Before and after his return from knee surgery, Irving routinely remained on the floor long after the formal portion of practice had ended, working on his shot and rhythm. James often joined him. On this day, while Irving threw up shot after shot — from the wing, the 3-point line, the corner, and all points in between —(Mo) Williams spoke for more than an hour about his gym: the office space, the full laundry services, and the small lounge.
What it lacked, however, was showers. So while Irving and James remained on the floor shooting and shooting, the rest of the sweaty Cavs stood on the sidelines or sat in the bleachers and waited. As the minutes swelled into an hour, their patience waned. Sasha Kaun, an NBA rookie, was the first to be visibly irritated. Anderson Varejao saw how mad Kaun was getting and laughed at him.
“He doesn’t get it,” Varejao joked with me. “This is life with LeBron. Sometimes you wait.”
Yet after about 20 more minutes, Varejao wasn’t laughing anymore. Now he was annoyed, too. (Kevin) Love fidgeted with his phone. Assistant coaches made dinner plans. James and Irving, however, never flinched. They simply kept shooting.
“I will never leave the court without him,” James told me. “Meaning if he’s the only person in there shooting, I’m not going to leave. I’m not. And he knows that.”
James knew teammates and coaches were getting upset, but he didn’t care. The shooting session went on so long that even Tyronn Lue, still (David) Blatt’s lead assistant, stormed back into the gym as James and Irving were concluding. “Let’s go!” Lue shouted across the gym. “This is fucking rude and disrespectful!” James chuckled and told him not to get so upset in front of the media, even though there were only a few of us there at the time.
“They can leave us. They don’t have to wait for us,” James told me later. “We know the way back.”
With LeBron, there is almost always sound reasoning behind a display. In that moment, he wanted the rest of his teammates to see how hard the two stars were working, and the more pissed they got, the more they’d remember.
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►National Basketball Association◄, NBA-THIS IS WHY WE PLAY
