Scant smoke where there was supposed to be fire, dire straits in place of smooth sailing, tumult for a triumphant realm: Whatever your preseason predictions for the Cleveland Cavaliers, the reality couldn’t have been more polar.
As it is, polar is a pretty good word to describe relations within the Cleveland locker room, where ESPN’s Marc Stein and Brian Windhorst are reporting a growing chill between players and first-year head coach David Blatt.
It’s hardly a secret that Cleveland—now a pedestrian 18-12 in a historically horrific Eastern Conference—has yet to realize its Platonic potential.
But throwing Blatt out with the bathwater, while tempting, won’t cure what ails these Cavs.
What Cleveland needs now is a complete reimagining of its offense. And Blatt may well be the only man for the job.
Truth be told, it’s the spark Blatt was hired to light in the first place.
Long lauded as a basketball visionary abroad, Blatt—tapped by the Cavs on June 20—was the first coach in league history to make the leap directly from Europe to the NBA. Towing enough hardwood hardware to fill a swimming pool, Blatt arrived stateside with a unique coaching carte blanche. Albeit over one of the most dysfunctional teams in the league.
Then, the Deus Ex Machina: After four years of self-imposed exile, LeBron James, guided as much by guilt as gallantry, decided to take his talents home.
But Blatt’s blessing wasn’t without its immediate curse, namely convincing the planet’s best player he had what it took to hold the hardwood harness.
Thirty games of sample-sizing later, the returns, while encouraging, are by no means jaw-dropping: The team ranks fourth in overall offensive efficiency (107.3), seventh in assist rate (17.7) and eighth in true-shooting percentage (55.5 percent).
Instead, it’s the Cavs’ defense—now 23rd in the Association at a forgettable 105.4—that’s been the singular scapegoat for their head-scratching start. And with Anderson Varejao now lost for the season with a torn Achilles, those critical clarion calls aren’t bound to silence anytime soon.
The Cavs don’t have much recourse as far as rim protection is concerned. What they do have, however, is enough perimeter quickness to make life a bit more disruptive for the opposition. The hope being that a slight uptick in turnovers forced might lead to the kind of transition opportunities on which players like James, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love and Dion Waiters would thrive.
ESPN’s Dave McMenamin summed up Cleveland’s delicate balancing act thusly:
The goal is to become a selfless team that makes the extra pass on offense, because with their personnel they will always be able to space the floor to allow their penetrators room to attack. Defensively, they know they have their weaknesses to overcome with no true rim protector on their roster, but if they can force enough turnovers each game with their activity on the perimeter, their transition offense is so deadly that they’ll simply be able to outscore teams even if their halfcourt D is mediocre at best the rest of the time.
That’s all easier said than done, of course. For all their undeniable talents, Irving and Waiters boast nowhere near the ball-hawking instincts of a Dwyane Wade, Norris Cole, or even a Mario Chalmers. Still, it's impossible not to appreciate the latent potential of an unbridled LeBron bolting down the wing, or Kyrie Irving's ball-handling wizardry sparking fast breaks by the boatloads.
In a league where space and pace have become prerequisites for any functioning offense, the Cavs' lack of the latter stands as perhaps their foremost actionable item.
To the well-trained statistical eye, all of this might sound a bit counterintuitive. After all, the Heat never finished higher than 14th in pace during LeBron’s four-year tenure. And that was with a perennial top-10 defense capable, at its most hellacious, of getting stops seemingly at will.
At the very least, Blatt needs to recognize that Cleveland’s last, best chance at a championship turnaround lies in recalibrating the offense according to the strengths of its best players. That means more LeBron James shooting the defensive gaps, more outlet lasers from Kevin Love and—perhaps most crucial of all—better open-court decisiveness on the part of Irving.
"The real key to David's success," David Blu, a former player of Blatt’s with Maccabi Tel Aviv, told the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen, "is that he's able to adjust to his players."
Perhaps Blatt is still figuring out how best to play the pad hand he’s been dealt. Perhaps he's hindered by some sort of star-struck deference. Perhaps—and you’re bound to hear this mendacious little mantra in the days and weeks to come—the little Euro-coach that could has bitten off a bit more than he can chew.
Whatever the root of the team’s tension, the disconnect between Cleveland’s personnel on the one hand, and the expectations levied upon that personnel on the other, could hardly be more apparent. Fair or not, it's on Blatt to figure out how best to tweak his talent. Less in the service of lowering expectations than reimagining them.
From Cohen’s Wall Street Journal dispatch:
Blatt enters the NBA with an extensive history of strategic tinkering. His former players said coaching flexibility comes with the territory in Europe, where roster turnover is more frequent than it is in the NBA. Blatt was working with even more constraints than most in Tel Aviv. Maccabi's budget, which was dwarfed by that of other Euroleague teams, forced him to get creative in tailoring strategies to the players around him, rather than jamming them into his own set beliefs.
Blatt will need that sense of experimentation now more than ever, as much to save Cleveland’s season as his own NBA stock. Rewiring the frayed communications—making a point to heed as well as he teaches, particularly with James—being tantamount to the cause, of course.
Four years ago, Erik Spoelstra found himself stuck in very similar crosshairs. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and the Heat, for all their early woes, wound up blazing a trail to four straight Finals appearances. A great run made all the more gaudy by the fact that it almost never happened.
Baring some miracle hat rabbit, the marriage between Blatt and the Cavs will likely hold—at least until season’s end.
Which, so long as Blatt can tool and tinker the way he always has, could find him crowned champion of hardwood and hindsight alike. Just as it was with a certain South Beach skipper before him.
from Bleacher Report http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Bleacherreport/~3/QGujznrtfcA/2314231-cleveland-cavaliers-title-hopes-hinge-on-david-blatts-offensive-genius
via IFTTT December 29, 2014 at 11:17PM
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