As you may have heard, Kyrie Irving played for the Cleveland Cavaliers for the first six seasons of his NBA career before getting traded to the Boston Celtics this past summer. While the trade occurred because of Irving’s desire to be a team’s No. 1 option, it apparently happened at the behest of LeBron James.
A report from earlier this week said that James did not want the Cavaliers to move Irving, as ESPN’s Brian Windhorst wrote that the best player in the world wanted the team to tell Irving to honor the rest of his contract and stick around. On Thursday, Windhorst gave some more details into this, and as it turns out, moving Irving may have caused even more damage than we thought.
Windhorst appeared on ESPN Radio in Cleveland to discuss the Cavaliers and dropped this nugget about how the Irving trade might have impacted James’ ability to trust the team and its owner, Dan Gilbert.
Windhorst: I don't think LeBron will sign a 5-year deal with the #Cavs this summer. He may resign but I don't think for the max.
I am not sure he can trust the organization and Dan Gilbert after the Kyrie Irving trade. LeBron would have preferred they forced Kyrie to play.
— ESPN Cleveland (@ESPNCleveland) January 18, 2018
James and Gilbert have had a famously, um, rocky relationship, so for Windhorst to suggest that there’s little-to-no trust on James’ end due to the Irving trade is a serious allegation. It makes sense that James would have been upset — the Cavs turned Irving into a very good but injured player (Isaiah Thomas) and a future draft pick (the Nets’ 2018 first-round pick), and he has titles he wants to win — but the thought of losing his trust in the organization because for the deal is astounding.
Additionally, Windhorst touched on the stretch of time when the Cavaliers didn’t have a general manager this summer between the parting of ways with David Griffin and the hiring of Koby Altman, which he believes could be a monumental stretch of time for the organization.
Windhorst: In my opinion, those 3 weeks over the summer that the #Cavs had uncertainty in their GM position could have been one of the most damaging stretches in team history.
— ESPN Cleveland (@ESPNCleveland) January 18, 2018
Would things have been different if Griffin was steering the ship and got to see Irving’s trade request through? Who knows. But if Windhorst’s report is accurate, there are some serious issues in Cleveland that have been brewing since the summer, at the very least.
