Kobe Bryant Altman, president of Cavaliers basketball operations, recently gave an exclusive interview to recall his past when he was just promoted to general manager of the Cavaliers in the summer of 2017 to complete the Kyrie Irving deal.
"The difference about Carey is that I came here in my second year on the team and it was my 10th year at Cleveland. We all love Kyrie and I don't want to trade him. I've witnessed some of his best games, his evolution as a player, he's been inducted into an All-Star, he's won an All-Star Game MVP. I was walking through the players' tunnel with his dad in New Orleans and was so happy that our Cavaliers had such a player.
"First of all, on the one hand, we don't want to touch Kyrie at all; but at the same time, it's also about facing the reality that he's two years away from being free to go and the players have the initiative in this game, it's not the kind of situation where you say you have to be, you have to be very respectful of the players and their talents, they have to respect their families, respect the ideas they think are best for them. If you think you can convince a player to stay where they don't want to be, you're deceiving yourself. You can try to deal with it for a little while, but in the end, you have to respect their wishes as well as their families. So that's one of the factors, too. Ultimately, those experiences are part of the NBA, and you can't take them as a personal vendetta, that's part of the industry. Altman said.