Tim Couch joins the Browns QB chorus with Bernie Kosar
December 17, 2014A whole slew of Cleveland Browns finished first in Pro Bowl fan voting
December 17, 2014If you thought that 2013 was one crazy year in the world of Cleveland Sports, 2014 once again proved that there is rarely a dull moment. There were good times and bad, hirings and firings, wins and losses, homecomings and award winners. As the year comes to a close, like we have done the last six years, WFNY will take a look at what we view to be the ten biggest sports stories to grace our local sports scene over the last 12 months. Each day through the rest of the year, we will be counting down from ten to one. Do enjoy.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A sports team, coming off multiple seasons of bitter losses and a frustrating lack of improvement, fires its head coach. They hire a new coach who comes in with some expectations for immediate improvement. After some early ups and downs, the team collapses under its own swirling chaos and suddenly at the end of the season, the coach is stunningly fired after just one season in charge.
Such a story would be rather bizarre in and of itself, no? Now what if I told you that this story happened twice within five months of each other in the same city in two different sports? “Well, obviously that city would be Cleveland, right?” Right.
2013 and 2014 weren’t exactly great years for Cleveland coaches not named Terry Francona. After dealing with the years of frustration with Pat Shurmur and Byron Scott, both the Browns and the Cavaliers brought in Rob Chudzinski and Mike Brown, respectively, to turn around each franchise.
|
For the Browns’ part, their season flamed out in spectacular fashion and before the start of the final game of the season there were already rumors flying around that Jimmy Haslam and the Browns were set to fire Chudzinski. After one season. And that’s exactly what happened. It was one of the lowest points of my life as a Browns fan1. It was a miserable public display of the systematic failures of the franchise from the top to the bottom. It was a symptomatic referendum on everything that has ailed the franchise since the return in 1999.
None of us ever could have imagined that the Browns wouldn’t be the last team in 2014 to hire their third coach in three seasons. And for those of us who identify most as Cavalier fans, the situation with Mike Brown would actually be worse than what the Browns went through.
You might be shouting “Blasphemy!”, but hear me out. The Cavaliers situation was worse because they were firing the coach they had just re-hired less than twelve months prior. You want to talk about systematic failures and symptomatic referendums, this was an organizational case of dysfunction on a completely new level. It hadn’t been that long ago when Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert sat before the media and shamefully had to admit he had made a mistake in 2010 when he fired Mike Brown2. Now less than a year later, he was making the same “mistake” again, firing Mike Brown. Or maybe the mistake was saying that it was a mistake because it was never a mistake at all and the only real mistake was hiring Brown without even bothering to interview anyone else. Got that? Yeah, it’s tough to keep up with.
And that’s really the point and that’s why the whole situation was such a bummer. Mike Brown was hired most likely for three reasons. One, to turn around the Cavaliers’ atrocious defense. Two, to provide some stability and to oversee Kyrie Irving’s transition to superstar. And three, to get the Cavaliers into the playoffs. He did a pretty decent job on the first part3, but he failed pretty miserably on the second two points. But really, the whole tenure of Mike Brown’s season back in Cleveland was filled with pure chaos.
The Cavaliers had the No. 1 overall pick in the 2013 NBA Draft, and they used it to pick Anthony Bennett, an overweight player coming off surgery who also had asthma and sleep apnea. They also signed Andrew Bynum, who turned out to be every bit the locker room cancer he was rumored to be. By late December he was suspended indefinitely (and infinitely) from the team. The team also signed Jarrett Jack, who turned out to have arguably the worst season of his career. Eventually the Cavaliers traded Bynum for Luol Deng in an effort to finally address that gaping hole at SF in the wake of LeBron’s defection. Deng arrived in Cleveland and immediately regressed while leaking damaging stories to the press about Dion Waiters and Kyrie Irving. The Cavaliers also made one last effort to make the playoffs by trading for Spencer Hawes. Hawes played pretty well for the Cavaliers, but the team still fell well short of their playoff goal.
I’m not sure if any coach could have weathered that storm. But alas, Mike Brown was the overseer of the franchise and the responsibility lies with him. The team routinely struggled at running even simple inbound plays and the offense completely fell apart. Even the hallmark of Mike Brown’s success, his defensive system, looked alarmingly outdated just four years after the team had so much success running it. It was pretty obvious Mike Brown wasn’t working, but no way would the Cavaliers also fire a coach after one season, right? Especially not after Dan Gilbert publicly gushed about the hiring of Brown and so sheepishly admitted firing him in 2010 was a mistake. Right?
On May 12, 2014, the Cleveland Cavaliers fired Mike Brown. It was big deal in and of itself for the reasons listed above, but more than anything, for Cleveland sports fans it was especially brutal to see two teams fire a first year head coach within a few months of each other. Whether Mike Brown deserved to be fired or not (he probably did), it was the circumstances that made the ordeal difficult to watch.
Then there was the question of who the team would hire to replace him. Immediately some really exciting names4 popped up as candidates. Names like Vinny Del Negro, Adrian Griffin, Lionel Hollins, and Tyronn Lue popped up. The Cavaliers gave a token interview to Mark Price seemingly just to placate fans. There was a lot of pessimism among fans at this time, as most people were wholly underwhelmed by the possibilities. Furthermore, with LeBron James being able to opt out of his contract, any hopes of a homecoming seemed laughable.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the name David Blatt popped up. I was aware of David Blatt, but not as the head coach of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball club. I remembered him instead for his comments back in 2010, when he was coaching the Russian National Team. When asked about the controversial 1972 Gold Medal Game between the old Soviet Union and the US, a game which almost anyone with any sense of objectivity agrees that the US was jobbed, Blatt said he felt the outcome was fair. That simple comment drew the ire of Coach K who dismissed Blatt as being Russian.
I remember being mildly offended by Coach K’s comments. I think Blatt is nuts if he thinks the outcome of that game in ‘72 was fair, but having batshit crazy opinions is part of the American spirit. You can say what you want and believe what you want no matter how nuts you are. Regardless, that was what I remembered Blatt for. I didn’t realize the sheer vastness of his success overseas. The more I read about Blatt, the more videos I watched of his teams, the more interviews with him that I saw, the more I interacted on Twitter with people who covered Blatt, the more excited I got about the prospects of the Cavaliers hiring him.
The candidates were eventually narrowed down to Blatt and Tyronn Lue, a young assistant coach who the Cavaliers reportedly liked an awful lot. But rather than offering the job to Lue, the Cavaliers kept waiting for an answer from Blatt. For his part, Blatt was rumored to be deciding between taking the Cavs job and accepting a role on Steve Kerr’s staff in Golden State. That might sound crazy, but remember, at the time the Cavaliers were a franchise with Kyrie Irving, sure. But there was no LeBron James. There was no Kevin Love. Instead, there was still Anthony Bennett and the No. 1 overall pick in the 2014 draft (which would become Andrew Wiggins). The Cavs job wasn’t as attractive back then as it is now, and you could potentially see Blatt preferring to re-learn the NBA as an assistant for a year before chasing his dream of being an NBA coach.
Ultimately, Blatt made the decision he needed to make for himself and finally, on June 20, 2014, the Cavaliers officially hired Blatt, making him the first Euroleague coach to make the jump as head coach in the NBA. It’s safe to say Blatt made the right move. After coming to Cleveland, Blatt would eventually receive the best housewarming gift ever when LeBron James announced he was going back home. Then the Cavaliers would trade for Kevin Love, giving the Cavaliers one of the most potent (and youngest) “Big Three” superstar collections in the league.
It’s funny how it all turned out. Chaos often breeds chaos, but sometimes something rises out of the chaos that transcends the common narrative and changes the paradigm. Those shifts rarely happen in Cleveland, but for once, it did. The Cavaliers didn’t deserve any of this to happen. Teams shouldn’t get to be where the Cavaliers are when they re-hire a coach only to fire him one year later. That’s not how karma is supposed to work. But somehow, the Cavaliers landed one of the brightest and most well respected coaches available to them.
After the crazy year 2014 was for the Cavaliers in terms of their coaching situation, it will be nice to take a year off from the insanity and chaos. Because there’s no way 2015 can be anything like 2014. There’s no way David Blatt gets fired and the Cavaliers do the whole coaching search thing all over again in 2015. Right?
- Obviously there have been lower lows than that low…the team moving, the Drive, the Fumble, etc, but as far as embarrassing goes, this might have taken the cake. [↩]
- Of course, the funny thing is, nobody other than Gilbert seemed to think it was a mistake…if anything, common perception seemed to indicate that most felt the re-hiring was the mistake. [↩]
- The Cavs’ defense was by no means good in Brown’s one season, but he really did improve the defense and at least got them to play a little bit harder on that end. [↩]
- Sarcasm. [↩]