I certainly was not accusing Griff of incompetence for exploring Kyrie trade ideas. That was a reasonable thing to do. I was accusing the entire organization of epic incompetence for complely botching their relationship with perhaps the second most important/talented player ever to play for the Cavs. Which they did before, during, and after his trade demand. Firing Griff abruptly and out of the blue, when he seems to have had the best relationship with Kyrie, appears to have been one contributing factor to that.
They didn’t fire Griff out of the blue. It was truly a mutual thing. Griff walked as much as Dan didn’t re sign him. Griff also dug his own grave by shit talking Dan to other teams around the league in the final year he was here. Not sure I could have given Griff the money and power and titles he demanded if I knew he was bashing me to our peers behind my back because we had some fundamental disagreements. Would you want to keep, promote and give a raise to an employee of yours under those circumstances?
Maybe you say since it still may be better for the team...make the sacrifice. I dunno. Easy thing to say.
Also, I can say with 100% certainty Kyrie Irving was going to request a trade whether it was Griff, Dan, Billups, or the ghost of Red Auerbach at that meeting. Remember..Kyrie was pissssed about his name being in trade talks...talks orchestrated by his best buddy Griff!!
Now...if we had retained Griff or had a clearer plan in place maybe that meeting and request happens two weeks sooner which maybe changes the available trade targets...that is a fair criticism 100%.
Front office people are paid millions of dollars to judge talent and manage relationships with talent. If you botch your relationship with your players so badly that you can't even get them to sit down and have dinner with you when they want to leave, that's fucked up.
Huh? What? The Cavs couldn’t get Kyrie to have dinner? Where did you hear this? Lol. Because they had plenty of communication with Kyrie post trade request.
The Cavs failed to understand Kyrie's dissatisfaction in advance, when they still could have traded him for more equivalent value,
They knew he was unhappy at times, but at the same time were they supposed to trade him during their title defense? Are you seriously suggesting that?
Sure, yeah they could have traded him in the few weeks between the Finals loss and request...thy actually had talks about it but the talks never got serious. But Kyrie could have also made his request three weeks earlier...this goes two ways.
they failed to play softball properly (unable to appeal to him effectively enough to get him even to talk to them),
Again...what? No...just...lol
they failed to play hardball properly (unable to assert a threat to either not trade him on his schedule or trade him to a team he didn't want to go to)
They evaluated the situation and determined playing hardball wasn’t a better option. We can argue this all day but Kyrie and his people did a great job leveraging and threatening the Cavs into a situation where they felt they had no choice.
This isn’t a situation where Kyries value today would be higher than it was this summer if he held out for two months and then came back digging it and causing locker room drama.
And Dude...teams he didn’t want to go to pulled most of their serious assets off the table because he would contact them and threaten to leave in 2019. So the Cavs should have taken less out of spite?? Cmon now.
they failed to negotiate the trade properly. That's a pretty comprehensive set of failures.
That’s YOUR opinion, to be clear.
Your continued argument that the Cavs were helpless in the face of Kyrie's determination to leave, that they had to let a 24 year old alpha them, walk all over them, and treat them like pussies, even though THE CAVS HELD ALL THE CARDS AND WE WOULD HAVE LOST LITERALLY NOTHING ON THE COURT HAD HE HELD OUT is completely mystifying.
You’re putting your head in the sand in terms of who had all the cards like you don’t understand the idea of player empowerment and how it’s changed the league and situations like this.
Nothing to lose? Try significant amounts of trade value with every passing week as the season went on... if you don’t see that...I don’t know what to tell you man.
