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WORK TITLE: The Blueprint
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Cleveland
STATE: OH
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; wife’s name Alessia; children: three.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and sports journalist. Akron Beacon-Journal, sports journalist.
WRITINGS
Contributor to websites and magazines, including ESPN.com, Cleveland, Lindy’s Sports, and CBSSports.com.
Athletic Cleveland, editor-in-chief.
SIDELIGHTS
A writer and award-winning sports journalist, Jason Lloyd has spent much of his career covering major sports events and championships. He has covered the World Series, the NCAA tournament, and the NBA Finals. Lloyd’s journalism career started relatively early, when “earliest gigs at the Morning Journal in Lorain, covering high school sports and then Ohio State University, pulled him from a factory job at nineteen years old,” commented a writer in Cleveland magazine. Since then, he has been a sports reporter for the Akron Beacon-Journal, focusing on the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team and the sports career of superstar Lebron James.
Currently, Lloyd serves as editor-in-chief of the website Athletic Cleveland. As a reporter who got his beginning in print newspapers, however, he pointed out in the Cleveland magazine profile that he recognizes the conflict between online and print journalism. He further stated that he doesn’t “want to kill newspapers because they are too critical in fighting corruption.” Instead, he intends for his tenure with Athletic Cleveland and beyond to help show newspaper publishers how they can adapt to the online model and use the Internet as a strong source of revenue.
Lloyd brings his many years of direct experience covering the Cleveland Cavaliers to bear in his book The Blueprint: Lebron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA. He provides a comprehensive account of what happened when James left the Cavaliers in 2010, how the team fared in his absence (not well), and how the Cavaliers returned to champion status after James came back to the team in 2014.
In the book, Lloyd shows how the Cavaliers have a history of missing out on championships. This remained the case after James left the team. However, the management of the Cavaliers put together a comprehensive plan to not only bring James back, but to create a team that could finally make it to an NBA championship. Lloyd points out how being a losing team worked to the Cavaliers’s advantage, giving them better choices in the NBA draft. This allowed them to not only get James back on the team, but to draft additional players who could support James, such as Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. The book also includes Lloyd’s expert analysis of the coaching style of the Cavaliers and provides full coverage of the team’s championship season of 2015-16.
Lloyd’s “intoxicatingly thorough reporting allows readers to grasp the difficulty in assembling a team—even one featuring a legend,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer. A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that the book presents readers with “Exciting game action blended with mostly interesting behind-the-scenes maneuvers and manipulations of a pro-sports franchise.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Mark Levine, review of The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA, p. 38.
Cleveland, January 24, 2018, “Most Interesting People 2018: Jason Lloyd,” profile of Jason Lloyd.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The Blueprint.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of The Blueprint.
Washington Post, October 27, 2017, Tim Bontemps, “NBA Podcast: Jason Lloyd on the Cavs, His New Book, Lebron’s Future, and More.”
Jason Lloyd is a lifelong resident of Northeast Ohio. He has covered the World Series, the NCAA Tournament, the BCS National Championship Game, and the NBA Finals; and he has won several state and national awards for his work covering the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Cleveland Cavaliers. He has also worked for ESPN.com, Lindy’s Sports, Cleveland Magazine, and CBSSports.com. He and his wife, Alessia, live in Avon Lake, Ohio, with their three children.
Most Interesting People 2018: Jason Lloyd
The Cleveland sports author has a blueprint for running the Cleveland branch of The Athletic, and it's working.
Why He's Interesting: The editor of The Athletic Cleveland, which launched in 2017, also wrote the definitive account of the rebuild that led to Cleveland’s first championship in 52 years in The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA, which was released in October.
During a January 2017 Cavaliers road trip, beat reporter Jason Lloyd and ESPN’s Brian Windhorst drove together from Sacramento to San Francisco. Holding back the juicy bits, the writers swapped notes for their upcoming books — Windhorst’s Return of the King and Lloyd’s The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA.
Upon arrival, Lloyd mentioned that two businessmen, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, wanted to meet him in San Francisco. The pair, who previously built a successful workout app called Strava, had a new subscription-based, multicity sports news site called The Athletic. They wanted Lloyd as editor-in-chief of the Cleveland branch.
Lloyd planned to turn them down.
“You waited until now to mention this?” said Windhorst, baffled. “Take the meeting! What do you have to lose?”
“I wouldn’t have met with them if it wasn’t for Brian,” says Lloyd, who promised the businessmen 15 minutes. “After two hours, I left Starbucks knowing I was probably going to make the jump.”
But since launching in March, has been accused of further wounding local newspapers by poaching notable beat writers such as Cleveland.com’s Zack Meisel and Ari Wasserman. An October New York Times article that quoted Mather saying The Athletic would “suck [local papers] dry of their best talent” didn’t help.
“We will always pursue the best talent,” Lloyd says. “We have the revenue streams. We can pay more, but I don’t, in any way, want to kill newspapers because they are too critical in fighting corruption.”
Lloyd, an Avon Lake native, is a product of newspapers. His earliest gigs at The Morning Journal in Lorain, covering high school sports and then Ohio State University, pulled him from a factory job at 19 years old. But newspapers have struggled to profit from the internet. The advertising revenue generated from tens of thousands of clicks — the typical newspaper model — equals earnings from just a few Athletic subscribers, Lloyd says.
He doesn’t want to kill newspapers — he wants to show them the way.
“I hope newspapers see our success and follow suit and find a way to monetize the internet,” Lloyd says.
Interesting Fact: May 11, 2010: His first day on the Cavs beat at the Akron Beacon Journal was also James’ final home game before leaving for Miami.
NBA Podcast: Jason Lloyd on the Cavs, his new book, LeBron’s future and more
by Tim Bontemps October 27, 2017 Email the author
The latest edition of “Posting Up” features Jason Lloyd talking about the Cleveland Cavaliers and his new book, “The Blueprint.” (AP/Frank Franklin II)
Only one man has been around the Cleveland Cavaliers from the moment LeBron James changed the basketball world forever with “The Decision” in July of 2010 until now.
That man is Jason Lloyd, the longtime Cavaliers beat writer for the Akron Beacon-Journal who now is the editor-in-chief of The Athletic’s Cleveland site, and remains a must-read on the Cavaliers on a daily basis. Luckily for the rest of us, Lloyd decided to chronicle everything that happened over these chaotic past several years, and the result is “The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance & the Making of the Modern NBA,” Lloyd’s book that came out earlier this week.
And, Lloyd says, it was that unique perspective of being with the team every step of the way these past seven years – coupled with the many remarkable things that have happened during that timeframe – that led him to make the decision to write it.
“I am the only person who has covered this team every day, home and road, been with them every day, from the time LeBron left to the time he came back,” Lloyd says on the latest episode of “Posting Up,” The Washington Post’s NBA podcast. “It’s just me. So I have the whole story, and I’m the only one who lived it every single day.”
The result is a brilliant book, one that takes the reader back through the many momentous moments over the past several seasons in Cavaliers history. From the trade that landed Cleveland the draft pick that became Kyrie Irving to how the organization settled on drafting Irving and Tristan Thompson, the players that laid the foundation for James to eventually make his return, to the disastrous selection of Anthony Bennett with the No. 1 overall pick in 2013 (which you can read about in this excerpt), Lloyd masterfully tells a truly compelling story of the fall, and subsequent rise, of the Cavaliers.
But that doesn’t mean the story has stopped being interesting. The current version of the Cavaliers have the potential to be the newsiest team yet, with James entering free agency next summer and Cleveland having a roster full of veterans capable of grabbing headlines with their play on the court or their words off of it.
That means Lloyd has his hands full with the current team, as exhibited by a bizarre opening week that saw Cleveland win against the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks – two of the better teams in the East – only to get blown out by the Orlando Magic, barely beat the hapless Chicago Bulls and then lose to the Brooklyn Nets.
“They’ve changed over half the roster,” Lloyd says, “yet nothing’s really changed. This is still a team that just sets its own house on fire just to have the opportunity to put it out.
“That’s what I said about them all last year, and that’s the way that they are again. They’ve given up 17 three-pointers in three straight games to the Magic, Bulls and Nets. This is not exactly the Rockets, Warriors and Spurs they’re playing. This is the bottom feeders of the East, and they can’t bother to defend for more than six or seven minutes of a game.
“It looks a lot like last year looked even though they turned over eight of the 15 guys on the roster.”
In addition to Cleveland’s current defensive issues, the conversation also touched on Dwyane Wade’s being moved from the starting lineup to the bench this week, and why that was the right move in the long run; Tyronn Lue’s ability to handle Cleveland’s many disparate locker room personalities, and why that’s one of many reasons he’s become one of the NBA’s most underrated head coaches; and why LeBron James – at least for now – seems like he might be sticking around Cleveland past this season after all (though Lloyd is the first to admit anyone who thinks they know about what James is going to do is fooling themselves).
“A lot can happen still, it’s too early to say one way or the other,” Lloyd said.
“But if you ask me today right now, if I have to guess where LeBron is playing next season, I would have to say back in Cleveland.”
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The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland's Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA
Mark Levine
Booklist. 114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland's Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA. By Jason Lloyd. Oct. 2017. 320p. Dutton, $28 (9781524741907). 796.323.
In the tradition of Michael Lewis' Money ball (2003), journalist Lloyd traces how the Cleveland Cavaliers, after re-signing LeBron James, captured the NBA championship in 201516. The narrative begins with a brief history of the decades-long failure of Cleveland's professional sports teams to win championships and then shows how the Cavaliers organization managed to turn that tradition around through intense planning and execution. In the Cavs' case, all that losing helped, as Lloyd shows in his explanation of the way the team used the NBA lottery--in which the poorest-performing teams receive the highest draft choices--to its advantage. He traces how Cleveland, anticipating Lebron's 2014 return, made use of the draft, trades, and financial maneuvering to secure supporting players Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and others. Lloyd also addresses changes in the NBA and delves deeply into the team's coaching, leading up to a recounting of the 2015-16 championship season. Pair this account with Erik Malinowski's forthcoming Betaball, about how the Golden State Warriors built the dynasty that beat Cleveland in the 2017 finals and seems situated to win more.--Mark Levine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levine, Mark. "The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland's Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161533/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=09352f56. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161533
Lloyd , Jason: THE BLUEPRINT
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lloyd , Jason THE BLUEPRINT Dutton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 10, 24 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4190-7
A sports journalist debuts with a very personal account of the return of LeBron James to Cleveland in 2014 and of the Cavaliers' NBA championship in 2016.Lloyd--the lead NBA writer for the Athletic and former writer for James' hometown Akron Beacon Journal during the team's efforts to lure the King back to Cleveland after his dramatic 2010 departure to the Miami Heat--tells several interlocking stories: James' decision to leave the team, the four intervening years when the Cavs' front office began plotting to get him back, the arrival of key players (especially Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and J.R. Smith), accounts of failed coaches (David Blatt's tale is especially painful), the changes in the NBA itself, and, of course, that championship that erased decades of frustration for Cleveland sports fans. (Lloyd reminds us several times of the key misplays and failures of the Indians and Browns.) The author deals thoroughly with the front-office attitudes and decisions about losing frequently so that the franchise would earn a good draft position. He also tells us a bit about himself, discussing a sports journalist's difficulties in balancing family and professional responsibilities, and he describes some of his coups and failures; he even tells us near the end that James gave him a nonverbal shoutout at the city's massive street party for the Cavs after their championship. At times, Lloyd does veer near homer-hood when he celebrates coach Tyronn Lue, who "was masterful with his lineups throughout the postseason," and during his long account of Game 7 of the 2016 Finals. Most interesting to general readers will be the pages dealing with the intricacies of NBA management, the relationships among the players (Love's complicated story is key), and the staggering egos of professional athletes. Exciting game action blended with mostly interesting behind-the-scenes maneuvers and manipulations of a pro-sports franchise.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lloyd , Jason: THE BLUEPRINT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192304/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5418e3b. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192304
The Blueprint: LeBron James, Cleveland’s Deliverance, and the Making of the Modern NBA
Jason Lloyd. Dutton, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-1-5247-4190-7
As journalist Lloyd, who previously covered the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Akron Beacon Journal, reports in this energetic, detailed slice of basketball history, when Akron-born LeBron James left the team in 2010, the Cavs immediately began plotting to get him back. When he signed back up in 2014, the fan response was mixed, and James had to adjust to new, talented teammates such as Kevin Love, who went from being adored by the superstar to nearly wilting under his high standards. Lloyd also covers the coaching staff and front office, notably the drama involved in finding a head coach: oblivious David Blatt, who led the Cavs from 2014 to 2016, thought he could coach in the NBA after years overseas, but soon realized he couldn’t. The right man, Blatt’s assistant Tyronn Lue, only took the job after his mentor, coach and former player Doc Rivers, convinced him. The Cavs’ player personnel moves in 2014 were dictated by finances (salary cap space was an obstacle) and need, and Lloyd’s intoxicatingly thorough reporting allows readers to grasp the difficulty in assembling a team—even one featuring a legend. (Oct.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 08/28/2017
Release date: 10/24/2017
Ebook - 978-1-5247-4191-4