Isaiah Thomas, Jay Crowder, Ante Zizich, and that Brooklyn pick are now with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

And the company that was on top of this before anyone else yesterday was Yahoo Sports and the vertical in particular.

And from Yahoo Sports and the Vertical, it's a good friend Chris Manix.

Hey, Chris, good morning, man.

Good morning, guys.

He's on the AT&T expert hotline.

All right, so we've talked all about how the parts are going to fit everything.

First of all, tell me a little bit about how all this went down, what you guys know about the behind the scenes on how Danny and made this all work out.

Well, I mean, look, if you know Boston and their brass, there isn't a team in the league more proactive than Danny.

And to a greater degree, Mike Zarin, the assistant G.O. does most of the legwork in deals like this.

And, you know, the second that Kyrie Irving came available, they were in contact with Cleveland and, you know,. Cleveland, obviously, they were going through a whole bunch of different things over the last couple of months. And I can tell you that there were people in Cleveland as recently as a couple of days ago that we're still harboring some hope that this could kind of blow over that they could bring Kyrie Irving to camp and that they could just figure it out on the fly. Obviously, you know, Dan Gilbert didn't feel that way and we have this deal. But,

you know, Boston, whatever a star becomes available, Boston's the first team in line to express

interest with their, you know, using their draft resources. And that's exactly what happened here.

They had the perfect package to kind of put together for Cleveland, which get the players that can help them compete for a championship now and a potential draft pick that will help them rebuild if LeBron leaves in 2018. How bad were things between LeBron and Kyrie? I mean, we've read a lot of bit, we've read a ton of stuff, but I don't know. I mean, now it seems that it was bad enough to where they had to get rid of him. If you're going to make a trade to the team that you play in the Eastern Conference finals, it seemed like this is something that the two of them definitely couldn't work together. It was never bad between LeBron and Kyrie. I mean, I would describe bad as being Shaq and Kobe. You know, what they went through was bad. There was, you know, palpable, visceral disdain for each other. Kyrie didn't have that. Kyrie just wanted an opportunity to step out of LeBron's shadow. He, there was no issue with them personally. They didn't dislike each other. They were on a podcast together a couple of months ago. I mean, they're there, and when I talked to players in Cleveland, they just say that Kyrie's kind of a unique guy, and, you know, he just wanted the opportunity to go out and do it on his own. But I don't think that there was negativity between those two, and that's what kind of led to the belief by some that you could bring these two guys to camp and that they could figure it out after a couple of months and realize that winning is better than anything else. But, you know, Dan Gilbert, you know, he's the guy calling the shots there. He added in his head that it was, that with Kyrie wanting out, with it going public, it was time to move on, and that's what they did. Do you believe that Kyrie would sign an extension with the Celtics? No, but there's no point to it. Let me rephrase that. Do you believe that Kyrie will be here for the long term? Do you think that after his two years, he would? Yeah, I do. I do. I mean, look, anything can happen, of course. You know, he could wind up hating Gordon Hayward for some reason. I don't know.

But, you know, if you look at it, you know, just purely from sort of a 10,000 feet view, I think this is an ideal situation for Irving. He gets to go to a franchise that, you know, he's played against over the last few years. He's going to play for a great coach in Brad Stevens. The stability that he didn't have

in Cleveland over the last few years, it's totally different in Boston. Boston is one of the

most functional organizations in all of basketball. They're great from top to bottom,

ownership, down to the coach. And if you look at what Kyrie's had to endure for his

entire career, I use the word endure loosely, but, you know, he's playing for multiple coaches. LeBron comes to town. I mean, his whole career has been one roller coaster ride after another. Boston presents the kind of stability that I think he's long craved. So assuming nothing out of the ordinary happens, I think that Kyrie could play, you know,

not just two years, but 10 years with the summits.

All right.

Well, in that case, Chris, that leaves me to my question.

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