#CavsRank Moments: 30-28

This blog isn’t just a detailed listing of Live Threads, and Recaps. It’s a time capsule that canonizes the moments of the Cleveland Cavaliers story. During the past two seasons we’ve wallowed through depressive depths of infighting, and risen to manic mania that only a championship parade can deliver. Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting the highs and lowlighting the lows. Join us as we recap the entire epic journey.

30. Ty Lue Steps Over Subtweets

After posting my Case for Kibitz article about David Blatt’s firing, I was the closest I’ve ever come to asking for a break from the Cavs. I didn’t want to separate entirely, but I wanted a few months to collate what mattered to me in life, and whether the Cavs should be a part of it. I attended the Timberwolves game a few days later, and I still wasn’t settled about the whole situation. In a way, I was disconnected and wished I was digesting the beef check pirogies and pork shank I had just eaten from a blackjack table at the Horseshoe rather than two rows behind the Timberwolves bench. At the very least, I could have won something back.

As I looked upon the Timberwolves roster sharing a kibitz together a few feet away,  I was jealous of their fans in a sense. Not just because they had Karl-Anthony Towns and our brief summer fling of Andrew Wiggins in their harem, but because being the fan of a rebuilding team is safe. You anticipate hiccups during a rebuild, but your brain blocks out the bad in an act of self-preservation, and all you see ahead is the endless possibility of what if.  The future starts slow, and the possibilities of what they could all become together is infinite. They haven’t disappointed you yet. It’s a sheltered zone in fandom, and I was legit jealous that the Cavs were on a title or bust train, and the wheels seemed to be coming off. My Cleveland fan defense mechanisms were at full alert.

I didn’t hold any of the Cavs turmoil against Lue. He applied for a job just like we’ve all done a thousand times, and they decided to hire someone else, then they hired him anyway. It wasn’t Lue’s fault that LeBron tuned out Blatt from the rip, and that the rest of the roster followed suit. The awkward position Lue faced after replacing his boss was that he was there for the entire juxtaposed journey. He saw Blatt suppress himself entirely to appease The King, and it eventually cost him his job. The firey Blatt from overseas was long gone by the time he was fired with a 30-11 record.

LBJ is that annoying relative who posts cryptic statuses because they want you to ask what's going on. Then they say, "Nothing. Why?"

— HoopsDogg (@oldseaminer) March 3, 2016

Lue was stepped over by Allen Iverson in the 2001 Finals, but he wasn’t going to let LeBron James step over him or the organization in his first head coaching gig. Lue witnessed first hand that Blatt taking the passive route with James didn’t work. James had realized that Blatt would kiss his ring, and that he could do whatever he wanted, from openly flirting with playing with other team’s players presumably not in Cleveland, calling his own teammates out on social media for their deficiencies, and unfollowing Cleveland related accounts on Twitter just because he could. It’s hard to imagine now that THAT poo parade was just five months ago.

Lue said enough and stood up to the man-child messiah who had eight-inches on him. Lue had the stones to point out James’ own poor play in video sessions. Lue told James to stop subtweeting. Most importantly, Lue took back the huddle. If Lue doesn’t step up to LeBron, he probably never earns his respect. If he never earns James’ focus to stop the sophomoric temper tantrum and buy in, the rest never follow suit. Without Lue standing up to LeBron, they never win the title.

29. Kyrie’s 55 over Portland

Perhaps I’m biased, but it’s hard to imagine that another fan base in any sport has been through a rollercoaster ride of the negative and positive emotional g-forces that we have experienced the past few seasons. The title win and the summer of Cleveland has retracted my brain, and it’s hard to fully remember just how rough of a ride it really was. K-Love 3:16, the summer of Kyrie, and J.R. being told by the president to put a damn shirt on have replaced all of the turmoil we were going through a year and a half ago.

As the hour glass of 2014 ran out of sand, and was flipped over to 2015, the Cavs were at their absolute low point of the second King James reign. Click bait journalists and tweet trolls were at full bloom, as the Cavs had lost had lost nine of their previous 10. LeBron missed Miami so much that he flew to South Beach midseason, abdicating his throne and teammates to clear his head and rest his body. Questions quickly arose about whether or not the supporting cast he hand-picked himself a few months prior was capable of being cohesive on the court, let alone chasing and capturing the elusive Larry O’Brien.

One of the major questions during that meltdown was whether Kyrie Irving was the right running mate for LeBron James. Was he too young? Did the absolute dysfunction of the franchise during Irving’s first three seasons brew malfeasant manners and selfishness that could never be corrected? If Kevin Love sacrificing his back spasming body to draw a charge against the Lakers is the turning point of the Cavs 2014-15 season, then Kyrie Irving’s performance against the Trailblazers thirteen days later was the moment that LeBron James realized Kyrie was the right man to be his running mate.

Despite having won six straight since Kevin’s charge taken, James sat out the game with a sore wrist, and at that point the Cavs were a rotting carcass 1-7 without him on the season. A rested Trailblazers squad that was second in the brutal West at the time, and had beaten the Cavs by 19 earlier in the year. Would LeBron’s absence derail the Cavs seven-game winning streak, and drop them back into another funk?

Irving started the contest an Arctic icecap sub-zero, the  during the first 10 minutes of action. The rest of the way he was a global warming heat check wave, as the Cavs surged ahead throughout the first half, and kept the game tight as the Blazers battled back behind 38 points from LaMarcus Aldridge.

With 28 seconds remaining, and the contest tangled at 94, Irving had already established a then career high of 50 points. Irving casually dribbled the clock down, and as Nicholas Batum slowly retreated to play the drive, Irving aced a triple from just right of the top of the key to seal the win. Cleveland would go on to win 11 straight on that streak.

It’s hard to imagine now, just how cold LeBron was to his teammates during his first few months back. Multiple times, he talked about how they just didn’t understand what it took to win. Rather than lead by example and teach them, he manned the helm of the malaise madness that later infected the rest of  the team. It seemed like he had a “do as I say, not as I do” hypocritical big brother relationship with Kyrie, but the first person to chest bump Irving off the bench after the game winning three against the Blazers was LeBron. This was a fulcrum moment in the past two years because it was the moment that LeBron James believed that Kyrie Irving could be championship clutch someday.

28. The Ultimate Warriors’ Airport Welcoming

He’ll be remembered as a man of such physical marvel, that you’d assume he had more synthetic testosterone in his urine during his prime than the Soviet Olympic team during the Reagan years. A man who repeatedly held a gun to his bosses’ head just to flex his control, and get high on his own ego. In the back of my mind, I’ll always suspect that his primary focus behind all of the fluff, charity and noise is his branding for his own monetary gain.

Social media was toasty after the Cavs cross country championship tour touched down at Hopkins airport, with LeBron trolling the recently defeated Golden State Warriors by proclaiming himself the Ultimate Warrior, donning an only in the early 90s neon vomit shirt with the recently deceased wrestler’s image front and center.

During an interview with Alyson Shontell of Business Insider, LeBron elaborated on the subject, and said that his wife packed him a collection of tee-shirts of his favorite childhood wrestlers for the road trip. He said that the Warrior shirt just happened to be the only one left in his carry-on to wear after his previous tee was soaked with champagne in Vegas, but it’s obvious that he hadn’t worn one of those wrestling memorials since before Game 7 when he wore an Undertaker shirt in anticipation. He was wearing the Cavs “Locker Room” edition tee (that we all own three of now) within the bowels of Oracle. In Vegas, the only photos I’ve seen of him have him donning an Akron based RWTW shirt during the teams’ Sin City recess. Was it really a coincidence that the only shirt in his travel bag was the Ultimate Warrior tee?

I’m probably crazy, but I saw more in him wearing the shirt than that. A deep wrinkle of my brain believes that every line of the first paragraph of this moment not only applies to Jim Helwig, aka Blade Runner Rock aka The Ultimate Warrior, but also to LeBron James in varying shades of neon green. I don’t buy LeBron’s explanation that the shirt just happened to be packed for the trip at all, when just about everything he does seems to be carefully processed for the purpose of his brand.

Helwig was a physical freak who bought in so much on his brand, that he legally changed his name to “Warrior” so that Vince McMahon wouldn’t be able to trademark the gimmick. At some point his wife had to explain to all of her friends and family at a Thanksgiving table why she changed her last name to Warrior. The effect of Helwig’s decision forced his children to be in different home rooms during elementary school. Their lives could have been changed forever over that. Helwig was a branding forefather by taking back his own gimmick.

For those who don’t have arrested development, and aren’t trapped being 12-year-olds who are starting to see their hair line retreat by the year and can buy beer, Warrior infamously held a gun to Vinny Mac’s head during a major pay-per-view for a bigger payday. LeBron may have never threatened not to walk out of the tunnel, but for the majority of his prime he’s threatened to walk out the door with the structure of his contracts. Do what I want, or else became his modus operandi.
As fitting as “The King” nickname is for James, he’s really “The Brand.” All of it. Every fulcrum moment of his prime seems to have been plotted in a way. I don’t mean to dismiss his character, but him being so obsessed with his brand and how the public will react to it is a major part of why he’s such a compelling character in the NBA story. The Decision wasn’t staged because it was a good idea, but because he wanted to show that he’s the most important plot in sports. Period. Like any girl who had other options, he just wanted to see us all wait for an an extra hour and go primp himself, just because he could.

His return is the best thing that has happened to Cleveland in the past 50 years, but I definitely think much of it was manufactured for marketing. In retrospect, him going to Miami was absolutely the best decision for him, but he’d never be baby face after The Decision without coming back. Anyone who has ever moved away can relate to the familiarity that is home. Nostalgia creeps in sometimes, and you remember everything as better than it actually was live. I’ve lived a lot of places, but home will always be home. The return wasn’t a decision he woke up to that morning. His handlers and yes men had to have bought into how good the story would go over, and how that would ultimately affect his marketability in the present and more importantly in the future. He’d also have the control over the franchise on a level that he’d never receive in Miami.

If Helwig had crafted his decisions more carefully, his career could have finished better. Ultimately, he and McMahon buried the hatchet, because grudges aren’t a sign of strength, but of absolute weakness on both sides. Helwig was inducted in to the WWE HOF after a decade plus of petty feuding because it was what was best for business for both sides.

A year and a half after LeBron’s return, we’ve still yet to see a genuine embrace by Gilbert and LeBron. Even at podium after the title win, there was still an awkwardness between the two. Hopefully, someday in the near future, we’ll witness that their hatchet is rusting away in the dirt with our ancestors who dreamed of seeing the mass of humanity that celebrated what these two great men were able to accomplish together. All relationships are told through the distance you sacrifice for another. I genuinely hope that one day the self-preservation bubbles between both disappears, and they will be arm-in-arm, able to celebrate what they accomplished together like Warrior and McMahon were able to three days before Warrior passed away. After all, the future isn’t guaranteed for any of us, and life and those who were a major part of it, are more important than holding a grudge.

[Editor’s note: the opinions in this piece reflect those of its author and are not indicative of the opinions of CtB as a whole, its editors, or any other member of CtB.]