Buster Olney ‏@Buster_ESPN 5h5 hours ago
ELIAS: Spurs have the largest points differential of any team in NBA history through 40 games, at +14.1. '71-'72 Lakers, 14.0.

Two pretty darned good teams meeting up yesterday. Since Irving's return the Cavs have joined GS and SA at the Amazing Level of play.

Anything about Monday's game remind anyone of the Indians?

Not really. Or I might say there's a lot more differences than similarities.

This is just a regular season NBA type schedule casualty. The grueling physicality of an NBA schedule oversees just about every regular season matchup. Cavs had just come off a 7 game road trip. First home game after, notoriously difficult.

And notice that the Warriors had JUST lost to the Detroit Pistons before that game - in fact they got hugely crushed.

Then, they were hugely pumped up for this one.

That type of thing, and schedule fatigue, are a large factor in the NBA.

As Luke Walton pointed out afterwards, this game was interesting but ultimately meaningless. The Cavs will cruise in the East, and the Warriors have to get through San Antonio, Clippers and OKC to get to the Finals.

It's all about the postseason for Cavs. Not so much for the Tribe.

For those interested in a quality article about the coaching change.

Posted By Chris Parker chris.parker@clevescene.com> on Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 4:22 AM

Everyone on the Bus! Not so fast, Blatt!



As you probably know by now, Coach David Blatt was given his walking papers yesterday, and replaced by assistant coach Tyronn Lue. The Akron Beacon Journal’s Jason Lloyd and ESPN’s Brian Windhorst have been breaking this story since at least the beginning of last year.

We deserve a little ridicule for the scorn we heaped on Windhorst at the suggestions Blatt would get the heave ho.

We were just as skeptical this afternoon when we got the news. It’s not often someone fires the Eastern Conference’s leading coach a couple weeks before the all-star game. It’s just seems strange, and obviously we weren’t alone judging by many people’s reactions.

But they had the story, and knew for more than a year that there were forces moving against Blatt. In the end he couldn’t fend them off any longer. Or so it appears.

We tip our hat to Lloyd and Windhorst not only to honor the work but to acknowledge that what follows is nothing more than our take.

Certainly we’ve read lots and lots of comments and articles, so it’s somewhat informed, but it’s no less biased than any other writer in the pool. We all have perspectives which can certainly seem like agendas, though they’re just our take. (Not that the truth can ever truly be discerned without involving every CSI agent from Miami to Los Angeles.)

It seems on many levels, an absurd proposition: Take seasoned coach from overseas, replace him with coach that’s never coached anywhere, then talk about how this will changed the team’s fortunes.

In making the change GM David Griffin plainly stated that good enough wasn’t the goal. Though he tried to temper expectations, we don’t see how you can replace the coach with the third best record in the league and be subsequently satisfied with anything less than the Finals.

“You cold look at a lot of different analytic measures of our team and we’re pretty good right now and that’s not what we’re in the business to be,” Griffin said. “This decision will be measured entirely by whether we’re able to bring championships to Northeast Ohio.”

No pressure, Tyronn

You’ll hear how Lue’s played with great players and coaches and was an assistant to Doc Rivers. But he’s not run anything before. There will be continuity since he’s been there, but we’re not so convinced it’s as simple as Steve Kerr and Luke Walton are making it look. It will be interesting to see whether anyone calls Lue a “rookie” coach during the media sessions.

In the end, Griffin didn’t fire Blatt so much from what was happening on the court as in the locker room. We’re going to have to get back the ruling from Zurich, but we’re pretty sure Griffin called the Cavaliers selfish underachievers.

“We are a team that struggles more than any good team I’ve ever been with – and this is my 24th year in the NBA – with prosperity. I’ve never seen a locker room not be as connected after wins as they need to be,” said Griffin.

It’s the syndrome in some locker rooms known as “15 guys, 15 ubers.”

“We’ve only been galvanized when expectations aren’t high and circumstances were somewhat artificial,” said Griffin, shredding their jugular like Freddie Kreuger. “Otherwise we’ve been a group of tremendous individual talent with individual hopes and dreams.

“That’s not a winning formula,” he continued. “I’m not leaving an unprecedented team payroll and all the efforts of everyone that works in this organization to chance.”

Yet it’s hard to see an upside risk being greater than the peril of the downside. In saying that “‘pretty good’ is not what we’re here for,” he may have only been reiterating popular logic, but it’s also laying down the gauntlet. The only metric is a championship. Yet the fact that this needs to be reiterated is a sign of the amount of trouble the Cavaliers may already be in.

Here’s where ours and the more “official” storyline depart.

By the reckoning of those more sympathetic to the players side of things, Blatt had alienated everyone in the locker room with his odd substitution patterns, failure to give second squad veterans the minutes they felt they deserved, and, it comes out now, failing to reprimand LeBron for his mistakes, while giving him ticky-tack calls in practice to curry favor.

These last two mortal sins (okay, one really is) are the subject of Brendan Haywood’s comments to ESPN following Blatt’s dismissal. Haywood said that Blatt wouldn’t criticize LeBron in film study and that James Jones actually had to say something to him about the players noticing. In someone else’s story it was Lue who said something. So that’s likely more than spin.

However Haywood also suggested that Blatt was often befuddled in drawing up plays, and cited himself as saying to other people, like, “we can’t trust this guy.” Prior to the Chicago playoff series we recall hearing compliments directed toward Blatt’s out-of-bounds plays.

(Haywood may have an axe to grind after spending almost the entire year stapled to the bench as a living breathing trade exemption and big guy past his freshness date. Note that he hasn’t hitched on to another team yet this year.)

We watched Blatt mostly meet with his three assistants then go back and draw stuff up, but we’ve watched players draw stuff up for their coaches in huddles so, aside from the fact that it plays into this out-of-his-depth narrative, we’re not sure the weight.

As to Blatt trying to court favor with James with his foul calls in practice, it sounds pretty craven. Then again if players never think they make a foul in a game, what is practice like?

In this telling, the socially awkward Blatt made things tough on the players, failed to give them clearly articulated roles, and didn’t really know enough about NBA personnel. Now maybe we lost count, but weren’t there three former NBA coaches talking to Blatt all the time? Were they out of touch with the NBA? Was Blatt not listening to his assistants?

Is It Character Assassination If You're Already Gone?

Of course, if you’ve been following the Cavaliers for a year, somebody’s been selling “this guy’s incompetent” line for a while, yet among the coaching fraternity there seems a lot of respect.

Yesterday Celtics Coach Brad Stevens copped to stealing one of his plays to create an open 3, while Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle credited him with picking up the NBA quicker than he could’ve adapted to European basketball.

Carlisle is one of several coaches (including Eastern Conference All-Star Coach in Blatt’s absence, Toronto Raptors Coach Dwayne Casey) that went overseas to spend time with Blatt, watch his practices and meet with him about Xs and Os.

Let’s be clear, Blatt had an undeniable kind of awkwardness sprinkled with a touch of arrogance. In Europe coaches are stars, so he probably came here a little too comfortable with the smell of his own farts, but that’s hardly uncommon in this business. We buy that he rubbed his players the wrong way, but find it hard to believe that he was holding the team back, per se.

What Terry Pluto and Adrian Wojnarowski have suggested builds out the circle a bit allowing us all to find a more common middle ground. Pluto suggested that the team’s indolence (disguised as “the Process”) had exhausted Blatt’s ability to motivate them, and in that sense, he’d lost the team. (It’s fair to question if he ever had some members, which we’ll get to in a moment.)

According to Pluto, Blatt was sacrificed to take away any of the team’s excuses. Before now they could say (and some would gladly repeat) when they lost it was Blatt’s fault and when they won it was in spite of him.

Indeed, Mike Fratello has suggested that Kevin Love was talking about Blatt when he said after the Golden State loss that the turn around was “going to take a lot of guys looking themselves in the mirror, and it all starts with our leader over there and dwindles on down.” (We love the word “dwindles” for how it seems to suggest a logarithmic decrease in responsibility for the players versus Blatt.)

Wojnarowski goes further than that. He says that LeBron James and his agent Rich Paul have been trying to push Blatt out since Day 1. (Hence the steady stream of stories to this effect – it just took a while to effect their plan.)

They initially wanted Paul’s client (and thus a comi$$ion) Mark Jackson but Griffin allegedly balked. Lue was Paul and Klutch Sports’ compromise candidate to replace Blatt. They’ve been pushing since last year to replace him, and it helped fuel the locker room divide as players divined the true center of power.

This is Wojnarowski’s line, and while he breaks more basketball news than anyone, he’s never been fond of LeBron either.

An additional shred comes from the Plain Dealer’s Chris Haynes who reports that the team was going to fire Blatt if the losing streak reached three games after the first Warriors loss. But a win in Phoenix (and for their next eight games, in fact) stayed their hand. This is interesting, and sounds accurate. Jason Lloyd has confirmed that these rumblings go back more than a month.

It is however a tad strange. You’re so convinced the coach has to go that a couple relatively lackluster wins over the Suns and the Nuggets are enough to cause pause? Yet a convincing win against the Clippers does not?

More Than Wins & Losses

Since losing three in a row at the beginning of December with Irving and Shumpert still out, the team’s gone 17-4. Not exactly screaming regime change, unless you put a lot of stock in that Golden State game, which Griffin claimed not to. In fact, he said it went beyond wins and losses.

“What I see is we need to build a collective strength of spirit and a collective will,” he said. “Elite teams in this league always have that… Halfway through the season we have not developed this identity and each step forward unfortunately we’ve taken two steps back.

“Our most glaring need is to understand and communicate role deliniation and team sacrifice,” he continued. “We have to have group buy-in and team-first habits in order to become the team we want to be.”

That sort of ties it together. The team’s sick at its core. Honestly, you can see it when they play. We were talking with some friends about how the Warriors seem to be having fun when they’re playing while the Cavs look stressed and anxious, except for LeBron, who’s looking for people to play angry, like he did in Miami.

What to make out of all this is really tied into your own preconceptions about the team. The fact is that whenever anyone leaves town it’s like a parade and everyone opens their window and empties the trash. So it’s never clear how much is legitimate gripe and how much is spin.

Reporters dig it up and throw in the middle and depending on where you sit, you might convince yourself that you triangulate the truth. (We mostly did.)

But we’re missing one more bit of information. Peter Vecsey was one of a couple reporters to suggest that David Blatt had talked to friends in Israel in recent weeks and told them “it’s me or Kevin Love.” If that was ever the conversation between him and Griffin, we know why we wound up here.

However it fits with the idea that all that time – going into last year – that Love was complaining about his lack of a role or purpose (on offense, we presume, not sure how much he cares what happens on the other end)

That’s nearly as long as LeBron’s allegedly been agitating for regime change. Could Love have found his way into James’ heart through their shared indifference/disdain for the coach?

We have no idea if Vecsey’s tweet about Love is even true, but his unhappiness is no surprise to anyone, and the team’s struggles can in some part be traced to Love’s general lack of assertiveness. We would never suggest he doesn’t care, but perhaps his frustrations lead him to stop exerting so much energy trying to change things.

We have to surmise that the timing of the decision is situated so that Griffin has a bit of flexibility evaluating the move before the trade deadline. If we were Kevin Love, we wouldn’t get too comfortable. Indeed, Windhorst suggested when the players were called together and informed, many initially speculated Love had been traded.

That’s a real team endorsement. (And may yet come true if this change doesn’t have the desired effect.)

We’ve read columns that have suggested in their own manner that this was akin to lancing a boil, and now that it’s done, things ought to move along smoothly from here. Even Griffin suggested this in his most cutting remark about Blatt’s legacy.

“We have a coaching staff and because that group is really close as a unit in terms of the assistants and the way they dealt with our game planning, I feel like we won’t miss a whole lot,” said Griffin, before laying down the boom. “But I do feel like we’re going to gain in some areas that were critical.”

We’re not losing anything we don’t already have and we’re getting a lot better in critical ways. Ouch! That’s Gotta Hurt!!

Final Analysis

We tried to give you everything we thought relevant, here’s what we think.

When the Eastern Conference’s best team has to fire their coach to get the team’s attention that can’t be a good thing. Just us, but that reads as a fundamental flaw in the team’s character. When something as dramatic as this needs to be done to motivate the players to play the right way (which is to say unselfishly), it begs a fundamental question of their consistency going forward.

Sure, they’ll do well for a while, but after the first blush of emotion is over what then? This team under Blatt showed a terrific capacity for backsliding, showing up late to games, and playing down to the level of the competition. Firing the coach is going to change that? When it’s all the same assistants?

We’d like to call this the beginning of the Make No Excuses tour. This team has what it asked for. Now it’s on them. Frankly, the fact that they made enough excuses and were guilty of enough malingering that Griffin felt this was necessary should speak volumes in itself.

“We need to honor each other with total commitment every single day,” he said.

Who here thinks anyone on the Spurs or Warriors needs to be reminded of the above?

“To be truly elite we have to buy into a set of values and principles we believe in that becomes our identity and if we can do that day in and day out that becomes who we are,” said Griffin. “

It’s not strange to us that this is being pitched as a solution – though few of us was aware before today of the perceived urgency. Sure the team loses focus and doesn’t always work hard. The second and third best players can be defensive turnstiles when they don’t put in max effort and the whole enterprise is pretty inconsistent. Yet, we’d still rather be Cavs than 27 other teams.

The fact that firing the coach was seen as the only way to solve this disconnect also drives home for us the idea that while everyone says LeBron James wasn’t consulted on the decision, he didn’t need to be. Everyone knew where he stood. Maybe Woj goes too far in his palace coup scenario, but nobody’s surprised James is happy to be working with Lue.

Problem is that in our experience, the coach isn’t your friend. He’s somebody you might actively dislike a bit, and that makes you work harder. Will Lue be able to drive James and his mates, or will they subconsciously still feel they can hit the button when they need, especially now that they’ve gotten their way with their coach.

Simply put, if this team needed action this dramatic for the GM to feel they could be in a position to compete for the title, then this is a lot worse than it looks, and it’s a lot easier to get sick in the stomach about present tenure of Kevin Love. If he’s got some big boy pants he better find them, because his role in Blatt’s firing is sure to put a target on his back. Or a bigger one anyway.

We thought Blatt was a good coach who wasn’t given a chance and we find it hard to believe on a staff with three former NBA HCs he could be as overmatched as some are beginning to suggest. However we don’t have any trouble believing there was a cultural difference that Lue is better able to bridge.

He’s 38 and played just a few years ago. We’re just not sure the Cavaliers are any better as an on-the-job learning opportunity for Lue. While he already has the team’s trust, since he acted as a liaison between the players and Blatt, we suspect, just from our experience of life, that strengths usually come accompanied by perhaps undiscovered weaknesses.

In the end Griffin made a move he felt he must. We didn’t sense the desolation and lack of comity he felt amidst his team, but we’ve seen its manifestation of selfish, inconsistent play. The move’s necessity speaks as loudly as the move, but we appreciate the two-time cancer survivor’s willingness to roll the dice even as he says he’s not willing to take any chances with such a big payroll. Newsflash: You just did.

“There’s a lack of spirit and connectiveness I just couldn’t accept,” he said. “Frankly halfway through the season I think we have the time to right the ship. I know that sounds crazy when you’re sitting here with a 30-11 record. I understand that.”

Okay, just so you know.

We’ll be at the Q tonight for the game against the Bulls. Ought to be a circus. Don’t fail to tune in. You can follow us on Twitter @CRS_1ne and read our postgame analysis on Sunday in the Scene Blog.

WoW! This is interesting stuff for one that does not follow the Cavs or the Browns. I'll have to watch my first Cavs game tonight since the Price era.

So Joez did you watch those prima donna millionare out of shape coach killing free throw missing poorly coached bozos clank shot after shot?

Ken! Suffice to say that not much has changed on the floor or on the gridiron over the years. I'm still clinging on to baseball.

So all you have to worry about is a cheap owner who shows no signs of trying to produce a winner in our lifetime but the good thing is is that he making a lot of money.

I guess I'm a glutton for punishment Ken

if you read Ken's posts Joe, you must be a glutton for punishment. I've blocked him for years and am much happier for it.

I keep an open mind Civ! I read all of Ken's posts. I don't necessarily agree with him all the time, but I find he does have some things to say worth contemplating and I do. It's not in my nature to block anyone. Everyone here has thoughts and ideas that give food for thought.

you're a nice guy and have a great ability to let criticism roll off your back. I just don't see a need to bother with sometimes nasty commentary. Disagreement is fine, if in a positive tone.

It’s OK If LeBron’s A Coach Killer

Go to the profile of Evans Clinchy
Evans Clinchy2 days ago

A player of James’ stature should win most player-coach battles. The bigger shame is players are incentivized not to own it.

David Blatt and LeBron James never asked to work with one another. They were put together unwittingly, stuck it out for 18 months, and eventually alienated one another to the point where the coach had to go. So it goes.

After 21 years as a head coach abroad, in Israel and elsewhere, Blatt agreed to return to the United States and coach the Cleveland Cavaliers on June 20, 2014. Two weeks later, James returned to Northeast Ohio for many reasons — none of which had anything to do with Blatt. Nevertheless, the two tried to make it work together, and had some success until eventually the experiment failed. When it did, we could all quickly suss out why, and no tweet to the contrary was going to convince us otherwise.

We don’t need a news conference or a few behind-the-scenes whispers from “sources” to tell us that LeBron James had a hand in dismissing David Blatt. It’s obvious, because this is the way things work in the modern NBA — especially when it comes to James, who has a long history of controlling the franchises he plays for, whether it’s with outright demands or passive-aggressive gestures like subtweets and two-week sabbaticals. James is the most powerful man in the NBA, he knows it, and he takes full advantage of it.

I’d argue there’s nothing wrong with that.

Our habit of blaming NBA players for their coaches’ ousters goes back a ways. Perhaps the earliest notable example came in 1981 when, 11 games into the regular season, the Lakers decided it was time to change course and part ways with coach Paul Westhead. It was a surprising move, given that the Lakers were 7–4 and riding a five-game winning streak, but eventually a reason leaked out: Magic Johnson wasn’t happy. Frustrated with a deliberate, plodding offense that didn’t suit his style of play, the Lakers’ young superstar had asked Jerry Buss for a trade. Instead, Buss responded by firing Westhead.
LeBron’s not the first big star to come to loggerheads with a head coach. (AP)

The move worked. Magic was satisfied, Pat Riley jumped in mid-season, the Lakers won the title, and they rattled off three more under Riley later in the 1980s. No one remembers Paul Westhead anymore.

“The irony,” Buss would later tell The New York Times, “is that I had already decided to fire him. But I don’t think anyone will ever totally believe that.”

One of the great storylines of the 1990s was the rise and fall of the Orlando Magic, who became a perennial title contender the moment Anfernee Hardaway joined forces with Shaquille O’Neal in 1993. The Magic made three consecutive playoff runs, including one appearance in the Finals, but when Shaq left in ’96, you know what happened next: a coach mutiny.

Hardaway began to rebel against Brian Hill, leading to the latter’s firing early in 1997. Multiple accounts place a sizable share of the blame on Hardaway. In Jonathan Abrams’ fantastic Magic oral history, the Orlando Sentinel’s Larry Guest alleges that “Penny became a coach killer,” and Brian Schmitz adds that Hardaway and others “decided that they just weren’t going to play for Hill anymore. There were a couple games where they basically just laid down and didn’t play defense.”

It was the beginning of the end for the Magic, who would win zero playoff series between 1997 and 2008, and for Hardaway, who began to decline sharply at 26.

Another memorable coach clash came a few years later, in 2000, when Seattle point guard Gary Payton had an on-court shouting match with Paul Westphal during a game in Dallas. It was early in the season, and the Sonics had begun just 6–9 despite high hopes for a stacked roster that had just added Patrick Ewing that summer. Payton had had enough, and he reportedly shouted at Westphal that he did not care “about this game anymore. You all can suspend me for the rest of my career.”

Instead, the Sonics’ front office dealt with the conflict the other way — by firing Westphal six days later.

More recently, as players have become even richer and more powerful and pushed the limits of their authority, these conflicts between players and coaches have only become more common — and the bigger the star, the greater the likelihood of the player winning. Even Jerry Sloan, who was beloved in Salt Lake City after 23 seasons coaching the Jazz, was not immune, as an inability to cooperate with Deron Williams is largely blamed for his sudden departure in 2011. Likewise the following year with Mike D’Antoni, who could never get on the same page with Carmelo Anthony in New York, and, of course, with Stan Van Gundy, who clashed for years with Dwight Howard — including the legendary press conference shown below — before the Magic finally showed SVG the door at the conclusion of the 2012 season.

Then you have LeBron — and, mind you, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard such rumblings about King James. It’s perceived that the Cavaliers fired Mike Brown at the end of the 2010 season in a futile attempt to keep James happy, and there were rumors about the Heat having similar thoughts regarding Erik Spoelstra in the early going before Bron and Spo righted the ship. Now, you have this latest news about Blatt.

We throw around this rhetoric a lot — that athletes deserve blame when their coaches are fired, that they’re entitled, that they’re selfish, that they take the short view rather than working out their differences. We do this despite not knowing the inner workings of these relationships. Very few of us were a fly on the wall for the conflicts between Magic and Westhead, or Hardaway and Hill. We can’t say with any degree of certainty who caused the animosity, who escalated it, who ultimately deserves to be called out for it. But all too often, our inclination is to point the finger toward the guy in the jersey.

It’s hard to say why, exactly. There are stark differences between these players and their coaches — they’re younger, blacker and make a hell of a lot more money than the guys who call the X’s and O’s from the bench. I wouldn’t dare attribute the “coach killer” stigma solely to ageism, racism, classism or anything else — there are so many “isms” to unpackage here that it’s impossible to isolate just one. But in any event, the impulse we have here is troubling. Even that term “coach killer” should be enough to make you cringe. It evokes images of a physically imposing young black man slaying a middle-aged white guy, and you don’t need me to explain what’s wrong with that.

The point is this. In 2016, we should be ready to accept that coaches are not infallible, and that players are not required to be subservient at all costs. It’s, figuratively, not that black and white. We have enough information to say definitively that, sometimes, coaches are screwups and deserve to lose their jobs. We also know that players today are smarter than they’ve ever been — they read enough scouting reports, watch enough film and study enough advanced statistics to achieve success without much help from a guy in a suit. That’s not to say the guy in the suit can’t help, but at least he’s not beyond reproach. Coaches today are no longer masters — more accurately, they’re equal partners. Sometimes, one end of the partnership isn’t working, and that guy’s got to go.

That’s the general view. When you zoom in on the case of LeBron James in particular, the case against the “coach killer” narrative only becomes stronger. For starters, there are few, if any, players in NBA history who have had less need for a hands-on coach than LeBron. We know this because he’s a human supercomputer on the floor, a point forward with the calculating mind to identify mismatches instantly and the brutal combination of size, strength and speed needed to exploit them. LeBron’s game is free-flowing, it’s instinctive, and it’s devastatingly fundamentally sound without any assistance necessary from a 56-year-old man yelling things from the sidelines. When you have a player who’s mastered the game as well as James has, meddling from the bench can do more harm than good.

And we know that Blatt was a meddler. He arrived in Cleveland and quickly tried to install a Princeton offense, borrowing from the program where he’d spent four years as a point guard between 1977 and ’81. LeBron quickly rejected the strategy, justifiably insisting that a slow, plodding style of play wasn’t the best way to maximize himself, Irving and Love. Blatt had tried to put his system before his players, and it had failed in spectacular fashion. What ended up happening, as ESPN’s Brian Windhorst later reported, is that the offense devolved into LeBron calling out plays and Blatt repeating his playcalls, trying at least to maintain a facade of control.
David Blatt quickly lost control of the Cavs after his attempts to install an offense were rebuffed. (AP)

We know that Blatt came to the NBA overconfident. He’s since admitted as much, telling the Associated Press in 2015 that he arrived stateside “under the impression that this was going to be a breeze,” and he soon discovered that no, actually, the NBA landscape was a “very different game with a whole new set of problems.” If a player ever admitted to being over his head the way Blatt did, he’d simply be cut, and one would ever think twice. Because it was a coach talking this way, however, he was given nine lives. Eventually those lives ran out.

There’s more than enough evidence out there by now that Blatt’s firing was justifiable. You might not agree with it 100 percent, but you can at least admit there were valid reasons. It’s been reported that Blatt had lost the confidence of the locker room, mismanaged his relationships with his star players, and had to rely on Tyronn Lue for help with basic NBA stuff, like how to call timeouts. Even if you’re pro-Blatt to some extent, you still have to concede that the decision was reasonable. It’s nothing to hide from or be embarrassed about.

Yet, James seems insistent on hiding from any responsibility for ousting Blatt. He told assembled media as much at shootaround before Saturday’s game:

“It wasn’t my call. I was ready to play no matter what. I’m ready to go no matter who’s at the helm. Now T-Lue is our coach, and we’re ready to play for him, just like we were ready to play for Blatt.”

Griffin echoed those sentiments in Friday’s news conference, shielding James or any other player from responsibility:

“I didn’t talk to any of the players before this decision. It’s really critical to me for everyone to understand this. This is my decision. This is our basketball staff’s decision. I had a conversation with ownership and I got their approval to make this move. I’m not taking a poll. My job is to lead a franchise and take it where it needs to go, and that’s what I’m doing. I didn’t ask anyone’s opinion on the team.”

A few minutes later, Griffin adamantly reiterated that “LeBron doesn’t run this organization,” adding that he has “a problem with the narrative” that he does.

Fine. That’s what Griffin is supposed to say. But we all know the truth, which is that LeBron James is one of the biggest power brokers the NBA has ever seen. He’s bigger than Blatt, bigger than Griffin, bigger than anyone ever to pass through Northeast Ohio. And, quite frankly, we know that if LeBron James wanted David Blatt still to have a job, he would have one.

It’s unlikely that LeBron walked into David Griffin’s office on Friday morning and issued an ultimatum. In all likelihood, the truth is something far less dramatic. A report from Yahoo!’s Adrian Wojnarowski directly implicated James and his agent, Rich Paul, and LeBron more or less spent months chipping away at the front office’s confidence in Blatt, using a series of small complaints and subtle hints. Still, he didn’t want to leave any hard evidence that proved he was the driving force behind his coach’s removal, and made a habit of publicly backing Blatt.

So, really, this is just semantics-quibbling. We know LeBron favored Lue over Blatt, and we know he wasn’t shy about it behind closed doors. Wojnarowski reported after the Friday firing that LeBron’s camp initially favored Mark Jackson to be the Cavaliers’ next coach, and they decided on Lue as a compromise once they realized Jackson was a pipe dream. “They started pushing for Lue to replace Blatt last season,” Woj writes, “and grew louder in those calls in recent days and weeks.”

Meanwhile, Windhorst insists that LeBron tried to distance himself from the rumors. In an ESPN Radio appearance Friday, the well-connected Cavs reporter said that as recently as last Monday, James was pulling reporters aside and telling them not to report anything about him turning against his coach. But, Windhorst added in the next breath, it was also clear through his actions and words that James didn’t have much respect for Blatt.

The Cavaliers’ superstar was performing a carefully choreographed dance around the issue, subtly positioning himself as anti-Blatt while at the same time putting up a facade that he wasn’t involved in the standoff. It’s a PR-savvy move, and we should expect nothing less from someone who’s always been one of America’s PR-savviest pro athletes. LeBron played it right.

That said, the game he’s playing shouldn’t exist. None of this silliness should be necessary. In an ideal world, it would be perfectly acceptable for a player of LeBron James’ stature to say: “My coach and I had some professional differences, those differences became untenable, and eventually we had to part ways.” If LeBron is involved in his coach leaving, he should be able to be honest and own that. We don’t live in an ideal world, though. Instead, we live in one where athletes are overscrutinized, and their opinions are stifled. Much of the general public still expects players simply to shut up and play. That’s not realistic anymore, nor is it fair.

If you look back on all the storied “coach killers” throughout NBA history, the odd thing is you’ll find some of the game’s all-time great floor generals among them. Magic Johnson, Penny Hardaway, Gary Payton — all men who were trusted for years to run NBA offenses and govern locker rooms. They’re proven leaders. It’s sad that, historically, the moment an older guy with a tie and jacket has disagreed with one of them, we’ve automatically sided against them.

The same’s true of LeBron. After 13 years as an elite player, he’s more than earned our trust, and if he wants to show his coach the door, he should be able to do so publicly without being shamed. Hell, he might even be right.

What a waste of time reading that piece of garbage ! Sounds like it was written by someone that would really like to sniff Lebron's jock !