With all due respect, the level of creedence I give to anonymous forum posters claiming insider knowledge is one level below what I give to random ESPN journalists, who are at least paid to gather information and put their names behind what they say. You seem to be claiming that Lebron *went to the front office and told them straight out that he wanted Blatt fired*. I find that extremely implausible based on his MO throughout his career and I find it even more wildly implausible that it would have leaked to an anonymous poster on an internet bulletin board while none of the dozens of reporters following NBA basketball ever reported it as a fact. It would have been one of the hottest stories of the year in the NBA.
More broadly, it's pretty clear that early in the year 1) the team was not playing at a high level and Lebron was frustrated, 2) Lebron was not familiar with Blatt, didn't know him, and probably didn't fully trust him. A lot of people have put those two together to claim that Lebron was trying to get Blatt fired. But that doesn't follow at all. Getting a coach fired is a radical, last-resort kind of move that is disruptive to a team and to a player's reputation, and usually results from sharp conflict with a coach, not from team growing pains in a situation where everyone is new to each other. There's no evidence that Lebron and Blatt ever conflicted, or even that Blatt ever told Lebron to do anything Lebron didn't want to do.
And Lebron in particular has never seemed to even care very much who his coaches are -- in all the various situations where he had leverage over a team, he has *never* publicly made any recommendation for a specific coach to be hired, for a coach to let go, etc. When he resigned with the Cavaliers early in his career he didn't call for a coaching change, when he went to free agency in 2010 and 2014 there was never a word either time about the coach he wanted to play for. It was always about the players he wanted to join. And early this year too all his public statements were critical of the *team* and never highlighted anything about the coach -- the team ('we') are soft, playing badly, etc. All he said about Blatt was that the front office had hired him, he was the coach, Lebron accepted that, and he was getting to know Blatt better. Because the fans and the media are always highlighting the role of the coach people interpreted this as implicit criticism -- how could Lebron be so indifferent to Blatt? But I think it was a perfectly straightforward expression of Lebron's view. I think the way he sees it the team's quality gets worked out between the players on the floor, by bonding as a unit through experience and adversity. The coach plays more of a supporting role. That makes sense of the way he talks about his teams and always has.
