About Face

David Blatt has been fired by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Tyronn Lue has been promoted as his replacement, signing a multi-year deal with the team. Those are the facts. LeBron James was reportedly not consulted or involved in the decision. I’ll put that one in “facts.”

It feels weird to say this about a guy who led his team to the NBA Finals last season, had his team atop their conference midway through this season, and holds the seventh-best head coaching win percentage of all time, but David Blatt’s firing is not really a surprise. The friction between him and everything else in Cleveland has been pretty well charted. He was hired before LeBron James made his decision to return, and thus never received the blessing of The King. LeBron never really bought into the motion offense that Blatt was supposed to bringing with him. Last season Lue was reportedly taking it upon himself to call timeouts. Making GIFs of LeBron and his teammates ignoring or dismissing Blatt’s directions became a cottage industry. Rumors have been trickling out for nearly a year that LeBron would prefer Lue and had expressed that to the Cavaliers. Other than the whole wins and losses thing, there’s been friction here for essentially Blatt’s entire tenure with the team.

But all those wins! By objective measures, Blatt has been successful in Cleveland and his firing (veering subjective now) makes him the victim of a reactionary front office and an rebellious star. But when it comes to coaching, it’s really impossible to separate the objective and the subjective. Coaches are judged on wins and losses and titles, but the raw material they work with are athletic human beings with feelings, thoughts, and facial expressions that are caught on camera. As such, feel, and vibe, and all sorts of new age metaphysics become part of the evaluatory ledger as well.

The Cavaliers have been good, even great at times this season. But they have also seemed to be playing with a leaden joylessness. The Golden State Warriors are good, and also light and free and fun. They’re kicking the snot out of teams and enjoying themselves. The Spurs are playing on the same plane of effectiveness but with a lightness of synergy and shared respect. Many hands make light work. As good as the Cavaliers have looked this season, they lost to both the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors in the past eight days. Their hopes of winning a championship this season almost certainly run through one of those two teams. The Warriors game was a blowout, the Spurs game was a tight loss, but both games reinforced the perception that the Cavaliers, as presently constructed, were still a step below those two teams. It wasn’t just that they lost, or the margins they lost by. It was how sharply disjointed, both emotionally and functionally, their arguably equal talent looked when held up against the Warriors and Spurs.

That comes back to Blatt.

Blatt had the numeric resume to keep his job, the win percentage and the point differential. Where he had been less than effective was in things like inspiring confidence, generating buy-in, engendering respect, helping to build a culture. Whether or not the blame is solely his, Blatt failed somewhat spectacularly in these areas. The Cavaliers have had a team culture, and it doesn’t even matter that LeBron is at the center of it. What matters is that Blatt was never able to exist anywhere but outside it. A successful coach can share leadership responsibilities but Blatt never appeared to be able to work his way beyond outsider. There was the roster and him, never really going in the same direction at the same time.

I understand the argument that his task here was impossible. The coach’s job is to take the talent he has and get them to play in the most strategically and stylistically advantageous way possible. LeBron’s desire to play a certain way — heavy on ball control and high pick-and-roll — may have been too much to overcome. Winning respect from the other players on the roster is near impossible if you can’t get it from your transcendent star. It’s fine to put some blame on LeBron, perhaps Blatt could have been more or done more with some thorough and full-throated support from his best player. But you can fail and still not have it be entirely your fault. However you judge the circumstances and apportion responsibility, the fact is that David Blatt in Cleveland did not work.