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Keith Strudler: David Blatt's Bad Call

These should be good times for Cleveland Cavaliers head coach David Blatt. In his first year coaching in the NBA, after over 20 years mentoring European squads, including a four stint as head coach of a solid Maccabi Tel Aviv team that won the Euroleague title in 2014, Blatt now coaches a Cleveland team that leads the Chicago Bulls 3 games to 2 in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. He’s got the most dominant player in the game in LeBron James and a roster that looks like the NBA all-star game. Generally speaking most first year NBA coaches get players that seem better fit for the YMCA men’s rec league. But, thanks to good timing and better luck, Blatt won the coaching lottery, perhaps in contrast to, say, Derek Fisher, who was handed a Knicks squad only more deficient in effort than it was in talent.

Yet Blatt, coach of the second seed in the East and now a likely favorite to make the NBA Finals, is in the hot seat. The temperature started to rise during the regular season, particularly when it was suggested that LeBron James actually called the plays. Some even accused Blatt of making fake hand signals from the bench so he at least looked like he was coaching, like a five-year-old with a toy steering wheel in the back seat. It continued with a spat between James and forward Kevin Love, when the team felt more like the TV show Dynasty than an emergent athletic one. Then Blatt’s chair nearly exploded Sunday afternoon in Game 4 of the series when, the game tied at 84 with only seconds remaining, Blatt tried emphatically to call a time-out from the bench to set up a potential winning shot, one that could tie the series at two games apiece instead of sinking Cleveland in 3-1 hole. Only problem was, Cleveland didn’t have any time-outs left, something known by pretty much everyone in arena except the Cavs head coach. The refs never noticed Blatt’s intentions, thanks largely to his associate head coach Tyrone Lue grabbing him like a teddy bear. If the refs had seen or heard Blatt, he would have earned a technical foul and essentially handed the game, and probably the series, over to Chicago. With that, the Cleveland Cavaliers, the league’s newest Supergroup, would have died with neither a bang nor a whimper, but rather a really, really bad move by a guy who’s coached longer than half his team has been alive.

Since that time, as the Cavs have subsequently moved within a game of the next round, Blatt has defended his near mistake, which is kind of a fallacy, since it was real mistake that just didn’t get caught. He even compared coaching basketball to flying a fighter jet, which would make a lot more sense if Blatt had ever done that. As is, it’s like comparing yourself to Gandhi because your signed a petition. But it’s been suggested, and I’d agree, that if the refs had seen Blatt’s signal and the Cavs had lost Game 4, David Blatt might not have been allowed back on the team jet, much less back in the Cavs arena to coach the team. He might have longed for the good old days when his worst problem was whether his game might be cancelled because of a border war with Hamas. If the Cavs had lost Game 4, David Blatt would have made Isiah Thomas look like Red Auerbach.

The question is, of course, was this fair? Should a head basketball coach lose his job, maybe his career, because of one really bad day? The answer is, oddly enough, perhaps so.

Blatt made the odd comparison of his world to that of a fighter pilot, because they all make hundreds of decisions a day. So let’s run with that. Even when a pilot might make 199 great choices, it’s the 200th that ends him in a ball of fire. To be a fighter pilot, or at least one that lives, you don’t have to be great. You have to be perfect.

Certainly, David Blatt’s mistakes won’t kill him. That’s a good thing. But when your salary comes in buckets, and your number one performance criteria is simply to make sure your team can win important games, then yes, making a decision that might literally make that impossible is a fireable offense. Especially when your NBA history to this point includes exhibition games against the Knicks in the Garden – where, by the way, it always felt like a home game for Maccabi Tel Aviv. That’s why David Blatt isn’t living the NBA high life right now, why he’s got less job certainty than AOL middle management, and why his seat probably feels like the face of the sun. And why today, despite all its potential, might not feel like the best of times.

Keith Strudler is the director of the Marist College Center for Sports Communication and an associate professor of communication. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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