Is Cavs head coach J.B. Bickerstaff the right person for the job?

I don’t envy NBA head coaches/coaches and the daily grind to win on a consistent basis, of which if they don’t, they’ll end up losing their job. They are getting compensated nicely for doing a sub-par job so I don’t worry about them that much, but when we start looking more closely at our Cleveland Cavaliers and their head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, I am starting to question just exactly what he’s established as the team’s leader?

Should Bickerstaff continue being the team’s head coach, especially if they have a poor season again like the previous one?

Now, I’m not the first to try and understand the pressures that NBA head coaches must endure, and coach-player relationships can be stressful, particularly if you’re a rebuilding team and situations can be fluid. We don’t get too much into that though.

Albeit obviously, I’ve never been an NBA head coach, but like some of you, I’ve gone down that path of coaching youngsters before at other levels like at high school. When you’re a coach, at any level, you have to learn to manage your own emotions and the emotions of your players and sometimes even the emotions of the people that are tied to the players, like their parents. It’s a difficult job, period!

I’ll be the first to say what Bickerstaff is doing as the Cavaliers head coach to this point, surrounding himself with a good assistant coaching staff, that seems to align with the youth of the current Cavalier roster, is admirable.

However, when do the training wheels come off and the Cavs have to face growing up in the face and risk falling many times? So far, it seems like those wheels are still there and for the Cavaliers to go further than their next-door neighbor’s driveway, then head coach Bickerstaff needs to break them of that security blanket.

Do you remember in the movie, Forrest Gump, when the character Forrest Gump, played by the actor Tom Hanks, breaks away from his supportive leg braces at the beginning of the film? What a wonderful moment for the character in the movie to be able to accomplish his task of speeding away from his enemies to save himself.

This is how I see the Cavaliers as a franchise. The leg braces represent the years of losing and the other things, like the shadow of LeBron James’ legacy that are holding this franchise back.

Does Bickerstaff have what it takes to help this Cavs team break those braces? I just don’t know…

We’ll dive further into the Bickerstaff outlook from here, though.