Can David Blatt Save Cleveland Cavaliers' Season and His Job?
David Blatt is supposed to be a basketball chameleon, a head coach renowned for tailoring style and strategy to personnel. In order to salvage his job and a Cleveland Cavaliers campaign that is rapidly slipping away, he'll need a miracle of adaptation.
"I have watched David's work for many years," Cavs general manager David Griffin gushed to reporters in June, per ESPN.com. "He has an uncanny ability to adapt his system to maximize the talents of his teams year after year. That is why I am very confident he will make a smooth transition to the NBA."
Smash cut to seven months later, and it feels like we know where the Blatt-Cavs situation is headed, doesn't it? Toward a predictable split, this season or this summer. If Blatt gets the chop, we'll all agree the underwhelming results, the seemingly hollow endorsements and the eyebrow-raising slips of the tongue during press conferences foretold a divorce.
If you run through the situation without considering precedent, forgetting all of the times we've seen coaches axed quickly for failing to meet expectations, you can make a case that things will turn out all right for Blatt.
The Cavaliers are 19-19, which isn't really so bad when you consider the immense roster turnover, LeBron James' injury absence and the weight of expectations. Blatt has received vocal support from James and general manager David Griffin.
He even quickly cleared up the controversy surrounding his comments that Kevin Love was not a max player, per Chris Haynes of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com:
More than anything, Blatt objectively deserves slack because the Cleveland job he has now isn't anything like the one he signed up for initially. When he inked a four-year pact on June 20, the Cavs were still fretting over whether to select Andrew Wiggins or Joel Embiid with the top pick in the draft. Never in his wildest dreams could Blatt have imagined worrying about what to do with James and Kevin Love and J.R. Smith and Shawn Marion and Timofey Mozgov and...you get the idea.
He was supposed to oversee a young team through a rebuild, not guide a thrown-together cast of veterans to the end stages of championship contention. Overnight, no less.
Unfortunately, all of those qualifiers and explanations won't earn Blatt a reprieve.
Cleveland's .500 record is a disappointment because James' arrival brought inflated hopes. Trading for Kevin Love and adding more talent through a pair of January swaps only pumped more air into the balloon.
Those expectations have made patience and rational judgment about Blatt's performance almost impossible. Case in point: Even if Blatt meant no offense in his comments about Love, all that matters is the buzz it caused. Perception is reality, and Blatt can't unring the bell.
There's only one thing Blatt can do to save himself and his team: Win. A lot. Starting now.
Per Kelly Dwyer of Yahoo Sports, what's happened so far matters less than what happens next: "The point was to hit April on a high, healthy note, and dominate the matchups in a best-of-seven setting. This franchise still has three months to suss that end of things out."
It'll be hard for Blatt to engineer chemistry on the fly. It'll be even harder to get defensive buy-ins from Love and Kyrie Irving, who've never bought in on that end before. Getting James to play in a system, rather than relying on the high pick-and-roll he prefers, won't be an easy task either.
In a Dec. 29 appearance on SportsCenter, ESPN's Brian Windhorst said (via Jason McIntyre of The Big Lead): "They have completely abandoned his offensive system. LeBron has taken over point guard without even consulting David Blatt.”
James is due back soon, having practiced fully Jan. 12, per ESPN.com. Cleveland is just 1-8 this year without him.
His return will give Blatt a chances to start tinkering in a meaningful way.
In the end, a heap of wins down the stretch still might not save Blatt. A championship would, but we're getting way ahead of ourselves.
The Cavaliers are committed to James first and, in some order, Irving and Love after that. Blatt checks in at No. 4 (at best) on the organizational hierarchy, which means if any of his three superiors aren't happy at season's end, his odds of sticking around shrink.
Very little of Blatt's genius reputation has shown through in his first half-season as an NBA coach. He hasn't performed offensive alchemy or reinvented the defensive wheel. And he hasn't grasped the nuances of challenging (or even giving off the perception of challenging) star players in the media.
What he needs now is for his defining characteristic, the malleability Griffin praised seven months ago, to shine through. And he'll have to do it carefully.
Blatt can't simply ask his players how they want to play and let them run wild, even if that might endear him to some important figures on the roster. To win, he'll have to take stock of his personnel and fashion an optimal system, perhaps forcing some players into uncomfortable spots for the good of the team.
If Love is clearly more effective as a primary scoring threat, as seems to be the case, maybe that means it's Irving who has to relinquish touches when James returns. Perhaps Blatt will have to force LeBron back onto the block that made him so dangerous in Miami.
Tough decisions loom ahead.
The odds are long, and the time for Blatt to figure out how to make this thing work is growing short. But he can save himself and the Cavs' season if he does what he does best: adapt.
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