12/21/24
January 22, 2016
SportsFilter: The Friday Huddle:
A place to discuss the sports stories that aren't making news, share links that aren't quite front-page material, and diagram plays on your hand. Remember to count to five Mississippi before commenting in anger.
The East leading Cavaliers have fired David Blatt.
posted by tron7 at 04:27 PM on January 22, 2016
Blatt now has the job I always wanted: getting paid fabulously not to coach J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert.
posted by beaverboard at 04:32 PM on January 22, 2016
Guess it was Blatt's fault for the lack of desire that LeBron and Irving have to co-exist. Must also be his fault that Kevin Love isn't capable of, or interested in, defending anyone.
I'm thinking Blatt must have attempted to tune up some of the Cavs "stars" after they played like a junior college team against the Warriors (and rightly so) and the "stars" were not happy about it.
Tyronn Lue.
Here I'd figured all available tires in Cleveland had already been burnt by the Browns.
posted by cixelsyd at 12:58 AM on January 23, 2016
Tyrone Lue spent some time coaching on the Boston staff with Doc Rivers. I don't know how much he learned there, but Rivers was quite good at handling diverse and demanding personalities. Of course, having a GM that was solidly behind the coach no matter the outcome of a dispute was certainly important.
This is one of those situations in which I, as the owner of the team, would turn to LeBron and simply tell him to go ahead, coach the team, get the players, run the whole damn show, and see if you can do better. There have been 40 player-coaches in the NBA, only 2 have won championships (Buddy Jeannette and Bill Russell), and there have been none since 1975. Richie Guerin (.535 win percentage in the regular season, .488 playoffs) and Lenny Wilkens (.485 regular season, no playoffs) might have been the best as a player-coaches. Does anyone think LeBron could do better?
posted by Howard_T at 08:20 PM on January 23, 2016
The story being posted in places is that Blatt was so overwhelmed by what he was asked to do in the NBA games, that he was confused and wasting time diagramming plays during timeouts, and that some plays involved players that weren't even in the game at the time.
Of course, there was the time in the playoffs last year where he almost screwed over the team by trying to call a timeout when the Cavs didn't have one left.
I can understand the desire to hang this on LeBron (and I'd be silly to suggest that he didn't have any input on the result), but there might be a good reason to let him go.
posted by grum@work at 10:26 PM on January 23, 2016
In a risky, last minute move designed to keep Bill Belichick guessing, NFL decides to give Patriots game balls (and air gauges) a police escort to the stadium.