Channing Frye, a longtime NBA veteran and member of the 2016 NBA Champion Cleveland Cavaliers team, is retiring at the end of the season.
Frye played 13 years in the league and played the better part of the last four years with the Cavs after getting traded by Orlando and eventually being dealt to Los Angeles last season in a last-ditch move to save the season by Cavs general manager Koby Altman.
However, the feelings of that 2016 championship run and the other trips to the NBA Finals will always be there. So much so that even as he goes away from the NBA game, Frye is still ready to rib the greatest teammate he’s ever played with.
Frye told The Athletic’s Joe Vardon that he, along with Kyle Korver, helped LeBron James’ jumpshot improve ‘for a year.’
Three things you’ll tell your kids about LeBron?
“No. 1, he has smelly breath. Smelly breath. No. 2, he was a freak of nature. And then No. 3, Kyle Korver and I fixed his jumper for one year. (Funny, Korver takes the credit for that.) I know, but Korver, Channing, it’s all the same. It’s all about Korver.”
Frye has often been credited by those followed the team closest that his presence in the locker room after arriving from Orlando helped bring an air of levity to a team that was great, but a little joyless. It may not be a stretch to suggest that without Frye they may have never coalesced in the way they eventually did.
Frye also took the time to speak with LeBronWire last summer about what it was like playing with LeBron and some prescient comments that eventually look like cautionary tales in a failed Year 1 with LeBron for the Lakers.
