While I'm sure many will outright reject my premise, they are more than welcome to do it. My premise is that Blatt doesn't get credit for much of the victories because there's not a lot for him to do right now. Looks to me like after the first half of Game 1 of the Chi series, someone else on the staff started doing most of the defense planning. Lebron has been motivating the players and dictating much of the offense for quite a while. Blatt is still picking who goes into the games, but with Kyrie & Love out, Blatt is kind of in a spot where there's not much for him to do. There's only a handful lineups that make sense.
So Blatt is limited to doing 4 things right now:
- Call in-bounds plays. He usually does a good job but screwed up 3 in a row at the end of Game 4 of the Chi series and almost screwed up the last one before Lebron & JR encouraged alternative suggestions.
- Talk to the media. "[My job] is only paralleled by a fighter pilot"
- Call time outs. I can't think of any notable mistakes he made here.
- Lineup decisions have been simplified down to the the complexity of a free iphone game. Tap the right side to replace Mozgov with Jones. Swipe the left side to cycle through Shump, Delly, and Smith. He's generally done a pretty good job with this in the Atlanta series. Last night got a little odd once Atlanta started throwing out mini lineups. I'll give him a break for last night that because the Refs were calling a lot of stuff for ATL after dirty little wHorford got ejected. It's hard to make things work when your guys get in foul trouble for no reason.
Blatt deserves some gets some credit right now because he has not screwed up in a while, but that's not the same thing as significant responsibility.
What can he do to earn significant responsibility? Based on my premise, not much right now because there's not much he can do right now. He's kind of a lame duck coach in this series, and yes, I think that if the season ended in the ECF, there's a very good chance that Blatt would have been fired. When Lebron can be free agent this summer and calls out the coach during full playoff lock-down bunker mentality mode, there is an issue, and Gilbert tweets don't really make it untrue, they are just a necessary move to help the team get back to playing basketball.
Fortunately for Blatt, the season is not over yet. Assuming that the Cavs make it to the finals and Kyrie comes back, Blatt will get a chance to redeem himself. He'll have more flexibility in the rotations and finding the right rotations against Goldenstate will take some genius, because there is a lot of talent on the other team. It will be very clear if the Cavs are playing great rotations or "what's usually good enough" rotations. If the Cavs win 3 games in the finals, I'll say that Blatt played a big part in the winning. It will also go a long way towards him staying in Cleveland next year.
