Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert regrets guarantee to win title before LeBron James

LeBron James has said publicly that he regrets staging The Decision, the TV special where he announced he'd be taking his "talents to South Beach" to team up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in the summer of 2010.

James of course spurned the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team that drafted him and the franchise he promised an NBA title to as a rookie.

An angry Dan Gilbert, the Cavs' owner, famously responded to James' departure by promising in a letter to disappointed Cleveland fans that his Cavs would win a championship before James would win his first.

That, obviously, was not how it panned out.

James led the Heat to the NBA Finals in his first season in Miami, falling to the Dallas Mavericks. He then responded with one of the best statistical seasons of his career while leading the Heat to their second NBA title last summer, defeating the up-and-coming Oklahoma City Thunder. He then went on to win his second Olympic gold medal in the London Games shortly after.

The Cavs, meanwhile finished an astonishingly bad 19-63 in 2010-11 and 21-45 in a lockout shortened 2011-12 season despite the arrival of No. 1 overall draft pick Kyrie Irving.

With the proof on the table, Gilbert finally budged.

On Tuesday, as the Heat opened the season against the Celtics in an Eastern Conference finals rematch and the Cavaliers opened the season against the Washington Wizards, Gilbert backpedaled on his guarantee that never met its fruition.

"Looking back now, that probably was not the most brilliant thing I've ever done in my life," Gilbert told reporters Tuesday.

"If you're going to predict something that doesn't happen and you're going to do it publicly, you'd for sure take it back.

The Cavs owner thought all of the animosity was water under the bridge now that the Heat have won and LeBron has a shiny ring on his finger.

"When that happened when (the Heat) won, it was the end of the end of the end of that whole thing. Now there's nothing more to talk about. In a way it was like a little bit of a relief. If they didn't win it, it would've been still another thing of who's going to win it (first)."

Gilbert said James' departure taught the Cavaliers a valuable lesson, one that the Thunder seemed to have learned recently by trading away James Harden away to the Houston Rockets when it became apparent that Harden was not interested in signing a long-term deal.

"The key thing, whoever you are and wherever you are, you can not wait," Gilbert said. "The big lesson was if a player is not willing to extend, no matter who they are, no matter where they are playing, no matter what kind of season you had, you can not risk going into a summer and having them leave in unrestricted free agency and get nothing back for it."It's not the player's fault. That's on ownership. Had we done that, the whole thing would have been crafted as I'm sure the player or whoever would have said, `Of course I would have stayed. You guys screwed up and ruined the whole franchise.' You're in a no-win situation."

Contributing: The Associated Press

H/T: ESPN.com