According to Golliver, someone, (I’m pretty sure it was me, this is definitely something I would say), responded: “Because you’ve got more money.”Īnd Blatt said: No, that’s not why. You know why?īy the way, these quotes and the exchange come courtesy of The Washington Post’s Ben Golliver, who was writing for Sports Illustrated at the time. When I go out to dinner, usually I get the check. And Blatt said: This happens to me a lot, I don’t know if it happens to you. Just saying, it was a moment no one who was there will ever forget.)Īnyway, during the postgame scrum, Blatt was asked about coaching LeBron, and whether the Cavs were going to go only as far as LeBron could take them. And LeBron said, “I scratched it,” which knocked us all out of our chairs for the sheer disregard he showed for the coach in outing him like that. Only, LeBron told us all after the game that Blatt had, in fact, called a different play, one in which he was to inbound the ball to a teammate, rather than catch the pass and shoot. Regardless, we all saw it, and no matter what happened next, there’d be questions of Blatt’s fitness for this kind of job, on that kind of stage, trying to chase a title with LeBron.Īnd then, LeBron hit a turnaround jumper on the baseline at the buzzer to win that game for Cleveland. Tyronn Lue, then his assistant, jumped up and pulled Blatt back before a referee saw it, which would have been disastrous. Near the end of the game, Blatt leaped off the bench and tried to call a timeout he didn’t have. It was May 10, 2015, Game 4 of an Eastern Conference semifinal series against Chicago. Not at that time.īlatt was going to have a bad day that day, win or lose. It told us how he’d gotten so far in life to land a job with the Cavs in the first place, and also, why, even though he was winning games, it was probably never going to work for him in Cleveland. Something he was ridiculed for at the time, like usual, but actually was pretty poignant and probably told all of us everything we needed to know about him, if we cared to listen. It’s something Blatt said, on one of his worst days as an NBA coach, that I always go back to. Rather, I wanted to share with you the first thing I think of when I think back on Blatt, above any gaffe or abnormality or self-comparison to a fighter pilot (which had me prancing around the media room, blaring Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” after Blatt said that one). There are dozens more waiting to be written in new books. There are a hundred anecdotes out there about Blatt, in books written about the Cavs from those days, and on podcasts and radio interviews, from myself and my friends who covered the team back then. I kicked enough on him while we were both there, during that season and a half when he couldn’t get LeBron to respect him, made clear to the pack of journalists covering the team he was not to be questioned (which was like striking the match and dropping it in the gas can), and all his teams did was win. I don’t plan to use the occasion of Blatt’s illness to kick dirt on his time in Cleveland. He had them in first in the East on his last day on the job, in January 2016.Īnd when he was fired, no one even remotely close to the team had any problem with it. Blatt won 83 of the 123 regular-season games he coached and guided the injury-plagued Cavs to two wins in the 2015 NBA Finals. And then overnight, the Cavs job turned into the most pressure packed of its kind, certainly in the NBA and maybe in all of American sports. He was hired to coach an up-and-coming group, centered on Kyrie Irving, who needed to be taught before he could win. He took his first job in the NBA, with the Cavs, about a month before LeBron James decided he was coming back to Cleveland. What happened during it, though, makes his diagnosis newsworthy in the U.S. “I was only going to adapt and adjust and find ways to continue my life as normally as possible.”īlatt used to coach the Cleveland Cavaliers a while back. “When I got over the initial shock and pain of understanding how this would and could change my life from today going forward, I decided I wasn’t giving in to anything,” Blatt wrote.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |