Mad Cavs: Fury Road
May 12, 2015
The Cleveland Indians / Mad Men Timeline: 1960-70
May 12, 2015
Happy Tuesday WFNY!
The Cleveland Cavaliers are preparing for a huge game tonight against the Chicago Bulls. It goes without saying1 that a loss in Game 5 will be catastrophic. The Cavaliers already gave up one at home, they cannot give up another.
What a miserable series this has been, though. I’ve heard some neutral observers talk about how great this series has been. Sure, three of the four games have been close, with two of them being won on buzzer beaters by former MVPs. But man, from the standpoint of watching awful offense and players getting hurt left and right, this has been a miserable series.
As someone who had high hopes for a Championship this season, all I can say is that this playoff season has been a disaster. Kevin Love? Out for the season. Kyrie Irving? Tendinitis in his knee and a foot strain. Can barely even move out on the floor. Iman Shumpert? Groin injury clearly bothering him. LeBron James? Rolled his ankle and is fortunate that it wasn’t worse. It’s just been a brutal series for the Cavaliers.
When Kevin Love was gone for the postseason, I felt that the Cavaliers would be unlikely to beat the Bulls. I apparently underestimated just how bad this Bulls team inexplicably is. Because the Cavaliers have played the worst basketball I’ve seen them play all year, they’ve been destroyed by injuries, and yet here they are with an even series and two home games away from the Eastern Conference Finals.
Some of this is thanks to the Bulls who have squandered so many opportunities to put away the Cavaliers, but credit those Cavs as well for not giving up and fighting and scratching for every play, every opportunity to pull off a win. So from that aspect, I’m happy for this team. But I’m also pretty disheartened about this offseason. This team was peaking at the perfect time. They were really primed to make a good run at a title. Kevin Love was playing some of his best basketball of the season. Kyrie Irving was great. For once, LeBron didn’t have to do everything himself.
Now, he does. Love is gone and Kyrie might as well be. As much as the Cavaliers want Kyrie to be a decoy, the Bulls know he’s just going to stand in the corner and not do anything. Without the ability to jump and get his legs set underneath him, Kyrie’s not a threat to knock down a ton of outside shots. His explosiveness with the ball is completely gone. This Kyrie is such a shell of the player we’ve seen all year. For a guy with a history of being “injury prone”, he deserves a lot of credit for showing the amount of heart he has in staying on the floor and trying to fight through it. But he’s clearly not helping the team at all right now. It’s painful and frustrating to watch.
And yet, here we are, on the day of a pivotal Game 5 in Cleveland. Two wins away from the ECF. What a crazy sport. I was wrong about the Ohio State Buckeyes not being able to win with their third string quarterback, and I’m hopefully wrong about the Cavs not being able to win without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. We’ll see what happens.
*****
Get it right, please
It’s Matthew Dellavedova. It’s not pronounced Delladova. I’m so tired of these national announcers (I’m looking at you, Jeff Van Gundy) being lazy and not saying the name properly. It’s completely unprofessional. Dellavedova isn’t even that hard of a name to pronounce. It’s pronounced exactly like it’s spelled. And heck, you can call him by his nickname, Delly, if his full name is too much for you.
But please stop with the “Delladova” nonsense. That’s all.
*****
The David Blatt situation
I’m not even sure where to start with this one. One of my biggest frustrations this season has been the uneven way that David Blatt has been treated by the media. I suppose I should start by acknowledging that Blatt perhaps brought some of this scrutiny on himself by the manner with which he handled the media. He often carried a sense of self-assuredness that some might call arrogance, and he wasn’t afraid to mock questions if he thought they were dumb questions. Dealing with the media is a game. When you’re Gregg Popovich and you’ve won five NBA Championships, you can be prickly with the media and get away with it. When you’re David Blatt and this is your first season coaching in the NBA, you don’t get the same benefit of the doubt.
But having said that, there’s a certain disingenuous way in which Blatt is being covered this year that drives me absolutely crazy. It probably started when Brian Windhorst reported that LeBron James was calling the plays on the floor, not Blatt. Well, ok. How is this news? Outside of maybe Rick Carlisle, are there any coaches in the NBA who call the plays on the floor on every possession? Typically coaches draw up plays in timeouts and inbounds situations. In the flow of the game, however, the point guard typically calls the plays. And yet everyone ran with Windhorst’s report and turned it into a referendum against Blatt.
This all became magnified in Game Four. The time out thing? Yeah, that was an unacceptable major screw up. He definitely deserves any and all criticism for that. He almost cost the Cavaliers the game and the series. And to his credit, he has acknowledged his mistake2 and took all responsibility for the stupidity of it.
But then came the final play. The play where he initially wanted to have LeBron take the ball out with 0.8 seconds left3. And the world has lost their collective mind over this.
Lets look at this from a couple different angles. First of all, does LeBron need to take that last shot? Be honest. When that ball left his hands, how many of you thought it was going in? LeBron has been terrible shooting the ball this series. I thought there was no chance of that shot going in. LeBron was not the guy I wanted taking that shot. I wanted JR Smith to take it. So no, LeBron did not need to be the one to take the last shot.
Ok, so, if LeBron’s not taking the shot, should he be the one taking it out? Here’s where it gets a little more complicated. I’m perfectly fine with LeBron not taking the shot, but I’d probably prefer he still be on the floor as a potential shooter just to draw as much attention from the defense as he can. His presence could have opened up a good look for someone like JR to make a winning shot. So no, if I was coaching, I would not have had LeBron take the ball out.
But here’s the thing, the Cavs have been successful with LeBron taking the ball out before. In a game against the Clippers in January, Blatt had LeBron inbound the ball and LeBron delivered a perfect pass to Tristan Thompson for a converted three point play to ice the game. In this game against the Bulls, the Cavaliers had just failed multiple times to get a play inbounded. With 0.8 seconds left, your best chance is to have someone cutting to the basket, and I understand Blatt initially thinking he wanted his best passer to be the one to throw the pass in for a tip in chance. I get it.
But then LeBron demanded the ball, and so Blatt changed the play up. That’s what good coaches do. They listen to their players and they trust their players. Had Blatt put up a big fight and made a huge scene about it, then I would question the move a lot more. But again, you can watch the replay and when Blatt talks to his team, he thinks there’s 0.8 seconds left. And I totally get his first instinct being to have LeBron set up a great inbound pass. The only thing that matters is the outcome of what Blatt ultimately went with. Everything worked out, the Cavs won. Why is this still a big deal?
This time, it’s because of LeBron. The fact that LeBron went out of his way to make a point of telling everyone that he nixed the initial play, it created a soundbyte that the media latched onto and ran with. LeBron did this on purpose. Why? I don’t know. I think it’s clear there’s still some friction between LeBron and Blatt. They both are guilty of playing into this childish passive-aggressive media game. And it needs to stop. They need to get back on the same page and they need to both stop using the media to take veiled shots at others.
David Blatt has made some excellent adjustments in this postseason. He deserves a lot of credit for his between game adjustments, even if his in-game adjustments aren’t always as strong. But that’s ok. You know who else is a great between game coach and not always a great in-game coach? Popovich. So it all comes back to Pop. If Blatt wants to model himself after Pop, I’m all for it. But two things need to happen. One, he needs to get on the same page and develop a deeper relationship with his biggest star. Two, he needs to win. And it’s tough to do the second if you can’t do the first. But the point is, Blatt is a fine coach. He’s probably a very good coach, actually. But coaching in the NBA is more than just Xs and Os. It’s also about managing the star players on your roster. I think both sides are at fault here, and both sides need to knock it off.
*****
New album of the week
For personal reasons, I hesitate to do this, but my favorite album of the week is the new Surfer Blood album, “1000 Palms”.
It’s a really, really good album and shows a musical maturity for this band. And I’ll just leave it at that.
*****
That’s been my time, you guys are great. Enjoy the rest of your week, and Go Cavs!
- I love when people do what I’m about to do right now….say “it goes without saying”, but then say it anyway [↩]
- Of course, he also bizarrely defended it by comparing NBA coaching to being a fighter pilot. I get the point he was trying to make, but it was not the best way to make that argument. This is another example of what I was saying earlier, he sometimes digs his own little holes to sink into [↩]
- At the time of him talking to his team and drawing up the play, he didn’t yet know that more time would be added. I don’t know if that would have changed his approach, but this is an important point to take note of [↩]
30 Comments
Andrew, I don’t see your arguments as defenses for Blatt. There is clearly friction between Lebron and Blatt and that’s more than a state of affairs; it’s a problem. It is on the coach and the player to work things out, and to the extent they don’t, it is a valid criticism of both. And when a superstar and coach have a problem, the coach always loses.
Analyzing the Windhorst article and comments earlier this season is not so straightforward. Windhorst, like all media, profits off of tension. Fan consensus is Windhorst has been edged out of his position as the hometown Lebron expert, is bitter about it, and still trades on his old status to toss pebbles at Lebron and the Cavs. All that said, believing that Blatt has substantial credibility among his team requires believing that Windhorst just made up a story out of whole cloth and deliberately searched for innocuous facts he could misrepresent as evidence. I don’t buy that either.
The treatment Blatt is getting is not even remotely surprising to me, because it is typical of many Cleveland sports fans. Regardless of the sport, many seem primarily concerned with the NAME over all else. Anything short of a big name, in his prime, with an established record of winning and titles is looked upon as a failure by ownership. Nevermind the fact that such coaches/managers don’t generally become available. And nevermind that such coaches.managers had to start somewhere, and didn’t just come out of the packaging that way. They were given an opportunity and then generally given TIME to become great (Popovich in San Antonio and Belichick in NE come to mind), allowing them to establish their way of doing things, their approach to scheme and player management, etc. But in Cleveland, we can’t be bothered with that reality. I suspect that much of it has to do with the revolving door of coaches in Berea over the last 15 years, coupled with overall futility, And while that frustration is understandable, it doesn’t excuse anything. Outside of Tito the Magnificent, no coach in this town gets ANY slack from our fans anymore, and I believe that to be to our detriment. Blatt is a good coach, and given time I think can be one of the best in the NBA. Pettine has just about everything I’d want in an NFL head man, and has managed a circus of a team well thus far. And yet both could be gone by 2016. Because Cleveland.
perhaps, but Phil & Kobe always had friction. Phil & MJ had some friction, but not nearly as much as Phil & Pippen. I cannot imagine with as salty as Sloan and Malone were that they always agreed. The friction is not an issue if there is also respect. if there isn’t respect, then there is an issue, but is there any definitive evidence that LeBron doesn’t respect Blatt?
☛☛☛ Freelance with Google at Home@nv35:::
➨➨➨http://FullSupportedJobs_News.com/dream/zone…
Hear hear! Well said. Erik Spoelstra didn’t come out of the package as a great coach in Miami. He needed some time to perfect his craft specific to the NBA, just as Blatt will. I know that doesn’t jive with championship-hungry Cleveland fans, but it’s reality.
I also seem to remember a situation with Pop and either Duncan or Parker where things got heated and they had to explain to the media that these things happen with two competitive people. I didn’t see LeBron’s comments as shots being fired at David Blatt. I saw LeBron’s comments as him wanting to let the media know that he called his own shot and then delivered on it. He’s incredibly arrogant as all stars tend to be, and he wanted everyone to know that it was his decision to call his own number after playing a horrible game and HE came through with the win for the team.
Amen!!
Blatt doesn’t like being treated as a rookie head coach after winning championships almost every year of his career in every league he’s been in. He’s not some random former player turned coach; he’s been a coach his entire life. The media hate that he treats them the way Pop does (heck, they hate it when Pop does it but it’s hit the point where they look stupider trying to complain about it), so they will nitpick every move.
Yet at the same time, Blatt had the best player on the planet and two other studs and was still recognized enough to get some COY votes. His team had a Net Rating that was historically absurd once he took everyone out bowling to get them more on the same page. He’s made adjustment after adjustment with a lineup that is full of injuries and a superstar who likes to do his own thing. And if you watch the video right after the Lebron shot, they still give each other a huge genuine hug, so I don’t think there’s any real issues about them getting along.
If there’s any ‘issue’, it’s that Lebron sort of goes along with these media narratives for his own aggrandizement. He wants to be recognized not only as a great player but as a brilliant basketball mind (and he likely is one). I think his calling out what happened – which wasn’t a big deal – was far more about showing his gusto in wanting the shot and his brilliance in adjusting a play than it had anything to do with David Blatt, who almost certainly wanted his best passer with a 6’9 line of sight inbounding to some good shooters than someone else inbounding to a guy who was 9-29 to that point. And he would have stuck with that had Lebron not wanted it more, as he said in the postgame, which can outweigh those types of thoughts – especially when the downside was simply going to OT. Lebron toes that line in between of coach is great/I need to do my thing so if there’s ever blame it is more likely to fall on the coach and if there’s credit it goes more to Lebron.
David Blatt trolls the media hard, and I love it.
I love that the “media” thinks it’s owed a “good interview” or that it deserves an “apology” on behalf of fans because a coach or a player made a mistake. Or that “guys like Pop can get away with it because they’ve won five rings”, but guys like Borrego and Steve Clifford better sit there and give us ALL THE SOUNDBITES.
Well I’ve got a newsflash for you Walter Kronkite; you aren’t.
….oh and you know who else liked LeBron to take the ball out? Spolestra. And do you know why? Because LeBron likes to do dumb things with the basketball in his hands at certain points.
Straight salty this morning.
A few things:
– We’re so scrunched into playoff mania that we tend to focus on our team’s warts and just blur over the opponent. To me the Bulls’ biggest problem is adjusting to the Amazing Shrinking Noah. Maybe his demise has been gradual but not from my distance. Three years ago Rose’s brilliance dominated but the sheer will and leadership of Noah won close games. The valuable rebounding piece we see now, the guy who gets the ball on a crucial inbound at the end of a playoff game but has no idea there is one second on the shot clock, that is not the same guy.
– I try not to evaluate Blatt too much because I’m a personal fan and not so objective. But here I go anyway: 1) Every coach has and will have trouble with LeBron, at least initially. He thinks he knows more until proven otherwise, and may be right; 2) Cutesy bantering with media is charming when you win, but doesn’t wear well long term, especially when things get rough. Ask Sam Rutigliano, who had a similar style but was eventually eviscerated by local media for it after the good times stopped rolling, and for years after he left. Possible Blatt can’t stop this, it’s who he is; 3) Not knowing the number of timeouts left in this game is dumbfounding. Blatt’s been in so many of these and it’s almost like a veteran quarterback losing the internal clock in his head as he looks for a receiver. Something so ingrained in early career that he still dreams blowing it after retirement. I do worry that it’s symptomatic of an unresolved coaching staff or coaching comfort issue.
Judging by the response to your comment I am in the minority here but I disagree with almost all of it. I don’t dislike Blatt because he’s not a big name. I thought he was the perfect hire to develop with a young team before Lebron and Love came here. After they came, I thought he had a chance to develop a championship level system to compete with the way the Spurs ran Miami out of the gym last year. In addition to all that, I’m a Jewish Bostonian so I was pulling for him on a personal level.
Aside from your specific assumptions on Cleveland fans reacting to Blatt, your generalizations are not true either. Sure, we couldn’t always articulate what was wrong with Shurmur or Mangini, but then we got Pettine (after striking out on big names) and you almost never see criticism of Pettine because we know a good coach when we see one.
The fact is, bowling trip or no bowling trip, Rich Kotite could have coached the Cavs to a better record than 19-20. They ironed things out, to their credit – resilience is an important factor in success – and did some great things this season. But it’s still hard to give Blatt too much credit because what’s his VORC? Intelligent fans don’t claim that he’s a joke or a disaster. They argue that the starting point for the Cavs is the Eastern Conference Semis, or even Finals; and the Cavs need to find a coach that can get them from there through the NBA finals. Nothing Blatt has done in the past year suggests that he is the right person to do that, and several things suggest he is not. It’s not a “sizzling hot take” to have that conversation.
on bantering with media: the coaching carousel is so fast in the NBA that I don’t think it hurts (or helps). either a coach wins more than expectations and is retained or wins less than expectations and is fired. it is absolutely ludicrous, but if Thibs leaves (as reported), then only Frank Vogel w/ Pacers would have longer tenure in the Central division than Blatt.
wow, that is amazing. What I didn’t mention above is that it looks to me like maybe the Bulls are burned out on Thibodeau. Like the scream-o-meter passed the 100,000 mark and they can’t react anymore.
Parker and Pop battled for years until the Spurs won a title and Parker realized he’d be a better player if he listened to his coach.
Blatt and this team will be better year two the interesting part will be how much of the roster returns. If the majority of it, the players that matter, return I have no doubt the Cavaliers will be Atlanta-like.
This and his INSANE demand for absolution in running his sets.
He has 0 tolerance for in-game flow adjustments made by the players which ultimately leads them to being completely shut down by defenses because they know exactly what they are doing.
Something so many pitchforkers for Blatt so carelessly leave aside is his “open floor” practice formats and thus far ability to juggle egos.
BECAUSE WE HAVE LEBRON AND KYRIE AND KEVIN SO THEY SHOULD JUST AUTOMATICALLY KNOW HOW TO PLAY TOGETHER AND JUST WIN ALL THE GAMES BY THEMSELVES AND OMG A TIMEOUT.
Atlanta-like….as in “cruising through the regular season and then running up against teams with stars that can take over a game at will finding out it takes more than just “team ball” to win”….that kind of Atlanta-like?
no thanks.
We have all heard that Blatt was hired before LBJ and Kevin came aboard. Any he also didnt know the NBA ins and outs. What we never hear about is that Blatt will have a whole off season to reflect and actually LEARN how to be a better coach for this team. He showed throughout the year that he can learn and adapt. This is his first NBA Playoff experience, lots of adversity coming his way. In a sense this is great for him to learn from and potentially be a better coach next year. Not even the great Greg Popovich was successful his first year. It takes time.
This whole team is going to be so much better next year (assuming Love comes back) as they will have had a year under their belt and know how to play with each other. You saw it in the Boston series before Love got hurt how efficient and dominant this team can be with that full roster.
The Spurs won a championship in Parker’s second season… 2002-2003 season.
And they butted heads after that Parker has admitted to it I’ve seen the interviews.
Uh last time I checked Atlanta and Washington are 2-2 and Washington lost their best star so what are you talking about?
And imagine if the corpses of James Jones and Mike Miller were replaced with relatively useful rotation players! If the starting 5 come back next year (Bron, Irving, Love, Mozgov, Smith) and you can fill the bench out with useful players with some NBA ability (retain TT, returning Varejao, Shumpert), this will be a very, very good team for the whole year next year.
I have less of an issue with JJ who has contributed but Miller and Marion are a waste of spots. Marion is retiring but I think Miller should as well.
1 seed went six games with the 8 seed
1 seed now series tied with the 5 seed
If it was the West, I wouldn’t think twice but in the East that is not indicative of any true championship winning power.
“There is clearly friction between Lebron and Blatt”
Evidence please.
http://i.imgur.com/rSqKl3z.gif
Always enjoy a good Zoolander reference.
Your comparisons of Blatt to Popovich and Belichick remind me of Lloyd Benson’s famous response to Dan Quayle in the VP debate in 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-7gpgXNWYI
Really? I don’t think all the passive aggressive sniping is everyone misinterpreting everything they say, regardless of their efforts to keep their deniability plausible.
Thanks bud.
I go to the Lebowski well too often and need to balance back out.
Yeah I must have missed “all the passive aggressive sniping”.
I heard LeBron throw around his “basketball acumen weight” by saying he scratched the play which inadvertently throws Coach Blatt under the bus; but that’s been Bron Bron since day 1.
➢➢➢➢Creat profit with Google at Home@nx4:::
..
➨➨➨https://BlueHome-Championskill.com/Ref/tang…