Christmas is a massive day on the NBA calendar. The season is technically about seven weeks old, but with football winding down and most of America gathered with family, it has become the league’s time to reintroduce itself to casual fans. A lot of planning goes into the matchups and there are special uniforms, special shoes, and even special commercials to take marketing advantage of the profile. For a player, being involved in a Christmas game is an honor even as it puts a strain on families.
The Cavs had a brutal trip around the holiday, four games in five nights across the West. Still, they were amped for their rematch with the Warriors in Oakland. The Warriors were undefeated at home, not having lost there since the Cavs won Game 2 in the Finals. This time the Cavs were healthy—no complaints about the Warriors not having to deal with Kyrie Irving or Kevin Love—and they expected to play their style. What happened was a little surprising.
Whether it was specifically David Blatt’s game plan or not, the Cavs fell right back into their Finals mode. They went slow and big, trying to bruise the quick and slick Warriors. Like it was June again, Blatt slashed his rotation and benched Richard Jefferson, who had been performing well as LeBron James’s backup, and he cut Mo Williams’s playing time. Irving and Love played terribly. They combined to go 0-of-11 from three-point range. It was an ugly slugfest, even Steph Curry looked off as he missed 9 of his 15 shots.
It was hardly a showcase for the league’s two best teams. The slowdown pace kept the game close, but the Warriors ended up winning by six, 89–83. It was by far Golden State’s lowest-scoring game—the Warriors had scored more than 115 points 15 times already. It broke a stretch of 47 straight home games where they scored at least 100 points. And yet they walked out with a 27–1 record.
What followed was another throwback to the previous year: attacks on the Cavs’ coach. Blatt had not articulated his game plan effectively to the players, and they were upset at how things unfolded.
“It’s going to take some time to get back into rhythm, and all of us, not just the players, but everyone, to get back in rhythm,” James said, breaking his string of Blatt support with a thinly veiled shot.
“Surprising,” Jefferson said about not playing. “Just because it was one of those games you look forward to as a player. I hadn’t played on Christmas Day in twelve years. Now thirteen years.”
“There’s not been a lot of communication right now,” said Anderson Varejão, who had been in and out of the lineup. “Just waiting to see what is going to happen.”
There were a number of reasons the Cavs lost, but there was no missing that the players were put off by Blatt’s approach and how they hadn’t been included. Blatt was in a challenging spot. He’d just gotten his whole team healthy and had to transition to having more players. He didn’t make his choices clear to the team, though, and it triggered blowback.
“The key thing in any relationship on any good team with any staff, with any group, is communication,” Jefferson said.
The next night the team played in Portland, and they were in a sour mood. Irving was not cleared to play on back-to-back days yet, so he sat and the lineup changed again. From the opening moment, the team looked like it wasn’t collectively interested in being there. It may not have been a direct boycott aimed at Blatt, but it was a negative response.
From his seat in the stands, team general manager David Griffin was alarmed. It was stunning how down his team was playing. He was already concerned that they were too uptight, that there was a missing enjoyment that accompanied their success. The Warriors always had fun when they played. The Cavs did not, even when they won sometimes, a tone that was often spearheaded by James. Griffin had been tracking this for some time, but it manifested itself that night.
The Blazers had a great shooting night, drilling a bunch of three-pointers in the opening minutes, but the Cavs looked to just quit at the challenge. The score was a shocking 34–12 after the first quarter and finished 105–76.
“For the first eight weeks we had built chemistry, we knew who was playing, we knew who wasn’t playing,” James said. “We have no rhythm. We have some guys who don’t know if they’re going to play, or if they aren’t going to play, and it’s hurting our rhythm a little bit.”
That was diplomatic. Many on the team were fuming. Blatt knew there were issues, and he discussed it with Griffin. After a day off to cool down, he called a team meeting the morning of a game in Phoenix and tried to refocus the team.
“In tough times you’ve got to show a little bit of leadership and lift your troops,” Blatt told Cleveland.com about the meeting. “That was the whole purpose of it, to fire them up a little bit and lift them a little bit. They certainly this year have been doing their part, and I had to step in and do something myself.”
The Suns were a weak team and it was a messy game, though the Cavs played better than in Portland. They probably couldn’t have played worse. Irving returned and scored 22 points, making a late three-pointer that carried the Cavs to a four-point win. That relieved some pressure, but the team’s body language was off. James played most of the game with a scowl and barked at teammates when they made mistakes. The problem was, he was making mistakes too. In a sign of where his head was at, he took just 10 shots and had just 14 points. The unrest was centered on Blatt, James’s previous game plan to be supportive having been suspended.
With James setting the mood, the locker room was tense even following a win. The look on James’s face was telling. He was like a coiled snake, sending out strong warnings to stay away.
“Guys, we won the game,” James Jones said. “That should be the only thing that matters.”
During the road trip and for much of the season, Griffin was in the locker room to witness it. He was deeply concerned by what he was seeing and what he was feeling. Never before in his twenty-four years in the league had he sensed such bubbling anger after a victory. This was a win, breaking a losing streak, and all he saw was a dispirited group. He also witnessed who the players were leaning on. It wasn’t Blatt, it was Ty Lue.
The team went to Denver for the final game of the trip. The next morning, NBA.com released a story examining shooting numbers across the league and determined James was having the worst jump-shooting season of any contributing player. It pointed out he was shooting a miserable 28.5 percent outside the paint. His jumper indeed had looked off, and his three-point percentage had badly slipped. His form had suffered—he had a bad habit of leaning on his jumpers, which he’d battled his whole career—and the early-season back issues had thrown off his rhythm. But no one realized how bad it had gotten until the numbers went public.
After reading the article, James didn’t wait for the bus but instead took a car over to the arena early to get extra shooting in. “I saw it,” was all he would say.
Irving again had to sit because of the back-to-back, yo-yoing Blatt’s options again. It didn’t make much of a difference. James again was in a bad mood, and it was carrying over to the floor. The Cavs led the game throughout and James had an answer for the shooting numbers, nailing a series of jumpers on his way to 34 points. The Cavs led from the start and picked up a win to end the road trip. Watching the game casually, that’s all that would’ve been apparent.
James was relieved by the performance, not so much because the team won but because he hadn’t flown off the handle to the media the night before in Phoenix when he was simmering with rage. Much of it, though perhaps not all, was aimed at Blatt.
“Thank God we play in the NBA, with a game the next day, and not the NFL,” James said. “Because if it was the NFL, I would have went off and let the quotes fester for a week.”
Not watching the game casually was Griffin. A Phoenix native, he’d stayed in Arizona to spend time with family instead of going to Denver. As he watched, he grew more dejected as it played out. He saw James was dogging it. Over and over, Griffin watched as James didn’t run back on defense, a half-quit showing Griffin knew was damaging. James set the example and the tone. Griffin later had his staff watch the film and count. Nine. Nine times it happened, James not getting back on defense.
Griffin hung his head, his family members realizing something was wrong. His team was up by 11 at the half—why did he look sick to his stomach? He’d pondered it for some time and he’d tried to put it off. But in that moment Griffin came to the conclusion that he was going to have to fire David Blatt.
The Cavs were in first place in the East. The team was in the midst of transition as players returned from injury. James was hardly an ally, but he’d come to accept Blatt was his coach. Blatt was in the middle of a three-year contract and the Cavs were already paying off fired coach Mike Brown for the next three years. Exactly a year before, as the New Year’s holiday arrived, Griffin had defended the coach when calls within the organization to fire Blatt arose, because he didn’t believe he’d been given a fair chance. Now he was feeling the opposite way. He’d just never seen a team that was more comfortable in dealing with adversity than it was with success. He believed Blatt, purposely or not, was a root cause.
After winning in Denver, the team took three days off, which is unusual during the season. Even with extended breaks between games, typically teams practice. But after being away for Christmas, everyone needed a break. James didn’t take the team charter back to Cleveland. Instead a private plane was waiting, and he flew to Aspen, where he celebrated his thirty-first birthday and the New Year with his wife, mother, and some friends. Other players went on brief trips and generally unplugged.
When the team reconvened for practice on New Year’s Day, Griffin sat in on the team’s film session, and it was he who got on James about his actions in Denver. Not getting back on defense and his general attitude was a problem, and Griffin called him out on it. That the GM was making the comments in the film session and not the coach was indicative of the dynamic that had existed between James and Blatt. For Blatt, this was a survival technique; he often had to try to set his agenda around James. This was untenable, but it was both of their faults: James for his frequent unwillingness to trust Blatt, but also Blatt for not setting a tone that all players would be held accountable.
The team whipped the Magic by 25 in their first game of 2016 as James’s hot shooting continued, including four three-pointers. During the break he’d watched film of his shooting and analyzed how it had changed since he was in Miami, where he developed an excellent shooting touch. He made adjustments.
They followed it up with a 22-point beating of Toronto, the team in second place in the East. Irving looked fantastic, racking up 25 points and displaying his full array of spin moves, crossovers, and speed changes that really showed his knee was improving. He did it against Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry, who had 23 points.
After the game the locker room was looser. As James was about to leave, Blatt came out of his office wearing only a towel and asked to meet with James. This was unusual—coaches had their own dressing area and didn’t walk through the locker room undressed like players. James was surprised, part amused and part annoyed.
“Coach,” he said. “I can’t talk to you like this.”
James did go into Blatt’s office. After a short talk he came out. “That man was naked,” he said as he left the room. It was a bizarre, though mostly lighthearted moment. It was also clear from its tenor that neither Blatt nor James knew that upstairs a decision to change coaches was under discussion.
Griffin had gone to ownership and told them what he wanted to do. A year before, it was owner Dan Gilbert who was thinking a change had to be made and Griffin asking for more time. Now the roles were reversed, and Gilbert was surprised by Griffin’s intention. The team was about to leave on a six-game road trip and making a move during such a trip was unwise.
“At first Nate [Forbes] and I weren’t sure. But there was no doubt in Griff’s mind we had to do it,” Gilbert said. “He had conviction about it.”
The team, though, kept winning. They made it five in a row in Washington, with James and Irving having classic performances. James scored 34 and Irving put up 32, outplaying Wizards star John Wall, who had 20 points. Wall had created a little stir a few days before the game when he openly complained that Irving was ahead of him in All-Star voting despite missing most of the season, calling it “a joke.”
The Wizards ran with it and made an actual joke. During a timeout in the second half, the videoboard showed a prepackaged skit where fans wearing Irving jerseys were asked which player was getting their All-Star vote, Irving or Wall. Naturally, they said Wall, and the point was made. But the Cavs players were watching. Irving was a demon down the stretch, scoring 19 points in the fourth quarter after seeing the video.
“We didn’t like it as a team,” J. R. Smith said. “We didn’t like it at all.”
“I saw it for sure,” James said.
“I really have no comment,” Irving said.
With the schedule soft, the Cavs’ streak rolled on. They won in Minnesota and Philadelphia, two of the worst teams in the league, with ease. James had 37 points in Philly, making 15 of 22 shots as the shooting numbers continued to rise. The winning streak hit eight in Dallas as first Love and then Irving made clutch three-pointers in overtime.
James’s mood improved with the team, and himself, playing better. He even got back to saying kind words about Blatt, again making it clear that he was out of the loop of what was being considered in the front office. They were qualified comments, but they were positive.
“I think every game is another learning experience for Coach Blatt,” James told ESPN in an interview about the state of the team. “There’s coaches with more tenure in our league, obviously, and there’s guys with a better résumé than he has. But one thing he tries to do is just put us in a position to win and then it’s up to us… In sports, kind of the coaches always get the worst of it.”
Blatt remained hopeful that the two would develop a relationship, but he, too, was guarded. He’d seen James’s mood swings before, one day patting him on the back and the next savaging him either to his face or behind his back. He kept hoping they could find some trust between each other. At the core, that didn’t really exist, and Blatt knew it.
“I think it’s him and everyone else in the program recognizing that we were very, very close,” Blatt said. “Perhaps the next step is that confidence in one another and that trust in one another.”
There really was no next step—there were few steps left between the Cavs and Blatt. He just didn’t know it.
The winning streak came to an end in San Antonio, where the Spurs were undefeated at home and it showed. They overcame a 12-point Cavs lead to beat them. Irving was outplayed by Tony Parker, and James struggled to score at times on defensive ace Kawhi Leonard.
That night, Blatt made another one of his PR missteps. The L.A. Clippers’ DeAndre Jordan had gotten sick, breaking his streak of 360 consecutive games played. That meant the Cavs’ iron man, Tristan Thompson, took over the streak for most consecutive games played, as he was playing in his 325th straight game.
Blatt was asked about it. This, again, was a layup moment. The reporters needed a positive comment for their stories and patting Thompson on the head was easy. Blatt dismissed it.
“He didn’t break a record. He’s the current,” Blatt said. “I’m leading the league in field goal percentage. I haven’t missed a shot this year.”
No, it wasn’t the record. A.C. Green has the record with 1,192 straight games. It wasn’t even the team record. But Thompson was proud, talking about playing through ankle sprains and food poisoning. Blatt shrugged. Another misread, another miffed player, another moment when Griffin was left scratching his head.
The Cavs won by 14 the next night in Houston to finish the trip at 5–1. After he’d sometimes struggled to maintain positivity even after victories, James expressed his confidence in where the team was headed. He didn’t worry about a close loss in San Antonio. For a moment he’d even been willing to take his team off the Golden State standard. James said he believed the Cavs were good enough to beat any team in the league in a playoff series.
He said it with a purpose. The Cavs were getting two days off and then hosting the Warriors. James felt they were ready. Irving was healthier than he’d been at Christmas. This long road trip had gone well. There was momentum and James’s comments would add to the motivation—at least he’d hoped.
The day before the game, Curry needled the Cavs when he said he was looking forward to coming back to the visitors’ locker room at Quicken Loans Arena. “Walking in that locker room, it’ll be good memories,” he said. “Hopefully, it still smells a little bit like champagne.”
The Cavs would’ve been fortunate had Curry stopped with trash talk. No, he and his teammates walked in with their 37–4 record not smelling champagne—they were smelling blood. The Cavs might have had some confidence after winning nine of their previous 10 games, but their new rival had something on another level than confidence. They were running so hot and so smooth that they’d taken the game to an art form, their array of passes becoming a blur until they found an open man. Curry was making shots from everywhere with ease, some of them nearing 40 feet from the hoop. Draymond Green was becoming a Swiss Army knife, able to deploy different talents at different times, all of them useful. Klay Thompson’s quick release and tremendous size made him a brutal assignment.
The Warriors unleashed their full power at the Cavs, wanting to make a lasting statement on the terms of their relative standing. They embarrassed their hosts, crushing them, 132–98, with Curry shooting and shimmy-shaking his way to 35 points.
At one point the Warriors got up 43 points, the most James had trailed in the 1,227 games of his NBA career. It was probably the most he’d been behind in any game in his life. It was beyond demoralizing. The Cavs had—rightly, they believed—clung to a belief that the Warriors couldn’t beat them when at full strength. This humbling night proved they were dead wrong.
It was a miserable game for Love. Already he’d predictably seen his role diminish since Irving came back, his scoring average dropping to 12.4 points a game from 17.6. He scored only three points and was exposed several times on defense, leading to highlights filling social media and questions arising about his fitness to play against the Warriors’ lineup.
Smith showed his dark side again, tackling Warriors forward Harrison Barnes and being ejected for the flagrant foul.
In the fourth quarter the game was decided and the starters were pulled. With the game in hand, Warriors interim coach Luke Walton, filling in for coach Steve Kerr because of an illness, sat down. Blatt didn’t have the option. Sitting in his seat on the bench was James, chewing on Lue’s ear and venting. This was very public, but the reality was it was just symbolic. James said nice things sometimes, but he’d long since effectively walled off Blatt and made Lue his most meaningful contact on the coaching staff.
Afterward, Blatt tried to shoulder some blame, saying he didn’t have the team ready. It was deeper than that. The Cavs weren’t equipped to handle what the Warriors, on their way to setting a regular-season win record, were throwing at them. Naturally after such a setback, Blatt was in line to be reviewed, and that happened. But it was not about a coach—one team was just way ahead of the other.
“Tonight was an example of how far we’ve got to go to get to a championship level,” James said.
“They definitely played like the champions,” Irving said. “They came in and just kicked our ass.”
When asked about the state of the team, Love gave a strange answer. “It’s going to take a lot of guys looking themselves in the mirror, and it all starts with our leader over there,” he said, gesturing to James’s locker. Was Love, after a horrible personal performance, pointing at James as a culprit?
James certainly thought so. The next day, he called a team meeting so things could be aired out.
Love said his point was misconstrued. “All I meant was that LeBron is our leader and we follow him at the end of the day,” he said. “We all got to be better for each other, him, our fans, our organization, each and every player on this team, our coaches.”
James talked to Love personally about the quote and cleared the air after the misstep. “We talked about it,” he said. “I take the man at his word.”
There were other discussions going on, though, between Gilbert and Griffin. The Blatt issue had been in the air for a few weeks. Gilbert still wasn’t sure it was the right call. He’d fired plenty of coaches over the previous ten years. And he had been talked out of firing more. In this case, he was conflicted. But he decided that he’d support his general manager and clear the way for the firing. This wasn’t always the case for Gilbert. He’d acted on his own before regardless of his GM’s wishes. But this time it was going to be on Griffin’s shoulders and the results would be on them as well. Gilbert gave his blessing.
“It was all Griff and it took a lot of balls,” Gilbert said. “I told him, ‘Griff, they’re going to kill us. We’re leading the East and we’re going to fire our coach in the middle of the year.’ Here’s what it came down to: In my gut, heart and soul, can we win the NBA championship with this coach? He’s a good man, he’s a good human being, but can these players rally around him? The answer we had to realize was likely not. We had Ty there. If we didn’t have Ty, I don’t think we could do it.”
The team had a back-to-back coming in Brooklyn, then a home game with the Clippers. After that, when there was an off day, Blatt would be let go.
The team won in Brooklyn, Love bouncing back with 17 points and 18 rebounds. Then they had a nice three-point home victory over the Clippers, one of the West’s best teams. Love was strong again with 18 points and 16 rebounds, as James delivered 22 points and 12 assists. It seemed like a stabilizing win. It was not.
Blatt had no idea it was coming. He again admonished the media for criticism and praised his team for their ability to battle through adversity.
“I hear a lot of far-reaching conclusions and personally I don’t like it,” he said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. I think this team has done pretty well dealing with the adversity that we’ve had. I think this team is in pretty good position, although people choose to overlook that, which I don’t think is fair.
“It’s about my team. It’s about my guys and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all,” he said, his confidence rising after the win. “This wasn’t promised to us. Nobody gave us that. We had to work for it and they’ve been working hard and doing a good job overall, a really good job.”
In many people’s eyes it was a good job. It was the exact halfway point of the season and the team was 30–11 and in first place. A few more wins and Blatt would clinch being named the East coach for the All-Star game in Toronto two weeks later.
The next morning, a Friday, Griffin asked to talk to Blatt. Because of the back-to-back the previous two days, the team had been given the day off and the practice facility was mostly empty. Griffin told Blatt he was being let go.
Blatt was stunned. His coaches were shocked. His peers in the league were angry. The nation of Israel would later become outraged.
Griffin called Lue, who wasn’t yet at work. Like Blatt, Lue was blindsided. He didn’t agree with the decision. Lue had wanted this job eighteen months earlier. At one point he thought he had it. He ended up in the unorthodox position of being the lead assistant to a man who beat him for the job. Griffin had leaned toward Lue at the time, but he accepted the Blatt choice. After seeing Lue work up close, Griffin was convinced he was going to be a good head coach.
Griffin saw Lue connected with players, some of whom used to be his peers when he played in the league. But he was more impressed Lue was not afraid to hold players accountable. It was an historic decision, firing a coach in first place at midseason, but Griffin was doing it because he also believed in Lue, not because he thought Blatt had failed. He told Lue he would not be interim coach—he wanted him to be the new permanent head coach. He offered him a contract extension and a raise.
Lue was concerned how it looked, like he might’ve undermined Blatt to get the job. He didn’t sign the contract, because he didn’t want to make it seem like he’d been negotiating. But he did accept the job.
Blatt had been given a difficult hand when he showed up his first day in 2014, weeks before James had signed and Love was traded for. He’d made mistakes, perhaps the largest being not recognizing just how big a change coaching in the NBA would be from his European roots. It was blatant he saw the two as somewhat parallel, and it was just as obvious that was an error in judgment. People in the NBA, players in the NBA, don’t see it equally, and Blatt learned the hard way.
“When I came to the NBA I was under the impression that this was going to be a breeze,” he said before starting his second season. “I’ve been coaching for twenty years at the highest level in Europe. I coached in the national team environment, coached professional teams, coached EuroLeague teams. I thought I knew basketball and I thought I knew how to coach. Which, in my mind, I did. But I realized that when I came over here it was a very, very different game with a whole new set of problems and a whole slew of things to deal with inside and outside of the game.”
Ultimately, he never was able to bridge that gap. He may never have won James over. When Blatt wasn’t able to hold James accountable, he gave up any hope of finding any real footing. Griffin believed Lue could perform better in that role.
“I think it was clear to everyone what was going on,” Gilbert said. “LeBron wants to be challenged and that’s hard because he can be intimidating. David just wasn’t able to connect.”
Griffin asked the team leaders to gather the team for a meeting at 3:30 that afternoon. They were scattered, none of them expecting to have to come in that day. When they got together the word was out, but they still weren’t totally sure what happened. They joked that they were getting called in to be told Love had been traded because those rumors raged after Love’s poor game against the Warriors.
There was an assumption by outsiders James was involved with the move, because of his well-known issues with Blatt. He also had a connection with Lue, which dated to James’s teenage years when Lue was in the league. But Griffin didn’t tell James prior to the firing. He didn’t feel the need to ask. James’s actions had made his feelings on the matter plain.
This would become a point of contention for those evaluating the unusual coaching change. Common sense dictated James, the center of the franchise, would be involved in such a major transaction. Some could never be convinced that he wasn’t consulted. But Griffin, Gilbert, and James swear it not to be true.
James didn’t perform the coup de grâce—that was Griffin. James did do damage along the way. Both of these statements can be true. And both men could end up being correct in their assessment of Blatt’s job performance.
For decades, star players have played a role in coaching changes. For decades, star players have been blamed for forcing coaches out regardless of the truth. Often there’s little room for nuance in understanding what happened. None of that will change in the future. James knew the score.
“Like it or love it or hate it, we got to respect it,” he said. “I can’t get caught up and worried about what other people are thinking. I stopped doing that a long time ago in my career.”
After the team meeting, Lue and James had a private conversation. “I told him, ‘I got to hold you accountable. It starts with you first. And if I can hold you accountable in front of the team and doing the right things, then everybody else has got to fall in line, fall in place.’”
James may not have admitted it publicly, but he’d longed at times to play for a former player. His first head coach, Paul Silas, was a former player, but there was a more than forty-year age gap. It was like a grandfather-grandson relationship, especially given how protective Silas was of the young James at the time. After that it was ten years of tacticians, former video coordinators like Brown and Erik Spoelstra, grinders who grew up in the league but never played. Blatt was from, it felt to James, another world. Even when he was playing for the Olympic team it was under Mike Krzyzewski, a legend, but not a player. James had connected to former players turned coaches like Doc Rivers, going against him for years. Lue was a Rivers disciple, having coached with him in Boston and L.A.
“We’ve been friends since I was seventeen years old, but at the end of the day, he’s still the coach and I’m underneath him,” James said about Lue. “He will coach me and push me, and I’ll listen to everything he has to say and go from there. Don’t try to make it a story of why me and Coach Lue are so tight. I think it’s a lot of coaches and players that’s close in this league. It just happened to be me.”
And that was happening for the first time in James’s career.
Griffin called a news conference to explain the decision. Gilbert was not there, which was right. This was Griffin’s decision and he intended to take full ownership of it.
“David spent the last year and a half under incredible scrutiny, he was doing it without his family, and he was working to mold a group of individuals that are incredibly willful,” Griffin said. “That’s not easy and I understand that. Decisions like these tend to make themselves. Every decision is made with an answer to the following question: Does it put us in the best position to deliver championships? I go to bed every night thinking about that question.”
Griffin talked about the lack of connection he felt within the team. He talked about how the players weren’t showing buy-in to the coach. He explained it wasn’t based on the win-loss record—how could it be?—it was about the bigger picture.
“Are our hearts, minds, and souls in what we’re doing? Are we really trying to achieve something as a unit?” Griffin said he asked himself. “We need to build a collective spirit. Halfway through this season we have failed. Each step forward has been followed by two steps back. Pretty good is not what we’re here for. We’re pretty good right now. That’s not what we’re in the business to be.”
Then he insisted no player had anything directly to do with the decision, saying, “I’m not taking a poll, my job is to lead a franchise. I didn’t ask anyone’s opinion. I’m in the locker room. I know what it’s supposed to feel like.”
There were opinions, though. There had been heavy coaching turnover across the NBA over the previous two years and the league’s coaches felt like they were under attack.
“I’m embarrassed for our league that something like this could happen,” Dallas coach Rick Carlisle said. “It’s just bizarre. It just leaves you with a bit of an empty feeling because Blatt’s a great guy and he did a great job there.”
“He had the most scrutinized job that you could possibly have,” said Rivers, who a day earlier had seen his team vanquished by Blatt’s Cavs. “I think the reward for coaching LeBron is you get scrutinized. It’s hard. They have a great record, the best in the East, and you get fired for it.”
“Back in my day, you used to have to at least lose games before you got fired,” Orlando coach Scott Skiles said.
“That one, to me, elevated all of the coach firings totally into the theater of the absurd,” said Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy. “It was insane.”
After his team became the latest to take a 30-point beating at the hands of Golden State, the Spurs’ legendary coach, Gregg Popovich, took aim at Griffin. “I’m just glad my general manager wasn’t in the locker room, because it might have gotten me fired,” Popovich said, mocking Griffin’s comment that his observations in the locker room led him to the Blatt firing.
Twenty years earlier Popovich had been a general manager when he fired his coach, Bob Hill, and put himself in the job. So it was ironic that Popovich would hit Griffin, but it was just part of a growing chorus.
Already with a massive payroll and huge expectations, the Blatt firing had upped the ante for both James and Griffin. History was going to judge them on this. They were both aware of it.
And they were also aware that when sudden changes happened to teams, whether it was a coaching move or a major trade, sometimes things got worse before they got better.