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Cavaliers claim Gilbert's letter to LeBron was taken down years ago, re-posted due to web issue

David Richard-USA TODAY Sports / reuters

Alright, so maybe the Cleveland Cavaliers weren't petty enough to leave a scathing letter to a former player up on their website for four years. That, or they're just good at covering things up.

After attention was drawn to the 2010 open letter from Cavs' owner Dan Gilbert to the departing LeBron James being taken off the web on Sunday night, SB nation reached out to the Cavs for an explanation. Was this because James is coming back? Is Gilbert finally ready to forgive and forget?

As it turns out, the letter was supposed to be taken down long ago, but was up due to a change in the team's CMS. Here's Tad Carper, the Cavs' director of communications explaining to SB Nation:

The letter was removed years ago from the Cavs.com website, but over the last week, it was discovered that it still existed from this external link to a stagnant archived page. It was on the content management system platform that was used back in 2010.
...
Quite frankly, we weren't looking for [the letter] because we knew we deleted it. If [it still being an active url] would have become apparent a year ago, we would have deleted it too.

Don't worry that it's no longer on the site, though. You can re-live the letter in its Comic Sans-y glory below.

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