![]() ![]() He was a decent head coach in Indiana by most accounts. He was the heartbeat of a mini-dynasty, the catalyst of the Bad Boys. He was fiesty and relentless, not backing down even to Michael Jordan. He was tough as anyone - remember that swollen ankle in the NBA Finals, and all that Thomas did on it. He was a score-first point guard before that was the norm. At the same time, Blatt tried to play down the burden of constant examination.Isiah Thomas was a terrific basketball player. He said he was just showing trust in his player. We’re going to win or lose with me.”īlatt said it was not fair to cast what happened as a disagreement or as James wielding veto power. James was asked what he had thought when he saw Blatt’s initial plan to have him inbound the ball: “It wasn’t a vision at all,” he said. James said it was not a big deal, the same as a “great quarterback calling an audible.” James was the final person to take questions Sunday night, and he revealed, unprompted, that he had overruled Blatt’s initial play. Yet James had a more clear-cut role in Blatt’s latest round of public scrutiny. “You associate with me, you get a little heat.” He said being near him could bring criticism down on another person. James let out a resigned laugh Monday when asked about his coach’s rough night. He and James are naturally engaging orators, which has only heightened the entertainment this season. It was a typically colorful remark from Blatt. And if you do it for 20-something years, you’re going to blow one or two, and fortunately it didn’t cost us.” “A basketball coach makes 150 to 200 critical decisions during the course of a game, something I think that is paralleled only by a fighter pilot. “A near-mistake was made, I owned up to it, and I own it,” Blatt said. On Monday, Blatt said he had never before lost track of the number of timeouts in a game, and he thanked his staff for alerting him before he was charged with a technical foul. Now, even after a surge into the postseason, it still seems that way. Was Blatt the coach to handle the league’s biggest superstar and to manage the sudden expectations of a championship? Did he and James get along? How much power did James wield? When the Cavaliers were struggling, Blatt’s job seemed constantly at risk. The story lines unfurled inevitably from there in colorful strands. It was his first job - as a player or as a coach - in the N.B.A., and it became a wholly different task less than a month later when James returned to Cleveland after opting out of his contract with the Miami Heat. Last June, after spending many years as one of the top coaches in Europe, Blatt was hired to coach the Cavaliers. If the Cavaliers’ season has not quite constituted a Shakespearean narrative, it has at least been a compelling soap opera.Īnd Blatt, 55, has been one of the central characters. Though he may not like it, Blatt seemed to understand a crucial fact about his team. “Shakespeare wrote comedies, he wrote tragedies, he wrote tragicomedies, he wrote drama-comedies - at least in the movies nowadays you have a lot of those - and that’s just part of this wonderful business we’re all in.” “It is just part of the drama,” he said as a smile returned to his face. “To me, it’s not a story.”īlatt hesitated and then appeared to refocus himself. “So you guys want to make this the story? It’s not the story,” Blatt said. And yet much of the postgame discussion among fans and pundits has revolved around two blunders Blatt was perceived to have made in the waning seconds: his brief attempt to call a timeout when the Cavaliers had none remaining and his decision to draw up a play - one that James rejected - that had James inbounding the ball, not receiving it, with 1.5 seconds left. It was a crucial win, a moment to savor and build upon. The previous night, Blatt, the Cavaliers’ coach, saw his team tie its second-round Eastern Conference playoff series against the Chicago Bulls when LeBron James hit a winning shot at the buzzer. CLEVELAND - Eleven minutes had passed in David Blatt’s news conference Monday afternoon when he finally betrayed some impatience with the reporters encircling him on the Cleveland Cavaliers’ practice court. ![]()
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