David Blatt v. Tyronn Lue

[gourimoko]

Okay, this shit has got to stop now!

@gourimoko @jking948 I love y'all, you're great posters it's great to read your contributions at all times. please, for the love of god, get new avatars, it's so fucking distracting that you have the same avi, it makes it seem like you've gotten a share account and randomly engage in spirited interpersonal debate.

I'm begging you guys, please find a solution to this.

It's not just us.. @KI4MVP has it too...

Just enjoying the moment man.. It's not permanent; I promise..

 

[buzzdog]

What Gouri said... and said... and said...

 

[Cavatt]

One thing I would love to know is how much time did Lue spend on his gameplan compared to Kerr. Did Kerr really just say, "If we hit a few ridiculous 3's we are good." It almost seems like he did. What were his adjustments? Playing Ezeli and AV were desperation moves.

Lue outworked the guy, and maybe he outworked Blatt too. Mad respect to Lue. I think he and Blatt are the best coaches Cleveland has had in a long time, but Lue is the one who won it for us. The proof is in the pudding.

 

[JMoneyYourHoney]

And now he has just as many championships as his teacher!

They're both at opposite ends of the "3-1" spectrum.

 

[Paul]

I think Blatt deserves some credit for helping to move the team from its formation to the Champion we see today. Mark Jackson played some role in the development of the Warriors team, and I would say the same holds true for Blatt. He certainly helped Delly and JR's development.

That said, Lue did what no Cleveland basketball coach ever could do by winning the championship. We can debate about who ran the offense, who ran the defense, who created the plays, etc, etc. Lue getting us the ring is a tangible accomplishment that can not be disputed or denied.

I was pretty pessimistic heading into the playoffs. I felt we'd probably end up losing in the finals. Lue got us all 16 wins so I tip my cap to him. He has earned himself a long term contract with the Cavs.

 

[Crosby_Cavs]

On a lighter note, has Al Iverson given Lue a call to congratulate him?

Allen tweeted this when Lue was named first team coach.
View: https://twitter.com/alleniverson/status/690694367888183301


So maybe he congatulated him privately. Who knows.

 

[TeaLeaves]

Trust in Griff. Let's see if anyone hires Blatt in the offseason. I'm betting definitely not as a HC and probably not even as an asst. I'm glad he's gone. Way too snarky for me especially for having never been in the NBA before.

 

[AsianDawg]

Allen tweeted this when Lue was named first team coach.
View: https://twitter.com/alleniverson/status/690694367888183301


So maybe he congatulated him privately. Who knows.

Good! I liked Iverson's on-court skills despite him being a thug at the time. Nice to show he was classy!

 

[ACisKING]

The defensive schemes were Lue's and this has been talked about at length, reported about by Jason Lloyd, Windhorst, and McMenamin, as well as stated by Blatt himself.

Not going to go through the loop de loop of circular arguments discussing what Blatt could've done. He was fired. You seem to have forgotten why and want to relitigate this, and for what?

I'll do this once.. if you disagree, that's fine, not my problem. Lue is the coach, this is the last I really want to write about it.

Let's start with a few quotes from David Griffin, the guy who made the decision to dismiss Blatt:

"I've witnessed this over the last couple weeks — really over the last month or so. It’s made because we have a lack of fit with our personnel and our vision of how to use that personnel."

"So, I'm measuring more than wins and losses. I’m focusing on a bigger picture in my evaluation and I’m really trying to decide, ‘Are we working towards a championship and are we building a championship culture?’"

"And really, most importantly for me, and I think a lot of you have seen this over the years, ‘are our hearts, minds and souls in what we’re doing? Are we all in on this? Are we of this? Are we really trying to achieve something as a unit or are we a collection of individuals"

Regarding this, it's important to note that Blatt had somehow decided it was a good idea to be late to practice and late to the team departures, to which one has to ask "are we all in?" And to which, LeBron James infamously tweeted.


Two weeks later Blatt was fired.

Griffin stated the Cavs were not progressing towards a championship..

"Elite teams in this league always have that and you see it everywhere. To be truly elite, we have to buy into a set of values and principles that we believe in. That becomes our identity and if we can do that day in and day out, that becomes who we are.

"Halfway through the season, we have not yet developed this identity and each step forward, unfortunately, I think you’ve seen we’ve taken two steps back."

And there is nothing but truth to this. The Cavs had no identity, no system in place, nothing. We were a team of disjointed individuals by every single account of every player and every reporter. The coaches job is to find a means of creating a cohesive team of these various talents, and Blatt failed to do that.

What can be argued here? We established our identity because of Ty Lue; which makes this, his team.

When asked if it was wise to make this decision midseason, Griffin said outright:

"I’m not leaving an unprecedented team payroll and all of the efforts that everybody that works in this organization to chance."

And if this is not an indictment of David Blatt, then I don't know what is.

Speaking on David Blatt's record in the East:

"I don’t think the Golden State game by itself did very much. I think it’s over time you start to see the type of things that you want to be doing habitually start to erode a little bit."

Like being late?

" And sometimes you can win games in this league in the regular season and get worse. And I think we were regressing over a period of time."

Which I think we all agree with...

"I don’t think there was a final straw. Again, my job is to broker in what I know. And I’m in our locker room a lot. And I knew that there’s just a disconnect there right now. There’s a lack of spirit and connectedness that I just couldn’t accept."

Again, lack of identity, role, delineation, responsibility, accountability. Whose fault is that?

". . We were 30-11 with a schedule that was reasonably easy. And I’m judging a lot more than wins and losses.”"

Exactly.... Our record doesn't mean much considering the talent we have in place.

On who he consulted:

"I’m not taking a poll; my job is to lead a franchise and to lead an organization to where it needs to go. That’s what I’m tasked with doing and that’s what I did. I didn’t ask anybody’s opinion on the team. I’m in the locker room. I’ve done this for a long time and I know what it’s supposed to feel like. I didn’t need to ask questions.”

On the bullshit narrative that James got him fired:

"LeBron is about this organization and he is of this organization and he’s of our community, but this narrative that somehow we’re taking direction from him, it’s just not fair. It’s not fair to him, in particular, but frankly, it’s kind of not fair to me and our group anymore."

Speaking of what's been reported, you can read McMenamin and Lloyd or the vast majority of Cavs beat writers, and there is a consensus; that census is echoed here by Brian Windhorst in the following:

“All I know is what I saw, and I saw a guy who completely was unable to get even a modicum of respect from a majority of his players,” Windhorst said.

“And I also saw star players and veteran players—not just LeBron, OK. We know LeBron had issues with him. But basically any player that had any sort of veteran status in the league, more than Joe Harris and Matthew Dellavedova—all the veterans didn’t like him, either. He wasn’t able to win over about anybody.”

This all comes half a season after James had to effectively take over certain aspects of coaching the team during the playoffs; or refs giving Blatt a pass to prevent him from getting bounced by the Bulls, or lack of use of depth in the Finals.

McMenamin/Windhorst writes:

"With the Cavs playing a vital game in Chicago in the second round, James made perhaps the biggest undercutting of his coach of the entire season. He changed the final play of Game 4, which resulted in his hitting a game-winning 3-pointer that evened the series at 2-2 and effectively propelled the Cavs to the Finals. Blatt initially wanted James to inbound the ball, while James wanted the shot.

... the way James explained what happened made his continuing viewpoint of Blatt very transparent.

"To be honest, the play that was drawn up, I scratched it," he said.

That was after Blatt nearly cost the Cavs their chance at that shot when he called a timeout he didn't have, and official Scott Foster saved him by not granting the timeout, which otherwise would've resulted in a technical. The result, even at a pinnacle moment in the season, put Blatt in the spotlight for the wrong reasons.

Timeouts had been an issue already. Blatt mismanaged them early in the season and sometimes turned to Lue about when to execute certain timeouts. Teams can take advantage of certain mandatory timeouts and conserve options, something with which Blatt had issues. When he tried to explain what happened, he made the situation worse.

Blatt, again refusing to accept that he fucked up, goes on to say this:

"A basketball coach makes 150 to 200 critical decisions during the course of a game, something that I think is paralleled only by a fighter pilot," Blatt said."

McMenamin continues;

"Yet even some of the simplest tasks -- such as staying on message about the injury status of Anderson Varejao in the days leading up to the Finals -- he failed in executing. Varejao, out since December because of an Achilles tear, had hoped to return to the court in the championship round. The team decided against it. Rather than giving a straight answer about the center's availability in the Finals, Blatt hinted he could play by saying, "Stranger things have happened in this world."

When a team source was later informed of Blatt's quote about Varejao, he responded incredulously: "What the f--- is he doing?!"

On the Christmas game:

"...little had changed from the previous season, other than the rancor not spilling over publicly. James still made many decisions without consulting Blatt (once he took himself out of a game without saying anything and received a technical foul). It was clear the players still connected better with Lue, during both practices and games.

Much of the early season was spent plugging holes as Blatt managed a roster that was the banged up into early December. But just when everyone got healthy, things took a turn.

On Christmas Day, the Cavs made a much-anticipated visit to Golden State for a premier game on the NBA schedule. With a fully healthy roster, Blatt coached as if it were a playoff game, and he slashed his rotation. Richard Jefferson didn't play for the first time all season. Mo Williams and James Jones saw their minutes reduced. Roles were changed on the fly. Certainly, Blatt had to make some tough choices with the healthy roster, but all of them came as surprises to the players, and that triggered a cascade of anger and frustration."

....continuing on:

"Although it might seem minor to offend back-end rotation players, the move ripped open some wounds from the previous season pertaining to the lack of respect for Blatt within the team. Privately, the players cursed Blatt, and their agents started complaining heavily behind the scenes. Whatever goodwill had been fostered seemed to be blowing up.

The next night at a game in Portland, the Cavs put forth an embarrassing effort in a blowout loss to the Trail Blazers. They gave almost no effort and were out of the game from the start. Calling it a boycott game might be too strong, but there was a noticeable chill that enveloped the team.

James tried to stick to his edict of not attacking Blatt in the media after the Cavs' next game, a win in Phoenix. The Suns were going through their own turmoil, with one star suspended (Markieff Morris) and another star out for the season because of impending surgery (Eric Bledsoe), not to mention Jeff Hornacek's having two of his coaches fired by ownership. Rather than pummel the Suns, the Cavs barely pulled off a win, with James visibly frustrated all night. He was terse in his postgame comments -- unlike his usual, engaging self.

The next night, the Cavs won in Denver, with James enjoying a turn-back-the-clock performance with family and friends in attendance on the eve of his 31st birthday. Overall, it was a sloppy game against a middling team, but it was a win. James was asked about his bizarre behavior in Phoenix -- both his demeanor on the court and his postgame remarks -- after most of the locker room had cleared out at the Pepsi Center.

"Thank God we play in the NBA, with a game the next day, and not the NFL," he said. "Because if it was the NFL, I would have went off and let the quotes fester for a week."

This is part of the "disconnect" Griffin is talking about; and no, it's not just with James, or Love, but with much of the team.

Regarding Griffin needing to get involved:

"Watching it all was Griffin, who was on the trip with the team. The veteran Jones came to the GM at one point and told him, "I wouldn't want to be you," according to a source. Jones said it because he knew Griffin was dealing with the beginnings of an uprising.

But the Cavs were still in first place. The team finished the trip salvaging a 2-2 record, but there was no ignoring the growing issues. After the players had two days off to celebrate the new year, they gathered for practice back in Cleveland.

Griffin sat in on a film session and jumped on James for not getting back on defense against the Nuggets, one of his bad habits. James accepted the criticism in stride, sources said. But this moment only inspired less faith in Blatt because it is supposed to be the coach -- not the GM -- holding the players accountable.

Within days, both Williams and Smith showed up late for games, arriving less than an hour before tipoff. Blatt said it was dealt with internally. Some around the team expressed surprise that multiple players did that, and it was thought of as another example of a lack of accountability.

Going in to January...

"The Cavs lost to the Spurs. Then, in the most important home game of the season, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day against the Warriors, the Cavs were flattened by the defending champs' unrelenting attack.

Playing expertly, Golden State destroyed Cleveland by 34 points and led by 43 points at one point. Gilbert sat next to the Cavs' bench until the bitter end. James spent much of the fourth quarter sitting in Blatt's seat on the bench and talking with Lue while Blatt stood a few feet away.

"That's my responsibility to get them ready, and our guys have got to be better than that, and they know that," Blatt said in accepting blame for the loss.

After the game, James took care to not take aim at Blatt. He rebuffed a reporter when he tried to get James to pile on Blatt's comments.

Meanwhile, Love had played poorly since Irving's return to the lineup, and he was not included effectively in the game plan against the Spurs or Warriors. In the next two games, a win in Brooklyn and a quality home win over the Los Angeles Clippers, Love piled up 35 points and 34 rebounds. Asked to explain the change, Love credited Irving -- not Blatt -- with making a strategy suggestion.

Blatt claims he's being treated unfairly:

Blatt, for his part, chided the media for not giving the team enough credit for being 30-11, despite an 0-3 record against the Spurs and Warriors.

"I hear a lot of far-reaching conclusions, and personally, I don't like it," he said. "I think this team is in pretty good position, although people choose to overlook that, which I don't think is fair."

So Blatt felt he was being unfairly treated by the media, and was oblivious to the problems the Cavs were facing. By the way, he was late 3 days prior to that Spurs game.

McMenamin/Windhorst concludes:

"It was nothing James or Irving or Love or anyone said that got Blatt fired. If it had truly been up to James, sources said, Blatt might have been fired a year earlier. As it turned out, the actions of the entire team, Blatt included, over the past 15 months brought Griffin to this conclusion."

Yet still, Blatt's supporters felt he was somehow treated unfairly:

"This is supposed to be a results-oriented profession, and look at the results [Blatt] got," a source close to Blatt said. "This is unbelievable."

.....

Look, I'm posting this here not to shit on a guy while he's down; it's because I want to put to bed this notion that Blatt was the guy to lead this team. He wasn't. He had his opportunity, and frankly, he squandered it.

Not developing a cohesive team strategy, lack of roles and responsibilities, no communication with players, lack of accountability. His hubris and arrogance, in my opinion, prevented him from taking a step back, embracing the role of a rookie coach, and learning the NBA game, the personnel, and the environment.

We could talk about his not being able to manage timeouts, after an entire season on the job; misunderstanding critical plays and moments, team strategy (having LeBron inbound the ball with no time left on the clock?), inability to motive and utilize Kevin Love....

All of these things are key elements to his job, that, according to people who were there, not blog posters or fans on a forum, or guys who watched him in Europe can attest to.

The reality is that he had his shot and he blew it. David Griffin made one of the smartest decisions a GM could possibly make, and it took balls. He fired the coach of the #1 team in the Eastern Conference, got trashed for it by all the coaches in the league, and former coaches in the media, got trashed in Israeli media -- and then won the fucking championship.

Give credit where credit is due.... and if we're going to criticize Ty Lue, then we better damn well be ready to criticize the guy who got fired because he couldn't deliver what Lue ultimately has.

p.s.
I'm a bit miffed by this walking on eggshells approach to David Blatt.

Whenever he is mentioned, he has to be praised, or people get offended like you called out their mother. I've never seen any coach get this kind of respect and deference in my many years watching this league. I'm not sure what it is, or why it is, but it's tired and played out.

I wish I could rate this post "winner" twice. Maybe it's because I'm a fan of another team that follows your team from a different perspective, but I've never understood the almost mythical reverence that Cavs fans seem to have for David Blatt. Any basketball fan could tell that the Cavs were underachieving for their talent level. Blatt marginalized Kevin Love; it's one thing not to play him much against a matchup that's tough for him but Blatt barely used Love properly at all. He seemed to have no trust in veterans last year in the playoffs or this year in the regular season (would the Cavs even have won it all without the contributions of Richard Jefferson or even Dahntay Jones?). Under Blatt the Cavs seemed to take way too much time to get into sets. And everything I read about Blatt seemed to indicate that he didn't have the respect of his players. A coach can know all the x's and o's in the world but, in the NBA, none of that is as important as having the people skills to get players with huge egos to buy in. Blatt's reaction to his players celebrating his first win shows his inability to relate to NBA players (or at least the ones on the Cavs). And that's not even counting the things that are flat out unacceptable for an NBA coach. Like nearly becoming the first coach in NBA history to blow a playoff game by pulling a Chris Webber. Like being tardy. Like being afraid to call out his best player for his mistakes. Like running around the locker room naked (I kid, I kid). Don't get me wrong - Blatt is a legendary international coach who has forgotten more about basketball than I will ever know. He could very well end up in the Hall of Fame. And he deserves credit for coaching a team with many egos through injuries and championship expectations. But I never got the re-writing of Blatt's tenure to make it seem better than it was; his firing may have taken the NBA by surprise, but it was warranted based on a number of factors beautifully outlined by @gourimoko and others.

 

[bushwick_bill]

Trust in Griff. Let's see if anyone hires Blatt in the offseason. I'm betting definitely not as a HC and probably not even as an asst. I'm glad he's gone. Way too snarky for me especially for having never been in the NBA before.

Blatt already signed and is coaching in Turkey.

 

[ACisKING]

Good! I liked Iverson's on-court skills despite him being a thug at the time. Nice to show he was classy!

Iverson and Lue are good friends now. During the playoffs, Allen Iverson has said in interviews that he has tremendous respect for Lue. He's even said that it annoys him when people bring up him stepping over Lue because of how much he respects Lue. And at a recent draft watch party in Philadelphia, when he was asked about the Cavs winning, the first thing Iverson mentioned was that he was happy that Lue won (as an aside, he also had many kind words for LBJ, who he mentions being close to - like he knows LBJ's family well and mentioned Gloria, Savannah, and the boys).

 

[AsianDawg]

Yeah, he talked about it at length in two interviews where he said they stopped switching everything and only switched on Klay and Steph. Still trapping, but would change the trap throughout the game from Steph or Klay depending upon who had the hot hand.

Very dynamic.

After Game 2, Lue had them figured out, and was blasting the Cavs to play physical, tough, defense.. Make our presence felt. The Cavs did just that, to the lamentation of Steve Kerr, and it really broke them down.

It would have been interesting to see how we played OKC--they are entirely different than GSW--I think we would have won but played differently against them.

 

[The Human Q-Tip]

Any basketball fan could tell that the Cavs were underachieving for their talent level.

Well, last season we had a screwed-up roster until midseason. Once that got fixed, we went 23-4. Hard to call that underachieving in only the first year if playing together. That team was playing great ball.

In the playoffs we swept Boston but lost Love. Lots of folks thought that meant we were done. But then, despite Kyrie also not being himself, we swept Atlanta. Chicago was supposed to take out a beaten-up Cavs team, but we beat them in 6.

Then we were up 2-1 in the Finals - one shot away from 3-0 (still without Love), then Kyrie goes down for good. I think Blatt got everything reasonably possible from this team last year.

This year, we started off with Love and Kyrie both banged up and trying to get into form. Moz had a bad knee as well, and Delly got hurt.

Point is that while it was the right move in retrospect, Blatt didn't exactly have the best luck in terms of i juries when he was here, but when he did, that team performed well.

 

[gourimoko]

Well, last season we had a screwed-up roster until midseason. Once that got fixed, we went 23-4. Hard to call that underachieving in only the first year if playing together. That team was playing great ball.

In the playoffs we swept Boston but lost Love. Lots of folks thought that meant we were done. But then, despite Kyrie also not being himself, we swept Atlanta. Chicago was supposed to take out a beaten-up Cavs team, but we beat them in 6.

Then we were up 2-1 in the Finals - one shot away from 3-0 (still without Love), then Kyrie goes down for good. I think Blatt got everything reasonably possible from this team last year.

This year, we started off with Love and Kyrie both banged up and trying to get into form. Moz had a bad knee as well, and Delly got hurt.

Point is that while it was the right move in retrospect, Blatt didn't exactly have the best luck in terms of i juries when he was here, but when he did, that team performed well.

If you recall going back to the Blatt thread; at no time was there a consensus that we were getting the most out of our personnel.

In fact, it wasn't until the end of this season and the start of the playoffs that we started to see this team click as a unit, rather than a collection of individuals.

We defeated teams that had lesser talent... I think Griffin went over this well, but we really were not acting as a cohesive unit.

Also, I don't think anyone would've thought we were "done" without Kevin Love since he really wasn't a big factor in our team's wins up to that point.

I think the point here is that, it's easy to look back at the Cavs record and think we accomplished something; but what, exactly? Is having a winning record an accomplishment in itself for a team with a championship as the only acceptable outcome to a season? Do we look past all of the problems the Cavs exhibited simply because we were winning games; regardless of how we were winning those games?

 

[cavsfever]

I think it's mostly post-championship hindsight to claim that Blatt wasn't getting the most out of our personnel and Lue was. In terms of record and the product on the court, the only difference between last year and this year is losing the Finals in 6 when injured vs winning the Finals in 7 when healthy. Both years, we started off wobbly at least in part due to outside factors (bad roster pre-trade last year, injury this year). Both years, we rounded into shape for the playoffs -- in fact, last year we finished stronger than we did this year, after starting a lot worse. Both years, we went 12-2 in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Then this year we won in 7 with Kyrie and Kevin (more or less) healthy, plus having Richard Jefferson. Anyone here that doesn't think we would have won last year with Kyrie and Kevin and RJ all available in the Finals?

Now the reports from behind the scenes do indicate that Lue gets along better with the players than Blatt did, and the overall team vibe seems to be better. That's for sure. But if we had lost this year then we might have heard more negativity about the team and Lue. (I am however impressed that there were zero negative rumors from 'unnamed team sources' about dissension or negativity when we were down 0-2 and 1-3). I'm happy we have Lue, and in the end I'm sure Griffin was smarter than I / we were about promoting him in the middle of the season.

But I think the moral here might be that when you have Lebron on your team and solid talent around him, then any good coach will get the job done, and both Blatt and Lue were good coaches. We sometimes over focus on coaches.