Everything was falling apart. Disaster on the court. Once again, David Blatt had to bring the calm.
Want to know why the Cleveland Cavaliers put their franchise and LeBron James’s return in the hands of Russia’s ex-national coach – an American with an Israeli passport and no NBA experience? Go back to the day in 2007 when Russia were fighting to beat Spain in the European championship with the clock winding down, a lead disappearing and a title slipping away.
“I drove the lane three straight times and missed, you could see everyone tensing up,” former Bucknell player JR Holden, a guard on the Russian team told the Guardian this week. “There was a time out and as I walk back to the bench Coach Blatt comes up to me and says: ‘What did you eat for breakfast? Whatever it was, don’t eat it again.’ He took all the pressure and placed it on his shoulders.
“Then he went from that to designing a play in a matter of moments.”
A few minutes later Russia won the game and their first European championship since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“That’s the thing about Coach Blatt,” said Holden, now a scout for the Detroit Pistons. “He’s at his best when things are at their worst.”
Cleveland needs Blatt now because it takes more than James to keep the Cavaliers alive without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. Even the world’s greatest player can’t withstand the loss of his team’s second and third-leading scorers alone. Logic says Cleveland should have collapsed when Irving’s kneecap shattered in Game 1 of these NBA Finals. The Cavs still might lose the series, but it’s a testament to Blatt and James that they have made it this far.
Occasionally there comes a coach who seems to thrive in chaos, working better when surrounded by rubble. Joe Gibbs, the Hall of Fame football coach was like this. Two of his three Super Bowls titles in Washington came during seasons cut short by work stoppage. His last playoff run as a coach came in the weeks after his best player, Sean Taylor, was murdered. In some ways, Blatt is like Gibbs.
“When the moment is the worst it makes him the best,” Holden said.
Perhaps this is what Cavaliers general manager David Griffin saw when he hired a coach with one of the strangest backgrounds in NBA history. Most team executives would not match James with a 56-year-old Ivy League point guard whose championships have been won in Israel, Italy and Russia. The easy choice would have been to select a name-approved NBA coach, giving management a safe, simple way to deflect blame when things didn’t work out.
But nothing about hiring Blatt has been simple. Just weeks after taking the job last summer he strongly endorsed Israel’s 48-day military push into Gaza as the civilian death toll rose. His words ran counter to the public statements of a handful of NBA players who condemned the attacks and they raised a reasonable question of how involved a professional basketball coach should be in addressing armed conflicts rather than the pick-and-roll. Such issues would not have come up if the Cavs had hired Tyronn Lue or Mark Price.
He never backed away from his Gaza comments even as criticism came. But he never made the issue about himself, just as he has kept from making the Cavaliers success his own personal narrative the way many celebrity coaches are tempted to do.
“I think that’s why he decided to go to Israel and become a citizen,” his coach at Princeton, Pete Carril said this week. “He liked the Spartan way of life you have there. His problem was that he worked too hard sometimes.”
Nine years ago, when Blatt was hired as the Russian coach, he inherited a team unaccustomed to working hard in a post-Soviet, big-money professional world. Playing for the national team was something players did voluntarily, rolling in for a few relaxing days of training before international tournaments. Holden, who holds dual American and Russian citizenship, didn’t know Blatt well when the new coach arrived and nobody seemed certain what to make of the screaming man who ordered grueling practices.
At first there was resistance. Then something strange happened: the words of the new coach began to make sense and the players started to enjoy their relentless workouts. They had … fun.
“He had to adjust to being an American coach of the Russian national team with an NBA superstar [Andrei Kirilenko] and try to make everyone feel they are on the same level for their own country,” Holden said. “He made it matter to the Russian players as much as it does to him.”
Blatt and the Cavaliers have already survived their adjustment. That came early in the year when Cleveland wasn’t winning, when players were hurt, James was unhappy and the skeptics cleared their throats. If only the Cavs had hired a big-name, NBA coach they said. Why didn’t Cleveland just promote Lue who was the other finalist for the job and an assistant that Blatt had hired?
“I think it was rough for him, very rough,” Carril said. “But he’s very strong and confident in his knowledge of the game.”
“I guarantee you 90% of the sports writers who wrote about that stuff didn’t think he’d be here now,” Holden said.
Blatt survived, just as he survived the first weeks with the Russian team and two decades of the Israeli, Italian and Russian leagues and two games of these Finals without two of his team’s three best payers. He survived because men like him always survive, ignoring the dwindling leads in foreign arenas, whispering jokes through a vicious roar.
If all goes right for Cleveland, he can watch as his players hold a trophy in a blizzard of confetti just as players of his did in Israel, Italy, Russia and that day in Spain.
“If David doesn’t get any credit he won’t give a damn, he will be happy they won,” Carril said.
Surviving disaster was never all about him anyway.
