Dan Gilbert accused of disrupting LeBron James’ inner circle when he joined Miami Heat in 2010

When LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers in the summer of 2010 to sign with the Miami Heat, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert didn’t shy away from expressing dissatisfaction regarding his decision.

He posted a scathing letter on the team’s official website addressing the news, and in the letter, he claimed that fans of the Cavaliers didn’t deserve “this kind of cowardly betrayal.” Gilbert also boldly proclaimed in the letter that the Cavaliers would win an NBA title before James would. That prediction aged poorly, as James won his first NBA title after the Heat eliminated the Oklahoma City Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals.

On top of his critical letter about James, Gilbert might have disrupted James’ inner circle after he spurned the Cavaliers for the Heat. According to a Heat source who worked for the team in 2010, the NBA prevented Miami from hiring James’ friend and associate Randy Mims after Gilbert “made a huge stink about it.”

“Back in 2010, after Mims says he was being promised a job with the Heat, the same player-liaison gig he’d had with the Cavs, the offer was pulled,” ESPN’s Dave McMenamin wrote.

“Sources told ESPN that James’ camp thought the decision not to employ Mims at the time was a power move by Heat president Pat Riley, his way of letting the eight-year veteran know that the team operates a certain way, and that even a superstar like James would have to fall in line.

“A Heat team source who worked for the organization in 2010 disputes that characterization, telling ESPN that it was actually the NBA that blocked Mims’ hire after Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, who had ripped James in a public letter after he’d left the Cavaliers, ‘made a huge stink about it.'”

There are clearly some mixed claims at play, so there’s no way to be certain who was responsible for Mims’ job offer falling through.

In addition to everything else, after James left, Gilbert claimed that he “quit” on the Cavaliers at times in the playoffs during his first stint with them. He cited Game 5 (and others) of Cleveland’s second-round series against the Boston Celtics in the 2010 NBA Playoffs and Game 6 of the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals versus the Orlando Magic as examples.

In Game 5 against Boston with the best-of-seven series knotted up at two games apiece, James dropped only 15 points while shooting 3-of-14 from the floor, and the Cavaliers lost that contest at home by more than 30 points. The next game, another contest that Gilbert thought James quit during, ended up being the final game of James’ first stint with the Cavs, as they were eliminated from the playoffs in that one.

A year earlier, in Game 6 versus Orlando, James misfired on all but eight of his 20 shot attempts from the field, and the Magic picked up a 13-point win and punched their ticket to the 2009 NBA Finals.

While there was seemingly a rift in their relationship for a while, Gilbert eventually apologized to James for the letter he wrote, and the forward ultimately helped the Cavaliers win their first title as an organization in 2016 after returning to the franchise.

James’ second stint in Cleveland spanned four seasons, and the Cavaliers were consistently contending for titles during that time. In fact, the last time Cleveland made it past the second round of the playoffs was when James was on the roster in 2018.