The Cleveland Cavaliers spent most of July waiting on LeBron James, and on Friday, they finally received an answer that stung: James is signing with the Philadelphia 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal that includes a player option, ending one of the most closely watched free agencies in recent NBA history.
Now, thanks to the man who ran the process, Cavs fans are getting an unusually candid look at how close their team actually came — and at the moves, some of them Cleveland’s own, that ultimately tipped the race toward Philadelphia.
Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul broke down the decision on his “Game Over” podcast with Max Kellerman, and his comments described a race that stayed genuinely open until the very end.
Paul said the 76ers, Cavaliers, Miami Heat and Golden State Warriors were the four teams under serious consideration throughout the process and that James never condensed that list of finalists. The decision, per Paul, was not fully made until 1 a.m. Friday, after a day spent going back and forth.
Cleveland stayed in it until the final night
For a fan base bracing to hear it was never real, Paul’s account offered the opposite. He said every finalist led the race at some point and pushed back on the premise that any of them was easy to rule out, praising the way the organizations in Cleveland, Miami and Golden State handled the process behind the scenes.
“Back of the house in Cleveland was great,” said Paul. “Back of house in Miami was great. Back of house in Golden State was great. How do you eliminate [teams]?”
That framing will not soften the outcome in Northeast Ohio, but it matters for how this offseason gets judged. The Cavs did not lose a rigged race.
They ran a real one all the way to a 1 a.m. finish and came up short against a team that changed its own math midsummer — while a fifth suitor, Minnesota, fell away in part, Paul joked, because of the weather.
The Garland trade’s hidden cost
The most revealing Cleveland detail did not come from Friday’s episode at all. It came from Paul’s July 3 whiteboard breakdown of James’ options, when he walked through what he called “the C-town” and volunteered that the Cavs would have been even more appealing if Darius Garland were still on the roster.
Making clear he meant no slight toward James Harden, Paul explained that James “loves Garland like he loves Maxey.”
Read after Friday’s decision, that comment lands very differently. Cleveland traded Garland, a Klutch Sports client, to the LA Clippers last season in the deal that brought Harden to town and salvaged a campaign that ended with the top seed in the East.
The move worked on the floor. But it also removed the exact kind of relationship tether that, by Paul’s own telling, helped decide this race in Philadelphia’s favor.
Because on the other side of the ledger sat Tyrese Maxey, another Klutch client, whose bond with James was one of the factors Paul cited most emphatically on Friday. The two have trained together every summer for roughly five years, and Paul described that familiarity as something no franchise could manufacture or buy its way into. Cleveland once held a comparable card. It was traded in February.
Cleveland connections that cut both ways
None of this means the Cavs walked in empty-handed. On the whiteboard episode, Paul singled out assistant general manager Brandon Weems — James’ childhood friend and high school teammate, a man Paul described as being like a brother to him — as a genuine feather in Cleveland’s cap, and he noted that president of basketball operations Koby Altman was in the building for the 2016 title run.
The problem is that Philadelphia countered with Ohio ties of its own. Sixers president of basketball operations Mike Gansey played against James in high school and spent time in the Cavaliers’ front office during James’ second stint in Cleveland, and executive vice president Jameer Nelson was an All-Star contemporary. The executive who assembled the roster that beat out Cleveland learned the business, in part, inside Cleveland’s own building.
And the roster is what moved last. Paul indicated Friday that Philadelphia only entered serious consideration after acquiring Jaylen Brown from Boston — the trade that, in his telling, changed how James looked at a franchise that has not reached the NBA Finals since 2001.
Once the Brown deal landed, the Sixers could offer a blend the Cavs could not assemble under their current cap constraints: a second All-NBA-caliber wing, a Klutch guard James already trusted and a front office stocked with familiar faces. James, who turns 42 in December, will chase a fifth ring there in his 24th season.
Where the Cavs go from here
The day-after reality in Cleveland is blunt. Chris Fedor of cleveland.com, who noted Friday that James bypassed Cleveland, Golden State and Miami alike, wrote Saturday that the Cavs are not left in ruins the way they were in 2010 or 2018 — but that the offseason has been a disaster with only one real path to salvage, and that the path does not run through the players currently linked to them.
One of those linked players is Jonathan Kuminga. With James off the board, the Cavs and the Golden State forward have mutual interest, according to a report from The Athletic. Any Kuminga pursuit would almost certainly require a sign-and-trade given Cleveland’s position against the aprons, which is exactly the kind of mechanical constraint that kept the Cavs from matching Philadelphia’s summer in the first place.
What returns, for now, is the group that earned the East’s top seed before being swept by New York in the Eastern Conference finals: Donovan Mitchell, Harden, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen.
That core was good enough to make LeBron James think about coming home until 1 a.m. on decision day. Whether it is good enough without him is the question that will define the rest of Cleveland’s summer.
