Before David Griffin was the general manager of the 2016 NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, he was the vice president of the then-moribund, LeBron James-less Cavs, trying to decide who to select with the No. 1 pick in the 2013 draft.
Chris Grant, Cleveland's GM at the time, was opposed to using the pick on Anthony Bennett, but Griffin was one of the overwhelming majority of voices in the Cavs front office pushing for the UNLV product.
Four years later, Bennett is out of the league, Grant and Griffin are no longer with the Cavs, and Griffin can only bemoan the fact that the prospect he believed in proved too apathetic for the NBA, and didn't hold up his end of the bargain.
"The issue with Anthony was, and we had no way of knowing it at the time, the kid had no desire to overcome adversity whatsoever," Griffin told The Athletic's Jason Lloyd in an interview for Lloyd's new book, "The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland's Deliverance and the Making of the Modern NBA."
"As soon as it was hard, he was out," Griffin said. "His whole life, he rolled out of bed bigger, better, and more talented than everybody else. As soon as it was hard, it was over. And I was the one on campus at UNLV. I'm the one who got sold the bill of goods and I bought it hook, line, and sinker."
While Griffin didn't pay a price for the botched pick - he took over as the Cavs' GM a year later, and remains in demand as a free-agent executive - Grant has yet to get another shot as a decision-maker in an NBA front office. (He's currently working as a scout for the San Antonio Spurs.)
"You f--k up sometimes," Griffin said of the Bennett pick. "But I feel bad Chris took it for that, because Chris was the one guy who wasn't sure."
