SAN FRANCISCO – The running joke about the Cleveland Cavaliers is that when he’s not humiliating opponents with chase-down blocks, setting up his teammates with those sweet-and-smooth-as-cheesecake passes and continuing to defy age and gravity with those eye-level-with-the-rim dunks, LeBron James is also running basketball operations for the franchise. GM LeBron, as he is known to fans on social media and elsewhere, calls the plays and calls the shots – a characterization that should offend David Griffin, the man who is actually paid to do the job and has spent the past three years aggressively making the decisions to ensure that James is always positioned to win championships.

“I take offense to it on [James’] behalf at times,” Griffin told The Vertical. “He doesn’t like that image. I don’t think he wants that image. He wants to lead his troops. He wants to be a player. He wants to lead the guys from within. He never tried to do any more than that. I think for him, it’s almost an unfair characterization of him, that he’s some kind of overlord. That’s not at all what he does.”

James’ purpose is to collect championship rings, chase the seemingly untouchable ghost of Michael Jordan and leave the game having solidified his status – or at least be in the discussion – as the best to ever lace them up. Cleveland didn’t have an established tradition of success, and Griffin had only held his first general manager job for five months before James decided to entrust his legacy to a championship-deprived franchise that had the upper hand mostly because it was closest to his hometown of Akron.

“I had about eight seconds of bliss and then several days of sheer terror,” Griffin told The Vertical of James’ arrival in the summer of 2014, “because it was, ‘Oh, thank God, he’s coming,’ to ‘Oh, my God, how do we win a championship?’ ”

The Cavaliers were able to answer that question last June, ruining an otherwise dream, 73-win season for a Golden State Warriors team that James respects but refuses to acknowledge as a rival. Griffin felt some relief for not ruining the last few years of James’ prime. The moves Griffin has made since James arrived – trading for Kevin Love, J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert and Channing Frye, signing Richard Jefferson, replacing David Blatt with coach Tyronn Lue – helped yield the desired outcome, even if they had all been initially second-guessed. But rest didn’t come with that liberation for Griffin because, when it came to James, “I just think he felt a hunger for more.”

That the Cavaliers upped the ante in the NBA’s arms race with the Warriors by acquiring three-point specialist and former All-Star Kyle Korver shouldn’t come as a surprise because it continues Griffin’s annual tradition with James on the roster of shaking up the team midseason. And Griffin certainly isn’t satisfied with where the roster currently stands – even with the Cavaliers sitting comfortably atop the Eastern Conference despite occasional bouts of boredom – and not just because James has publicly stated that the team needs to find a backup point guard.

“We like our group. We think we’ve got a group that belongs together, that fits together,” Griffin told The Vertical. “But if we can improve and continue to further the cause, then we will. We’ve got that same small window to capitalize in and we’re going to do what we need to, when we can.”

Griffin has given LeBron James the pieces necessary to succeed. (Getty Images) More

Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert showed a spare-no-expenses mentality the first time James was with the organization, but the money wasn’t always spent in the correct way because his expensive, luxury-tax-bloated rosters never reached the pinnacle and ultimately led the greatest player in franchise history to flee. James won his first two championships in Miami but never viewed returning to his original team as a gamble. “I trust in myself,” James said Sunday. “Coming back home happened to be the place that I decided to come back to. But I trusted myself. I knew how much I’ve grown. I knew what type of basketball player I was. I knew the type of leader I am. And I knew what type of man I was. I trusted myself and the organization has rallied around me, and I appreciate that.”

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