David Blatt, Coach Without a Team

David Blatt might be a fine coach, but that's not his job. He's on the sidelines, like a besuited apparition. He's in a post-game interview, being contradicted minutes later by his best player. He's in the huddle, strategizing with no one in particular. Head coach is not really the term for it; Blatt is something like a Senior Largely Ignored Consultant or Vice President in Charge of Pointing Purposefully. He's at the top of his field in terms of pantomiming coachily, but his machinations have a dubious effect. His ability to perform the tasks he was initially hired for remains purely theoretical.

He isn't good at his current gig, whatever it is. At the season's outset, his Princeton offense was ditched in favor of a LeBron James-approved, pick and roll-heavy scheme, which was either a sign of eroding authority to come or an indication that Blatt never had any in the first place. Buzz abounded in December, from well-sourced reporters Brian Windhorst and Marc Stein, that Blatt had, with impressive rapidity, lost the locker room. Subsequent success aside, It doesn't really appear the pseudo-boss ever won it back.

Even as the team found their footing and bullied their way through the league all spring, the players—LeBron especially—seemed to ignore Blatt, electing to converse during games with lead assistant Ty Lue instead. (This is the same Ty Lue who was apparently calling timeouts from the bench earlier in the season.) The broad public perception as the Cavs rounded into form was that LeBron had gotten healthy, and Kyrie Irving had gotten comfortable, not that Blatt had made any profound discovery.

There was the whole Blatt Parroting LeBron's Play Calls controversy, which may have been a story about nothing, but reinforced the impression that Blatt is less the captain of the ship than a passenger who sees which way the vessel is turning, then ostentatiously pretends that it did so under his instruction. He doesn't help himself in press conferences, either. Blatt has a sometimes-appealing matter-of-factness about him, but he also regularly hands the press quotes that make him look clueless, mistaking a simple turn of phrase for a punchline, or a sliver of self-deprecation for charm. He's stubbornly idiosyncratic in a way only entrenched, consensus geniuses like Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson are allowed to be. It's a bold choice, and probably a poor one.

But regardless of how ill-suited Blatt is for the role in which he's struggling, his is a shitty, impossible, thankless job. He came to the NBA after a decorated career in Europe to coach up what was a presently awful but broadly promising Cavs squad that desperately needed someone to organize and mentor them. It's not beyond reason to expect that Blatt might have been an excellent fit for a team built around Kyrie Irving and Andrew Wiggins. Instead, he arrived not as a keen and respected basketball mind, but as The Guy LeBron Didn't Choose. He had to lead without influence from the jump, barely a collaborator on a project he was supposed to direct.

Due to the necessarily improvisational nature of the sport and the fact that NBA players recognized some time ago that a coach's power can be usurped by a simple y'know what? fuck this guy, even the league's most respected skippers only have so much control over their squads. Surely, most of the gesticulating and shouting Tom Thibodeau does during the course of the game is white noise to Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah. Even when they're able to make out what Thibs is saying, his players occasionally ignore his directives because they think they see something Thibs doesn't. They're not trying to undermine their coach; they're just trusting their instincts.

Taken as discrete events, neither David Blatt nearly sinking the Cavs in Game 4 of their second round series against the Bulls by calling a timeout his team didn't have, nor the final play he drew up being nixed by LeBron are an indictment of Blatt's coaching acumen. Brainfarts happen, and it's not unusual for a star to demand the ball in a game's closing seconds. But taken in the context of a season in which Blatt has often cut a disconnected figure, it's more evidence that what he seems like—an overmatched, inflexible outsider who has been put in a position to fail—is precisely what he is. He has no command over his team. He hasn't been granted any.

When a coach doesn't have the trust or respect of the players, he becomes cringe-humor sitcom fare. That's where and what David Blatt is right now, or at least that is the lens through which his every action is viewed. He's bravely still trying to prove his expertise, and to all appearances, being shut down by side-eye and thousand-yard stares, mocked by an endless loop of Vines and mean tweets. How much of this he has earned is unclear—though comparing himself to a fighter pilot is a horrible, half-baked metaphor that he alone owns—as are his employment prospects for next season.

There is nothing fixable about Blatt's predicament in the here and now. He's going to keep standing on those sidelines, conducting an uncaring orchestra, until the Cavs get bounced from the postseason. Then he'll either have a long chat with management and LeBron (those two not being totally distinct entities) over the summer and come to an understanding, or he will find a new job somewhere else: a real one, coaching a basketball team in some capacity. Because Blatt doesn't seem to be doing anything like that these days. It's difficult to watch.