While possible, Mike Brown was fired on May 12th. This report was filed June 6th and seemed to indicate a lot of present tense, "we" references when referring to the Cavs.
Also, I took the "former" designation to mean that the report was from the Cavaliers, a former team of Dengs, and not that it was necessarily from a "former" employee of the Cavs.
My initial take -- though see my counterargument at the end of this post -- is that it is reasonably clear the report was written by, or based on information provided by, a Cavs FO employee at the end of the season (and thus not Grant or a member of the coaching staff). On June 6th, it wouldn't have technically been "former" since Deng was a Cav till June 30th, but for all intents and purposes it was "former."
I don't see that anyone has provided any insight into whether this sort of report would typically have been written by the GM (Griffin) or one of his right hand men (Trent Redden, hired in 2006 during the Ferry regime, or Koby Altman, hired during the Grant regime), or if "FO" can loosely refer to a lead scout. Insider information like what Deng's agent was asking for, and what the trade market for Deng at the deadline looked like, point to someone higher up the food chain, but I doubt it would have been known by only 3 or so people in the organization. But I don't think we have enough information to know.
A key point -- which I don't think anyone has mentioned -- is whether the controversial report was actually in the Cavs reporting system/tool, and was then passed, perhaps electronically, to Atlanta. It reads as though it was written by the Cavs, but maybe it was a transcription of a conversation held with a Hawks employee who then simply input it into the Hawks' scouting tool/database (that seems to be what Wojnarowski assumes: "It's unfair to Grant and former Cavs coach Mike Brown, another close friend of Ferry's. The report says the interview took place on June 6, 2014 – months after each was let go in Cleveland?"). If there is no written record in the Cavs' system, then it will be difficult to prove or link it to any specific Cavs employee. Which doesn't make it a good thing, so the Cavs should be trying to find who the source is (if they don't already know).
The fact the Cavs apparently gave this insider information to the Hawks, especially given that it reveals their strategies, does raise questions of intent and motive. Grant did arguably have a motive. Maybe Grant didn't write the report, but continued to have access to the report, or somehow gained access to the report, when he left the Cavs, and then shared it with his old friend and mentor Danny Ferry?
The theory that Grant is the source (though not necessarily the author of the report) squares with what The Bullshit Whisperer reported on April 5th:
Finally, this is not related to anything mentioned above, but I am being told by executives and insiders around the NBA that former Cavs GM Chris Grant has been spinning stories. Grant, of course, was fired in February. I've always really liked Grant personally, even if I didn't care for the way he refused to make himself regularly available to local media. But one insider told me Grant "is considered a buffoon around the league: Dishonest, incapable and full of (beans)." It wasn't the first time I heard something like that, and I still often get that vibe about Grant when talking with other GMs. (For the record, Grant has denied all this and even once requested that we call, together, the folks who trashed him. I declined to join him in such an adventure.)....Anyway, the point is Grant now has a reputation as someone who is attempting to tell the world the Cavs will be one huge disaster without him. I have no clue if he's talking directly to national writers -- but he at least talks to people who talk to those writers (and, obviously, to me).
http://www.foxsports.com/ohio/story/cavs-playoff-dreams-dead-well-mostly-but-not-officially-040514
Wojnarowski has written one of the best articles on the scandal, and he isn't ruling out Grant as the source.
Everyone wants to know: In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's published scouting report on Deng, who was the redacted Cleveland source responsible for the initial African slurs? If this wasn't Chris Grant – the deposed Cleveland GM who replaced Ferry with the Cavaliers – it will be difficult for him to convince people otherwise. And that's a brutally vulnerable position for Ferry to have left him.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/danny-ferry-s-fatal-mistake--he-never-owned-his-comments-041056586.html
I still have some problems with the timing. Grant was fired Feb 6th, the report is dated June 6th. Not sure what the date of the report means exactly (is it the date it was written? the date the Hawks acquired it?), but the report was clearly written from a perspective that postdates Grant's dismissal ("CHA, PHX, DAL, & LAL all had degrees of interest [in trading for him] around the deadline"). Could Grant possibly have had access to either a written report or an unwritten assessment after he was fired, presumably provided by someone still inside the organization who remained loyal to him? It's possible. Would he have passed along an unwritten assessment to Ferry that included the racist language? I have no idea, but maybe so, in view of The Bullshit Whisperer's "spinning stories" comment. We do know that when Grant was fired, he was the only one let go. David Griffin emphasized that everyone else remained in place. (I mean, we know that Z effectively lost his role as personal assistant to an executive who was longer employed by the organization, but even Z continued to be on the payroll, so far as I can tell.) Grant would have had loyalists within the organization.
Still a lot of unanswered questions. This isn't the end of the story.
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