Final thoughts on David Blatt and first thoughts on Ty Lue: While We’re Waiting

“Can’t we stop using the word ‘failure’ and just be like, ‘I didn’t succeed’?” – Mythbusters

Happy Tuesday WFNY!

What a week. Last week at this time we were all licking our wounds a bit in the wake of the Golden State Warriors dismantling of the Cleveland Cavaliers. In my WWW edition last Tuesday, I wrote the following:

“But today, there are no moral victories to be found after the butt kicking the team took last night. If you’re looking for silver linings in a game like that, you’re looking for answers in the wrong place. The Cavaliers are stuck in a bad place to be. There is only one outcome to this season that will not be a disappointment, and right now, they are not playing good enough basketball to achieve that outcome.

“The Cavaliers play the Spurs at home on Saturday, January 30. If we see a repeat of Monday’s effort in that game, questions will start to pop up about whether or not changes need to be made to this roster before the trade deadline. The last thing the Cavaliers need is that kind of distraction. So keep an eye on these next two weeks, they just might set the tone for the rest of this season.”

I certainly never called for David Blatt to be fired and I absolutely did not see it coming, but what you can tell is that I sensed the same frightening realization that Cavaliers GM David Griffin: The Cavaliers are not good enough to win a Championship right now.

It seems crazy to say that about a team that was 30-11 on Friday, but that’s the reason why it seems crazy to fire a coach from a team that was 30-11. It’s why the shockwaves were sent throughout the coaching community and so many of David Blatt’s peers spoke out in support of Blatt and chastised the Cavaliers organization.

It might sound like I’m saying I support the decision to fire Blatt. But the truth is, I don’t. I’m not happy about this one bit. It seems like an unnecessary risk to introduce such turmoil and to ask a rookie head coach to turn this team around on the fly in the middle of the season. And while teams have changed coaches midseason and still won titles, it’s not traditionally a formula for winning titles. Unless, of course, you can change coaches and hire Pat Riley, who twice has taken over as coach midseason and won a Championship. So it Tyronn Lue the next Pat Riley? Who knows. But what I do know is that while I don’t like the move of firing Blatt now, I do understand why it happened.

My inclination was that if this team wasn’t good enough to beat the Warriors, then perhaps roster changes needed to be made. However, we can all agree that changing coaches is a much, much simpler option. Especially for a team as cap-locked as the Cavaliers are. Trying to find trade partners where you can make the salaries work under the collective bargaining rules is not easy. It limits your options on what you can take back in a trade. I think the Cavaliers knew something had to change, and making the move to fire Blatt was the path of least resistance right now.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean David Blatt was a great coach who was simply stuck in a bad situation. Look, NBA coaching is overvalued when a guy is the coach, and then undervalued when they are fired. Talent often triumphs in a seven-game series, regardless of who the coach is. Most times you just want to avoid a bad coach who over-tinkers and puts the team in a bad position to win. David Blatt was not that kind of coach. He almost always put the Cavaliers in a position to win.

And to be clear, Blatt was indeed stuck in a bad position. Blatt was a coach who was hired to rebuild a team, yet had the script flipped on him when LeBron decided to return. That should have been an exciting time for Blatt. Unfortunately for him, LeBron refused to speak with or meet with him for weeks. LeBron and his team reportedly tried immediately to have Blatt replaced with Mark Jackson. Despite Mike Miller referring to David Blatt’s offense as “borderline genius” last preseason, LeBron decided just weeks into the season that he was going to ignore his coach and instead move Kyrie off the ball and LeBron would thus start the iso ball offense he wanted to run. And when the Cavaliers made it clear they were not going to fire Blatt, LeBron began undercutting his coach via the media. LeBron never gave David Blatt so much as a chance.

That’s not to say Blatt was without his own faults. When the team wanted to celebrate with Blatt upon his first NBA win, Blatt rebuked them, citing that he was no rookie to coaching. Not exactly the best way to build chemistry and goodwill. Blatt was often prickly with the media, he made bizarre statements from time to time, and he made rookie coaching mistakes with managing time outs and lineups.

But despite his faults, and despite all the enormous forces working against him, Blatt did do some things pretty well. Despite dealing with a bunch of players who had never played together before, and then two midseason major trades which shook things up even more, Blatt was able to get all the players back on the same page. I thought it was remarkable how quickly Blatt was able to work JR Smith and Timofey Mozgov into the rotation in a very productive manner. Blatt was able to recognize his own weaknesses in understanding the NBA game coming over from Europe and he thus gave his assistant coaches more power and authority than most head coaches do. In the postseason, when they team was pushed by the Celtics and Bulls, Blatt made key adjustments to put them away. When Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving were injured, Blatt was able to use his limited rotations in a way to achieve maximum possible efficiency.

However, the key area Blatt failed in was getting through to LeBron. And in the NBA, that’s the only thing that matters. You don’t have to like your boss, but you have to respect him or her. And by Blatt trying to appease LeBron, he lost the locker room. Blatt was never able to fully gain the respect and trust of all of his players, perhaps because Blatt overestimated how much value his overseas success would carry inside an NBA locker room.

I don’t think of David Blatt as a failure. I think he’ll find another NBA job and if he learns from some of his mistakes in Cleveland, I think he will be highly successful. He just didn’t succeed in Cleveland in a situation in which there was no virtue but folly in patience. And now we turn to the Tyronn Lue era.

The biggest challenge facing Lue is getting LeBron to snap out of his iso ball mindset. The Cavaliers have two players who are very good at iso ball in LeBron and Kyrie Irving. But the Cavaliers have been at their most successful when they showcase the ball movement they are capable of. The team is 15-1 when they have 25 or more assists. Heck, lower that to just 20 assists and they are still 23-6.

Coach Lue has been talking a lot about the Cavaliers playing at a quicker pace. Some have extrapolated that to mean the analytics definition of “pace,” which is a measure of possessions per game. Yet when Lue was asked after Monday night’s win if he has a specific number in mind for how many possessions he wanted them to be at, Lue seemed surprised by the question. When he says he wants the team playing at a quicker pace, I don’t think he means it in terms of increasing possessions. I think he just wants the team to be active and moving the ball. Get into the offensive sets quicker. Be more purposeful in general on offense. More possessions may be a byproduct of that, but not necessarily. The focus should be on quality over quantity.

Late in the fourth quarter in Monday’s game against the Timberwolves, the Cavaliers saw their lead begin to fade as LeBron and Kyrie had a few possessions of isolation basketball and the offense became stagnant. Minnesota called a time out with under a minute left, trailing by six, and Zach LaVine about to shoot two free throws. He made them both to cut the lead to four, but in the ensuing possession, the offensive movement was back and Matthew Dellavedova found LeBron cutting to the rim for a beautiful pass and easy layup to essentially seal the win. That was one of the more encouraging signs I’ve seen in a while with this team. I don’t know if Lue called that play or if he spoke to the team about breaking out of their stagnant offense in that time out, but whatever the case, the Cavaliers made an adjustment to get the win.

It’s going to take weeks of practices and film study for Lue to really place his fingerprint on this team, but for now, we’re all just left with varying degrees of apprehension and hope. If Lue can finally be the coach to get LeBron to buy in and be on the same page with, the question will then be if that is enough for this team to overcome the Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs. Regardless of what happens in this weekend’s matchup with the Spurs, we won’t really know the answer to that question until the playoffs.