniel Gilbert, LeBron’s #1 fanemy and the author/performance artist behind the literary masterpiece that brought Comic Sans to the forefront of America’s public discourse surrounding novelty fonts.*
*I very much hope there is no such discourse.
Not only did Gilbert’s tirade provide seemingly endless comedic and pseudo-dramatic fodder for the talking heads and blogosphere at the time, its wonderful and magical reappearance as a conversation piece this spring was nothing short of kismet. Fans and media alike wondered whether LeBron could ever let bygones be bygones to work for a man who had once filled the moat between King James and his Cavaliers with grammatically-suspect gasoline and then tossed in an incoherently quotation-mark-littered match.
Ultimately, LeBron looked past the letter and Gilbert has (surprise!) willingly forgiven and forgotten since doing so means he gets to employ the best basketball player in the world for the foreseeable future. And so despite the events of 2010, the tidy narrative now shifts from the Decision to the Reunion, and we are fed a prophecy in which James’ new Cavs stand at the brink of an incomprehensibly bright future.
Only, that’s not quite right.
The Cavaliers are not a young, promising, arguable title-favorite despite the events of 2010. They’re all those things because of what happened four years ago.
In my mind, there are two alternate scenarios that could have played out in 2010 had LeBron not declared that was taking his talents anywhere — and neither have the Cavaliers in the extremely enviable position they find themselves in now.
First and most obviously, LeBron could have stayed in Cleveland. He would have re-signed at the max or something very close to it and, given Cleveland’s lack of cap space at the time (even without LeBron or any other high-profile signing in the Summer of 2010, the Cavs had a $51.4 million payroll against a $58.044 million salary cap in 2010-11), that would have precluded the signing of any player that could have improved the club appreciably. James would have basically been stuck with the team that won 19 games without him and, while he certainly would have been worth a whole lot of wins, it’s not realistic to think that James could have carried that team past the 62-win 2010-11 Bulls (in the healthy Derrick Rose’s MVP season) or the very good veteran Celtics team that Miami ultimately beat in the postseason. Certainly, they could have hoped to do no better against Dallas in the Finals than the runner-up Heat did in the event. And none of that even contemplates how they would have matched up with the still-formidable Wade/Bosh tandem that might have existed in Miami under this hypothetical.
So, let’s assume that in Year 1, LeBron improves Cleveland to a contender and non-champion. Sure, it means another year of “no ring” for the King, but it also means no Kyrie Irving — the odds of a LeBron-led team missing the playoffs and winning the Draft Lottery (or trading away Mo Williams for the Clippers’ pick that unexpectedly netted Irving) are essentially zero. And it also means that James, who had already begun to take some flak for his failure to win it all to that point, becomes a once-in-a-generation talent trying to convince another star or two to join him in a Rust Belt city with no assurances of anything other than constant pressure to succeed in what may or may not have been an impossible circumstance.
Does Carmelo Anthony force his way to Lake Erie instead of Broadway? Not likely. Do one of the available bigs come there in the 2011 offseason? (Marc Gasol, Nene, Tyson Chandler and Zach Randolph were free agents then.) Maybe, I guess. Does “Cleveland and the LeBrons” carry the same weight as the “Heatles” did in luring veterans to take a pay cut? Please.
It’s impossible to know exactly how things would have played out for Cleveland with LeBron in the fold, but it’s hard to imagine that they could have put together a core to rival James, Wade, and Bosh in their collective primes. In Cleveland, no less! The Cavs certainly would not have had Pat Riley at the helm or Erik Spoelstra on the bench. The Heat had all of these things working in their favor and managed to win two titles in four years, one of them after surviving a near-coronary of a seven-game conference final against the wily Celtics, and the other by a razor-thin margin over a Spurs team that uncharacteristically beat itself in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals. An imaginary team even incrementally worse than those Heat teams wins zero titles over that same span.
Now, let’s follow our hypothetical to the present: It’s the Summer of 2014 and LeBron is about to turn 30. He’s spent 11 years in Cleveland without winning a title and the hot takes are hotter than ever. There’s no Kyrie Irving. There’s no Andrew Wiggins. It’s time for James to decide whether to sign up to spend the rest of his prime tending to his mansion shrubbery. If he does, the hypothetical roster surely doesn’t have the same promise that Cleveland’s now-roster does. This, of course, assumes that the franchise — the hypothetical version that employed LeBron for the past four years — doesn’t enjoy lottery pick after lottery pick, absolutely does not have the juice to trade for a Kevin Love type, and that a ringless LeBron is wholly incapable of convincing a second superstar to move to the Cuyahoga Valley.
Judged by the metric of “likelihood to win one or more titles,” the current (actual) Cleveland Cavaliers are now light years ahead of where they would be had never LeBron never left.
But what if he’d left and just been nicer about it?
There’s our second hypothetical. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that James spurns Jim Gray and embraces Lee Jenkins in 2010, penning a tear-jerking essay about how much Northeast Ohio means to him; how it pains him horribly to leave, but he’s got hoops-induced OCD, and he just has to play on the title-caliber team that the Cavs had never given him or his competitive zeal will shrivel up and die. He doesn’t take his talents anywhere, he forges a new path, openly and sympathetically. Sure, he gets criticized, but the vitriol is at least an order of magnitude less than the dose of haterism the Decision exposed him to. Dan Gilbert gets upset and reacts reflexively, but not to such an immature and silly extreme.
The next four years then play out however they play out. (One can argue that perhaps Miami beats Dallas in 2010 if LeBron doesn’t carry such a heavy I-don’t-want-to-be-the-bad-guy-with-the-black-mouthguard-but-here-we-are-I-guess burden upon his broad shoulders.) The calendar turns to 2014 and LeBron, two or three rings in hand, has another decision to make. What are the odds he picks Cleveland? Again, I haven’t the foggiest, but believe the man when he revealed his feelings to Jenkins last week. In particular, I found this passage instructive:
“Miami, for me, has been almost like college for other kids. These past four years helped raise me into who I am. I became a better player and a better man. I learned from a franchise that had been where I wanted to go. I will always think of Miami as my second home. Without the experiences I had there, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing today”
By his own admission, LeBron grew up more in the past four years in Miami — enduring endless and to some extent deserved criticism for making an otherwise justifiable decision in a callous and arrogant manner — than he would have had the Decision never occurred. This is a man who is winning at life to a degree that almost no one on the planet can identify with, yet the reaction to that indiscretion humbled him in the truest and most important sense of the word.
Remember that brash 25-year-old who sat at the Boys & Girls Club in Greenwich, CT and shoved a knife in the heart of his hometown with an outright disturbing level of naivete as to the impact of his actions? Remember that kid who traveled to Miami with a chip on his shoulder and held a pep rally to boast about titles that he hadn’t yet won? And what did he reap from that which his immaturity sowed? He got to visit each and every arena in the country, only to be showered with heckles and jeers the likes of which he couldn’t possibly have once fathomed. And it was through that relative suffering that LeBron James grew up. He became the the man who approached every on-court moment with the same professionalism and poise that the manner of his 2014 announcement demonstrated.
On some level, the contrast between LeBron’s two announcements tells the whole story. His maturation is real, and it’s meaningful, and it could not have happened quite the way it did had he not been purged of the Original Sin he committed against his community back in 2010. If the Decision had merely been a decision, if LeBron had not suffered the slings and arrows of a hungry media and a ravenous nation of basketball fans, Cleveland still might have been able to lure the King back home.
But it wouldn’t have been this King.
The next few years in Cleveland won’t be easy; building a champion is difficult anywhere, but it’s even harder to do when the shadow of an extended title drought colors every decision, darkens every obstacles, casts every failure in sharper contrast. A week ago, the Cavs didn’t just sign the best player in the NBA; they also signed the one whose experience playing in the face of righteous indignation and irrational anger compelled him to to learn, to grow, and to win. Those are the skills that Cleveland’s young and unproven stars will need to master; how to excel on the court and how to compartmentalize drama and criticism off it.
Four years removed from the Decision that many thought would haunt him forever, LeBron James is home. And if the King can bring a crown home with him, that painful night in Greenwich may prove to have been the most important for Cleveland sports in half a century.