Character is a key for Cavs

By Mary Schmitt Boyer

Cleveland Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND

If the NBA gave out frequent flier miles, the members of the Cavaliers basketball operations staff would be platinum elite.

By the time the team makes its selections in the NBA draft on Thursday, seven men in the organization, including general manager Chris Grant, will have traveled about a million miles to see 600 basketball games and 200 practices.

“We’ve got war-horse type people here,” said David Griffin, vice president of basketball operations, who oversees the draft preparation. Those live views, as Griffin calls them, are just one step in a four-part process that the team uses to narrow the scope of its search for just the right players.

The other steps include videotape study, statistical analysis and then human interaction, which involves interviews and medical and psychological testing.

Every NBA team has a similar operation.

“There’s no secret sauce,” Grant likes to say.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” Griffin added. “Everybody knows who’s talented. But are they our guy?”

Griffin is in his first year with the Cavaliers after 17 seasons with the Suns, including 13 on the basketball operations side. He said what sets his current employer apart are the resources owner Dan Gilbert devotes to this part of his operation, including the staff assembled to gather the information.

“It’s a special group, very thoughtfully put together,” Griffin said. “It’s unique to have a staff put together with this much forethought. To be honest with you, that’s really the only way you can be all that different.”

According to Griffin, the live views and tape study are interwoven for scouts.

“You do tape study in one of two ways: Follow up views of people they watched live or you watch guys to determine whether to allocate resources to watch them live,” he said.

As part of the tape study, the Cavs — and most NBA teams — use a software program called Synergy, which offers detailed breakdowns of an individual player’s game. How detailed? Each player report includes about eight pages of offense and five pages of defense.

Which brings us to that statistical analysis.

“Statistics are used by all organizations differently,” Griffin said. “Some will use them more as a governing item, where they will make decisions based on that. I think the bulk of them use them as we do, which is to continue turning over every stone, identifying people you may want to watch in person and, more importantly, drilling down into what a given player’s game might be for us.”

But for all of that — the multiple live views, the tape study and the statistical analysis — the person is the most important element for the Cavaliers.

“The person dictates as much as the talent does here,” Griffin said. “This team has been high character over the years and will continue to be that.

“NBA teams will red-flag you typically for two things: medical and character. It’s highly unusual for an NBA team to red-flag you based on what a scout saw or what the numbers say. You can not get drafted, but you aren’t red-flagged.”

In spite of the care with which each potential draft choice is investigated, mistakes still occur. Every draft class is full of can’t-miss players who do.

“We’re dealing with people,” Griffin said. “It’s an inexact science. You can do as much as you possibly can to identify the psychology of a player, talk to as many people as you can to identify their character. Most developmental psychologists will tell you there’s almost no way to know what happens when you give somebody who has never had money a lot of money.

“So we like to think as a league that we’re crossing our T’s and dotting our I’s, but it’s inexact. You do what you can.”

Griffin learned a valuable lesson on draft preparation from Dick Van Arsdale, a former Suns player and executive.

“[He] once told me, ‘Fans think of players as a snapshot of what they remember seeing. Teams think of players as a home movie.

‘We need to get to the heart of not what they wanted you to see, but what is.’”