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Kyrie Irving has been to three straight Finals with Cleveland. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
It is unclear how hard the Cavaliers are trying to acquiesce to Kyrie Irving’s trade request, but tea-leaf readers saw a sign Monday that the team was inclined to keep its star point guard. Cleveland’s former general manager, though, said he thought Irving would get dealt, and he described the player’s request as an act of “courage.”
Appearing on ESPN’s “The Jump” on Monday, David Griffin, who unexpectedly parted ways with the Cavs in June, was asked about former Cleveland guard Ron Harper’s comments. Harper recently said (via the Akron Beacon Journal) that Irving’s desire to be traded away from LeBron James and Co. was born of “youth” and “ignorance,” adding,”When the inmates are in charge, nothing but bad things can happen, right?”
“I think what Ron was saying is really unfair to Kyrie,” Griffin told co-hosts Amin Elhassan and Dave McMenamin. “This is a guy who handled the situation exactly like he was supposed to. He went to [owner] Dan Gilbert privately, told him that he thought he would be happier somewhere else. The absolute worst thing this guy could’ve done was pretend to be all in and sink the ship from within.
“Most guys don’t have the courage to do what he did. That’s not youth and ignorance. That’s a little bit more courage than people give him credit for.”
Irving’s camp is reportedly of the opinion that James himself leaked the news of the trade request, possibly to lower the guard’s value and make it harder for the Cavs to get a worthwhile offer. At the same time, James has been widely rumored to be interested in leaving the Cavs after opting out of his contract in 2018, and Irving’s mind-set could be shaped by a preference to not be subsequently stuck with an asset-poor team built for the strengths of a superstar forward no longer around.
“I think Kyrie is going to end up getting traded,” Griffin said on ESPN. If that’s true, then a video the Cavs released Monday that showed off their new uniforms might be the last time we see the name “Irving” on the back of one.
Noting that Irving signed a contract extension with the Cavs before James returned to the team in 2014, Griffin said the guard “was sold a totally different situation than he’s actually in — and he worked very well in, he won a championship in — and I see this as him looking for a fit for himself to take the next step in his career.”
“LeBron casts a very large shadow over an organization, and most of it is really, really positive,” Griffin added. “You know you’re expected to win a championship, by way of example, but what that doesn’t always allow is for a player like Kyrie to test his boundaries a little bit and see how good he can really be.”
Interestingly, Griffin implied that Irving had named the Celtics as one of his preferred trade destinations, whereas previous reporting had claimed the list included the Spurs (to whom Griffin also referred), Knicks, Heat and Timberwolves. A New Jersey native, Irving was reported to “very badly” want to join New York, but the two sides have had not been able to come to terms, and the Knicks are also trying to figure out what to do with their own disgruntled star, Carmelo Anthony.
The Cavs don’t have to trade Irving, who has three years left on his contract, including a player option for the final year. However, Griffin presumably knows more than most about the thinking in Cleveland’s front office, and to hear him tell it, Irving is more likely than not going to be wearing another team’s jersey this season.
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A 2008 photo shows Presidio Terrace, a gated community in San Francisco. A San Jose couple bought the street — a private road — after the homeowners association failed to pay a tax bill.
Dale/Flickr
26 Presidio Terrace, a four-floor San Francisco mansion, was recently on the market for $14.5 million. 30 Presidio Terrace, a neighbor in the gated community, last sold for $9.5 million.
But Presidio Terrace itself? As in, the street? The strip of pavement these tony residents rely on to reach their front doors? The private road the homeowners association has owned for more than a century?
That’s a bargain. After the homeowners association failed to pay a $14 tax bill … for three decades … the road went up for auction, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. A San Jose couple snagged it for about $90,000.
Tina Lam and Michael Cheng made their strategic purchase in 2015. But now, the newspaper writes, “they’re looking to cash in — maybe by charging the residents of those mansions to park on their own private street.” Or, lacking that, opening the spots up to the general public.
Cheng, a real estate investor who was born in Taiwan, tells the newspaper the couple “got lucky.” Lam, a Silicon Valley engineer who immigrated from Hong Kong, says she “really just wanted to own something in San Francisco” because she loves the city so much.
The whole story is well worth a read over at the Chronicle.
Presidio Terrace was originally built as an enclave for white residents, as Curbed San Francisco noted last year. The Virtual Museum of San Francisco quotes an ad from 1906, bemoaning the fact that Japanese and Chinese residents were moving into neighborhoods and saying, “There is only one spot in San Francisco where only Caucasians are permitted to buy or lease real estate or where they may reside. That place is Presidio Terrace.”
Presidio Terrace, along with many other wealthy neighborhoods, continued to prohibit ownership by nonwhites until 1948, the Chronicle notes. That year, the Supreme Court blocked such racial covenants from being enforced. (Some neighborhoods tried to uphold their racial covenants even after they were illegal; member station WAMU has reported on an example in Washington, D.C.)
These days, Presidio Terrace is gated and guarded. SFGate described it as “very private and swank.” San Francisco’s late former mayor Joseph Alioto used to be a resident, as did Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
According to a lawsuit filed by the Presidio Terrace Association, the neighborhood’s current residents didn’t find out about the sale of their private road until this May — more than two years after it happened.
It all started with a $14 bill. Or, well, a lot of $14 bills.
The homeowners association says in the lawsuit that based on city records, “the property taxes on the Common Area have been less than $14.00 annually for the past several years.”
The taxes weren’t paid for “many years,” the association says, because the city was sending the bills to an address “associated with an accountant who last performed work for the Association in the 1980s.” A warning that the account was in default, owing $994.77, was sent to the same address. It too went unnoticed.
A few months later, the street was auctioned off.
(Incidentally, are you wondering how much each resident paid to that HOA? Based on news reports, it’s well north of $500 a month.)
The city should have known the address was wrong, the residents say. They’re calling for the sale to be rescinded.
The office of the treasurer-tax collector does not seem persuaded by that argument. A spokeswoman told the San Francisco Chronicle there was nothing they could do.
And, the spokeswoman told the paper, “Ninety-nine percent of property owners in San Francisco know what they need to do, and they pay their taxes on time — and they keep their mailing address up to date.”
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