David Blatt may not be off to a hot start, but firing him would be crazy on the part of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Cleveland Cavaliers are off to an 18-12 start to their season, and through the first 30 games it’s apparently already come time to call David Blatt’s job into question. While this is understandable, it’s also asinine and insane.
No one is saying that David Blatt is the Coach of the Year at this point in the season, but he’s also not doing anything worth firing right now. If the problems that the Cavaliers have continue to persist, then an evaluation of Blatt’s job is more than warranted. But we’re 30 games into an 82 game season in which the Cavaliers theoretically only need to win 39 games to make the postseason.
That means, on the absolute worse case scenario, the Cavaliers need to win 21 more games to make the Eastern Conference playoffs as the most dangerous 8-seed ever.
That’s getting too far ahead of ourselves though, and so is talk of even potentially firing David Blatt. LeBron James didn’t give his head coach the glowing endorsement he needed to on Monday, but he did point out a very good fact — the team has no other head coach. David Blatt is it and he’s their best option at the moment.
David Blatt also happens to be a damn good head coach, there just needs to be patience. That’s hypocritical to a degree though, as when David Blatt was hired by the Cavaliers no one expected them to be a win-now team, but as soon as LeBron James signed with the team things changed in the most drastic way ever.
Add Kevin Love to the mix and you can see the stress being put on Blatt before the season even tipped off. This was already not going to be an easy year for David Blatt and it became even less easy when the task of meshing together vastly different superstar talents in LeBron, Love and Kyrie Irving became the main objective.
That’s not an excuse as to why the Cavaliers are a middle of the pack team in the Eastern Conference, but patience needs to be pleaded for here. LeBron haters are going to hate, skeptics will be skeptical and people will jump to conclusions based on the ‘chill mode’ effort we’ve seen so far. All of that ultimately falls on David Blatt, but the time to punish him for not waking this team up is no 30 games into the season.
Putting David Blatt on notice this early in the season is a mistake by the Cavaliers, as the paint has just dried on the walls and someone already wants to tear down the house and build a new one. That’s not how championship teams are built as Blatt deserves to coach this one out to season’s end given his reputation in the NBA.
No one thought it was going to be easy for Blatt to adapt in the NBA before LeBron James came back home, and the evaporation of patience with Blatt since then is more than unfair to the players and to the head coach trying to pull things together.
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