Fade to Blatt: The Cavs’ Outsider Coach Never Stood a Chance
On your first day as an NBA head coach, you are you one day closer to being fired as an NBA head coach. That’s the harsh reality of a high-profile job in which you abdicate much of the X’s and O’s to you assistants, to deal instead with the media, the politics and the wrangling of egos. You make that trade out of necessity – there aren’t enough hours in a day to do it all – and yet, it almost always leads to your undoing. A head coach quickly learns his job is 20 percent stuff he can control and 80 percent stuff he can’t…yet, ultimately, he is held 100-percent accountable for what happens.
Just ask David Blatt, fired Friday after a 30-11 start to the season that had the Cleveland Cavaliers atop the Eastern Conference. That makes them the best team to fire its head coach midseason, and all Blatt did last year was lead them to the NBA Finals and a 2-1 lead over the Golden State Warriors before they collapsed. His overall record with the team stands at 83-40, and now he has been pushed aside in favor of assistant coach Tyronn Lue, a move that seemed inevitable.
As early as December 2014, there were rumors circulating about Blatt not connecting with the players, and stories of Lue calling timeouts and plays behind Blatt’s back. The noise subsided as the Cavs hit their stride in the second half of the season, but then there was the notorious incident in the playoffs when Blatt tried to call a timeout despite not having any remaining, then drew up a play that LeBron James ignored in favor of winning the game himself. Over the summer, James and Blatt downplayed the tension, and the Cavs were playing well enough to forestall concerns for a while, but – as Cleveland GM David Griffin said in his press conference on Friday – pretty good isn’t good enough.
Blatt apparently slipped the noose once this season already. In the Cavs narrow loss to Golden State on Christmas, Blatt tweaked the rotations without telling the players, resulting in open revolt in a game against a Damian Lillard-less Portland that the Cavs apparently more or less threw. A win over Phoenix was a stay of execution for Blatt, but Monday’s 34-point loss to the Warriors – at home – was the nail in the coffin.
As with many breakups, though, the inciting incident is not the cause, but rather the culmination of something that was building for a long time. According to a scathing article by Chris Haynes, Blatt treated the Big 3 of James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving with kid gloves, often seemed lost during timeouts and simply couldn’t build the trust with players that came so naturally to Lue, an NBA veteran and champion who played with both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.