Cavaliers architect faces the unknown
General manager’s contract expires at season’s end
CLEVELAND — David Griffin was on a far court, walking through offensive sets with Tyronn Lue, the coach he hired in the middle of last season. On the other side of the gym, LeBron James, the megastar he helped bring back to Ohio, stood in front of news media microphones, expounding on his Cleveland Cavaliers and the collective sharpshooters known as the Golden State Warriors, the two teams that are facing off in the NBA finals for a third consecutive year.
Griffin glanced at the news media scrum but had no intention of joining it. Usually known as Griff among agents and fellow NBA executives, he is one of the more voluble and transparent general managers in a league that prefers its wheeler-dealers on the more stoic and sleight-of-hand side.
Silence is golden, however, when it is your own contract that is up and the price of remaining the ringmaster of one of the league’s most-watched circuses might be more than the Cavaliers owner, Dan Gilbert, is willing to pay.
Does it matter that Griffin was essential to the effort to get James to return to Cleveland and give this sports-mad city its first major sports title of any kind in more than 50 years?
Some of his peers believe so. Both the Atlanta Hawks and the Orlando Magic recently asked the Cavaliers for permission to speak with Griffin for their top front-office positions. Each was turned down by Cleveland and went on to fill those positions without ever interviewing him. Now, the Milwaukee Bucks are reportedly interested in Griffin grabbing their basketball reins, although they have not yet asked permission to talk to him.
Gilbert is a hands-on owner who has a history of letting player and executive contracts run out before going to the negotiating table, and Griffin’s contract expires at the end of the month. With the Cavaliers’ payroll now standing at more than $125 million, and with an additional $27 million in luxury taxes to pay, Gilbert has earned the right to spend money at his own pace.
Through a spokesman, Griffin declined to be interviewed for this article.
Although the result of a Game 1 NBA finals loss to the Warriors was disheartening for the Cavaliers, there is still time for James to figure out a way to challenge an aesthetically dazzling Warriors team led by extraordinary talents bearing names befitting pop stars — Steph, Kevin Durant, Draymond and Klay.
Meanwhile, as Gilbert decides whether Griffin is worth keeping, and at what price, there is little doubt that taking stock of his achievements as the chief architect of the Cavaliers is forever complicated by the overwhelming influence James has in the front office and beyond.
In fact, Griffin’s tenure throughout these past three finals runs by James and his Cavaliers teammates has been characterized by whispers that he is merely James’ personal shopper, and then countered by assertions that he is, indeed, a gifted judge of basketball talent. So take your pick.
“It’s hard to get the credit that you deserve when you have a star like LeBron because of his dominance on the floor and, probably more important, off it,” said longtime sports executive Jerry Colangelo, who hired Griffin as an intern in the media department back when he owned the Phoenix Suns.
It was not necessarily what Griffin signed on for when he was named the Cavaliers’ general manager in May 2014 after four years as the team’s vice president for basketball operations.
When, a month later, James decided to return to the state where he was raised and to the Cleveland franchise with which he started his professional career, Griffin was forced to pivot quickly. Instead of continuing his efforts to build a team gradually around point guard Kyrie Irving, he now needed to bring in at least one top player and some decent spare parts to meet James’ wishes.
So Griffin traded Andrew Wiggins, that year’s overall No. 1 pick, and two other players to the Minnesota Timberwolves in a threeway deal for Kevin Love, the AllStar forward. He signed bench players James Jones and Mike Miller, who were with James in Miami when he won two titles there. In midseason, Griffin added J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert and Timofey Mozgov. James lobbied for the streak-shooting Smith, while Griffin believed Shumpert and Mozgov would help shore up the defense.
Griffin has gracefully referred to James as an “amazing partner” in making his personnel decisions for the Cavaliers. But he has also acknowledged that James’ is a voice that must be heard when he is contemplating what roster moves to make.
And sometimes it is a loud voice. Many of Griffin’s peers say that James’ periodic public comments about the Cavaliers’ roster only serve to make his general manager’s job more difficult, but that Griffin has managed to succeed, anyway.
“LeBron can say he wants this, this and that, but somebody has to go out and do the work to get them,” said one rival team executive who did not want to be publicly identified talking about another club. “Acquiring players is hard. You only have so many resources, there’s cap limits, and you’ve got to know the right players to get. The guy has done a great job.”
On the guts front, Griffin fired coach David Blatt in midseason last year despite the fact that the Cavaliers had a conference-best 30-11 record at the time. The previous year, Blatt’s first, the Cavaliers won the Eastern Conference before losing in six games to Golden State in the finals with a team that was missing key players.
As for the quest to find more shooters, Griffin pulled off a midseason trade last year for big man Channing Frye, who can hit from the outside. In January, he added Kyle Korver, one of the best 3-point shooters in the history of the league, in exchange for Mike Dunleavy, Mo Williams, cash and a protected future first-round draft pick.
When James worried publicly that the Cavaliers needed a veteran point guard to back up Irving, Griffin signed three-time All-Star Deron Williams in February after he was waived by the Dallas Mavericks. Like Korver and the others before him, Williams was a veteran without an inflated ego who was brought in to give Cleveland another shot at a championship.
“Griff has got Korver, Shumpert and J.R. Smith for nothing or very little,” said Happy Walters, the agent for Shumpert, who got to know Griffin in Phoenix while representing Amar’e Stoudemire. “I think he’s done a very good job of balancing egos and putting a championship-caliber team together. He’s definitely not anyone’s personal shopper. He will be highly sought after if he is not in Cleveland.”
Neither Gilbert nor Griffin has tipped his hand on what the owner is willing to pay or the general manager believes he deserves, or if they are willing to part ways. The starting point for an executive with Griffin’s level of success is about $7 million annually.