The Cleveland Cavaliers have spent four weeks selling LeBron James on a homecoming. On Thursday, the public got its first real glimpse of what the organization is planning in case he never answers the door.
Veteran NBA insider Marc Stein, appearing on SiriusXM NBA Radio’s “Deals and Dunks” on Thursday afternoon, addressed the Cavs’ reported interest in Real Madrid forward Mario Hezonja and attached an important condition to it. Cleveland’s pursuit, Stein said on the program, would come “in the event that Cleveland does not get LeBron James.”
"The Cavs are one of the teams that have expressed interest that I believe would be in the event that Cleveland does not get LeBron James"@TheSteinLine tells @talkhoops how he's heard Mario Hezonja is NBA bound
Hear Deals and Dunks weekdays at 1 PM ET https://t.co/uGOfTU9PUj pic.twitter.com/CqBtmkH0T3
— SiriusXM NBA Radio (@SiriusXMNBA) July 23, 2026
That one sentence did something no report this offseason had done: It put a name and a face on the Cavaliers’ contingency planning. For a franchise that has poured its entire July into the James pursuit, the emergence of a fallback board — however modest — is a story in itself.
What Marc Stein reported about the Cavs and Mario Hezonja
The radio comments built on reporting Stein and Jake Fischer published overnight. In their latest intel roundup, the duo reported at The Stein Line that league sources place Cleveland among the teams that have expressed interest in Hezonja, the No. 5 overall pick in the 2015 NBA Draft who has spent the last six years rebuilding his career in Europe.
The two insiders grouped Hezonja with Atlanta Hawks free agent Jonathan Kuminga on Cleveland’s list of potential fallback targets, a pairing that says plenty about how the front office is bucketing its options. Kuminga has been on the Cavs’ radar for weeks, and Hezonja now joins him in the category of players Cleveland would chase in earnest only after the James saga resolves against them.
Hezonja, for his part, has been pushing hard to make a return happen. Stein reported earlier this week that the 31-year-old is expected to rejoin the NBA after informing Real Madrid he was exercising an opt-out in his contract, and that multiple interested teams are also involved in the James sweepstakes. The Croatian forward has not appeared in an NBA game since the 2019-20 season.
Who Mario Hezonja is in 2026
Cavs fans whose memory of Hezonja ends with his NBA stint should know the player being discussed today is a different one. Per the club’s official announcement, Real Madrid confirmed in June that Hezonja was named MVP of Spain’s Liga Endesa for the 2025-26 season after averaging 17.5 points and 4.9 rebounds per game while leading the club to the top seed in the regular season.
He also made the league’s all-first team for a second straight year and delivered a 40-point, 11-rebound eruption against UCAM Murcia in May that ranked among the best single-game performances in the club’s ACB history.
That version of Hezonja bears little resemblance to the one who washed out of the league six years ago. Across five NBA seasons with the Orlando Magic, New York Knicks and Portland Trail Blazers, the 6-foot-8 forward averaged 6.9 points and 3.1 rebounds per game while shooting 41.7 percent from the field and 31.9 percent from 3-point range, per Basketball-Reference.
His final NBA season in Portland produced just 4.8 points and 3.5 rebounds per game in a reserve role. The gap between those two players — the Liga ACB MVP and the lottery disappointment — is exactly what NBA front offices will be debating.
European MVPs do not always translate, and Hezonja will turn 32 in February. But teams are not evaluating him as a savior. They are evaluating him as a low-cost forward with size, shooting and six years of high-stakes European seasoning, and that profile has drawn a market.
Why any Hezonja deal would come cheap
This is where the fit with Cleveland becomes practical rather than aspirational. The Cavaliers’ books are dominated by the money committed to Donovan Mitchell’s max extension, Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen and James Harden’s new deal, leaving little more than minimum-level contracts for outside additions.
A minimum deal is precisely the price range where Hezonja lives. He would arrive with no leverage beyond his European resume, and Cleveland could offer him something Madrid cannot: a rotation role on a team that won its playoff series behind Mitchell and Harden last spring and expects to contend in the Eastern Conference regardless of how the James pursuit ends.
The roster logic is straightforward, too. Dean Wade’s departure left the Cavs thin on forwards who can defend multiple spots and space the floor, and the front office has been surveying that market for most of the month.
Hezonja, at 6-foot-8 with a rebuilt jumper and a defensive reputation he never carried in his first NBA life, is a clean stylistic answer to that specific hole — if the version of him that dominated Spain survives the trip back across the Atlantic.
The bigger signal buried in the report
The most revealing line in the Stein and Fischer report was not about Hezonja at all. One league source told the duo to expect “eight or nine players sign right after LeBron makes his choice,” a prediction that captures just how much of the NBA’s remaining offseason is dammed up behind a single decision.
Cleveland sits at the center of that logjam, and not by choice. The Cavs cannot commit their remaining roster spots to fallback options without signaling to James that they have moved on, and they cannot wait indefinitely without watching those same fallback options sign elsewhere the moment the market unfreezes.
That asymmetry has defined Cleveland’s July, and the Hezonja reporting is the first public evidence of how the front office is managing it — quietly registering interest across the fallback tier so it can move within hours, not days, of a James decision.
It is worth being precise about what this reporting does and does not say. It does not say the Cavs have cooled on James, and Stein framed Cleveland’s Hezonja interest as strictly conditional on losing him.
It does not say Hezonja is the priority target even in that scenario; Kuminga, a 23-year-old with a far higher ceiling, shares the same list. What it says is that the organization is doing what every professional front office does in week four of a franchise-altering wait: preparing for both futures at once.
For a fanbase that has spent a month reading tea leaves from Rich Paul’s public comments to Mitchell’s on-camera recruiting, the takeaway is neither comforting nor alarming. The Cavaliers still believe they can land LeBron James. They are just no longer willing to bet the rest of their offseason on it.
