Lessons from the Bench

We’ve all been thinking a lot about David Blatt, lately. Questions float around in our head… Why isn’t this working? Is it the players? Is it the coach? Is it the waning moon? Did I move my life-size cutout of LeBron too close to my stuffed Moondog, and thus cancel out their energies? It’s true that there’s no single reason the Cavs are struggling. A new person is assigned as blame tampon each week…. Mike Miller, Delly, Sir C.C., Kevin Love, and this week, David Blatt. Having a little bit of coaching experience, myself, I thought I’d offer some advice. You see, I’ve coached girl’s basketball for the last three years as my oldest has matriculated from third to fifth, so I can empathize with what coach Blatt is going through. Coaching in the NBA is a lot like coaching fifth grade girls, right?

Lesson 1: Don’t Jump in Cold

When I first started coaching, I’d never coached on any level before. I’d never even been on a basketball team with a coach (besides myself: calling out screens, switches, cutters, and screaming “that’s a weak call!” …Yeah, I’m that guy at a pickup game). I also read a lot of books and studied up on drills and fundamentals, etc. I’d been fortunate to have watched most of my daughter’s practices the season before I took over, and they were run by an excellent youth coach named Dan. I tried to study everything about how Dan handled the girls: from drills, to attitude, to motivation, and apply it to my first coaching gig. The woman who ran the youth program at the Y was similarly helpful.

What’s this got to do with David Blatt? He could really have benefited from assisting in the NBA first, just to learn about the schedule, pace, and egos. Since that ship has sailed, he needs to study and reach out to some people who’ve coached at this level this level before and take examples from them. Jim Boylan and Tyron Lue are probably fine assistants, but neither of them have worked with LeBron or many of these players. Mike Malone would be a great person for coach Blatt to contact. He’s not affiliated with any NBA team right now, and he had five years as an assistant under Mike Brown during LeBron’s first stint in Cleveland. Blatt could call coach K and ask him how he got Kyrie to play so well this summer. Davis could also, take a look at how Eric Spoelstra and Pat Riley handled LeBron. It seems to me the trick was not indulging his every whim. You know, like how I put the kibosh my daughter’s penchant for fronting after every made basket.

Lesson 2: All Coaches are Schmucks

So when I had my first practice, I was still pretty terrified, and I think the girls knew it. The trick to overcoming that was: don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself, be positive, focus on little details (like not shooting the ball like you’re throwing an overhead pass, or not stepping out of bounds when you’re shooting corner threes — I’m looking at you, Joe Harris), and keep your energy up. Also, candy bars.

You have to find some way take your team’s mind off what a schmuck you are, because every coach — at one point or another — is a schmuck. You’re this person who has to tell these kids how to play these idiotic games so that they can improve, appease their parents, and hopefully, have fun.  The kids may or may not even want to be there (the Andrew Bynum conundrum). For guys like coach K, he terrifies his team with rage face. For me, I made sure the girls were always standing in lines (more difficult than you’d think), running drills, or doing some contest. Basically, I always keeping them busy and rewarding them with Milky Ways for their efforts. I think this could work for the Cavs. Lord knows they could use some motivation on 50-50 balls, and some carbs.

Lesson 3: Be Yourself

At every level of basketball, teams emulate the personality of their head coach. The Cavs have somehow emulated this deferential, timid, genuflecting, overly gregarious, weirdly passive aggressive David Blatt. As IGoHardNow.com’s Cleveland Jackson noted in his brilliant essay, entitled “David Blatt Doesn’t need this S***” (warning, language),this is not the David Blatt any of us have seen before.

David Blatt needs to become himself, that insufferable bastard that was screaming at players during timeouts and sending them into the locker room back in Tel Aviv (that’s in not America, by the way).  The SOB [my edit] that pulls players right off the court, no matter who they are, and sticks their [butts] on the bench with the meanest superglue in existence, no matter what the score.   If they won’t run his system, HE’LL PULL THAT TONGUE OUT OF THEY MOUTH AND STAAAAAAAAB IT WITH A RUSTY SCREWDRIVER.

Kids can spot a fake a mile away. You have to be yourself as a coach, and you have to try to project your best self, or at least your most honest self. You have to coach like you want your team to play. For me it was effort, enthusiasm, positivity, fun, execution, and rebounding. For David Blatt, I feel like if he wants his team to play nasty, he needs to be nasty. Where the hell is this guy?

Lesson 4: When Everyone is in Charge, no One is in Charge

My most recent season was also my most challenging. I was put on a team with a co-coach, a “travel team mom.” Never ever again. Fifth and sixth graders cannot listen to two people at once. I’d be screaming out “Pass! Look for your teammates!” and she’d be screaming out, “Just Drive!” I started practices with stretching and wrist shooting drills, and she took the wrist drills out because “they looked dumb.” When I called out the play ,”Gray!” in a game she yelled behind my back, “‘Gray isn’t working!” She spent the entirety of one game screaming at her daughter. When I missed a game for work, my playbook was changed to “two girls play buddy ball, and everyone else set screens.” I just wanted to quit right there and just let Travel Team Mom coach. But I didn’t quit for my daughter’s sake. As I told her, “You don’t have to sign up, but if you do, you play the whole season.” Plus, everything’s a learning experience. What I learned is that there has to be one person in charge. I don’t have to be that person. I’m happy to be an assistant, but the assistant has to be an extension of the head coach, not an alternative.

You can tell where I’m going with this. The Cavs are a mess in terms of leadership. We’ve all heard the tales of players running to Lue, and “Tyronn Lue calling timeouts literally behind Blatt’s back during games,” in posts like yesterday’s Windhorst article, (which Blatt has since debunked). Tyronn Lue is, I’m sure, a fine assistant. He’s also the top paid assistant in the NBA pro sports and has the title of “Associate Head Coach.” Blatt also insists that Lue wasn’t “forced upon him.” But the fact remains that Blatt doesn’t have assistants that he’s worked with before, and that his assistants are showing him the ropes instead of the other way around, and “Associate Head Coach” has an ominous power-sharing title (though they probably had to give it to him to make it a “promotion” so he could be allowed to leave his Clippers contract.

But in all honesty, Lue isn’t the problem. There’s only one guy running the Cavs right now, and it’s LeBron James. You know, the LeBron who coined, “Chill Mode,” and who stands there and stares at rebounds and blown defensive assignments as if he can stop the inevitable with his mind… If you haven’t seen the post about LeBron’s unacceptable disengagement during timeouts, Tuesday, or the Shove, I suggest you check them out. CtB alum, Patrick Redford sums up the problem with LeBron best.

James’ fingerprints are all over the roster. When he came back to Cleveland, James brought his aging buddies Mike Miller and James Jones with him. He helped persuade Love to agree to re-sign with the Cavs and pushed the Love-Wiggins swap. LeBron pictures himself an auteur, the kind of player who can take over a game, sculpt a roster, and engineer a play…

It speaks to the opaque, passive aggressive mystery of LeBron James the human person that he has unprecedented authorship of his own basketball experience, yet it never seems to please him. When he’s shooting eye-daggers at Kevin Love, an underachiever he had a hand in flipping the #1 pick for, it feels weird because Love is supposed to be his guy to some degree. If LeBron is getting what he wanted in the locker room and on the floor, why does he appear so unsatisfied?

People have argued that the solution is to make LeBron player-coach so he has to own all this, himself. Let me remind everyone that the CBA forbids this. It would be a mess for collective bargaining. In a way, though, it would avoid a lot of silly pretense if the Cavs do let Blatt go. They wouldn’t have to install a LePuppet.

The problem boils down to the fact that there are five different major powers on the Cavs: Blatt, Lue, LeBron, Griffin, and Gilbert, and no one is really sure who is in charge and who reports to who. If you showed this to a military man (or woman), he’d laugh and tell you that you’re in a clusterf… The Cavs have to establish a hierarchy, cause this is not going to work until they do. I hear Travel Team Mom is looking for a gig.

Lesson 5: What to do About Attitude Problems

When I watched my daughter’s first practice, I noticed there was one girl who rarely engaged, did her own thing, and was off shooting on her own most of the time. Coach Dan let her do her own thing and integrate when it worked for her. You can’t kick girls out of practice unless they’re complete chuckleheads, but you also have to figure out a way to deal with them. “Hands off,” was Dan’s approach with that girl. A year ago, I had my own attitude problem girl, who would get all goofy, quit drills in the middle, and just act bizarrely. She ended up crying at the end of one practice. In games, I was sort of fortunate that she wasn’t very good and usually, after three uncalled travels, gave the ball up (usually to the other team). Most of her teammates avoided passing to her, too. We got through the season.

Cavs seem stuck in a similar situation. Just like I can’t kick a girl off a youth basketball team (nor would I want to), the guy with the attitude problem is the guy who they can’t get rid of. I’ve never had to deal with an attitude problem with the best player on the team, let alone the best player in the world. I don’t even know how I’d do it. I know that my own daughter liked to shoot me death stares for a while when I’d tell her to run down the court, or point out what girl she should be guarding. I didn’t want to publicly berate her, but I was furious. Fortunately, my wife was too. On the way home that night, she chewed her a new one, and my daughter spent the next hour balling.

I know one way to solve attitude problems is to tear someone a new one and make an example out of them. It’s a heck of a lot easier when you can kick your own daughter out of practice because she won’t go run laps. Everyone else seems to step into line. So maybe the Cavs need to call up Gloria James and tell her that James can’t stare disgustedly at his teammates when LeBron’s man is getting offensive rebounds. She needs to take a long drive with her son and tell him to stop being such an A-Hole. She can repeat the speech Mrs. Smith gave my daughter.

“What’s my job in life?”

“To make sure I don’t grow up to be a jerk.”

“How am I doing right now?”

(Sobbing)… “Not very well.”

If Gloria won’t have this talk with LeBron, I’m sure my wife will.

Lesson 6: It Can Always be Worse. It Can Always be Better. Trust the Process.

The worst game of my life was last fall. We didn’t have five girls till 15 seconds before tipoff. Everyone was frazzled. We got killed. My “Crushers” got the ball stolen on the high post hand-off every single time. That wasn’t the worst part. It ended in tears. The first sobbing fit was my daughter’s. After 200 people in a gym were yelling for her to cover little Cindy Lou, who was standing alone under the basket, Cindy Lou caught the ball made her first basket (ever). A mixture of cringes and cheers rained down. As I said, “You’ve got to cover your girl!” my 10-year-old started crying and fell into my arms. A substitution was requested. Later, Travel Mom’s kid got popped in the nose with the ball. With a bright red face, she broke down — less from the pain, I think, and more from the incessant yelling and the worry of disappointment. At game’s end, my center, who showed up just at tipoff, and had to lace up her shoes during a first quarter timeout, had gone about 2-20 despite being the tallest, most coordinated big in the league. I said something along the lines of, “don’t worry about it. We’ll do better next game,” and she just lost it in an explosion of tears. “Well, that sucked,” I thought as I drove home.

The lost games are bad, but worst thing of the season for the Cavs so far, was losing Andy. After the Phoenix game and the Sixers game, I said, “Well, at least nobody got hurt.” So it can always be worse. It’s just basketball. Then Andy got hurt. But nobody died. Nobody’s life is ruined. Injuries happen, but these are millionaires we’re talking about. They will survive. Conversely, things can always be better, too. No one has ever played a perfect game of basketball. No matter how well or poorly you played, there’s always room to improve in the next game. I think that’s the thing I love about 5th grade girl’s basketball. I can get more excited over one great pass than all layups in a lopsided loss scored by an opponent my wife calls, “Moose.” You should have seen how excited I got the first time my daughter or her best friend scored a basket. There’s few greater joys than watching someone you’ve coached improve.

And that’s the thing about “process.” Yes it’s cliché, but that’s what you have to take joy in. Part of the Cavs problem is that they’re not enjoying the process. This season, these games are a means to an end: a postseason, a new contract, a business empire, a championship.” I extolled the virtue of the process in my favorite piece that I’ve written for CtB.

And I guess, what I’m hoping for, what I’m asking, is for everyone to step back from the brink. Remember the process. Enjoy the process. Live in the moment. Be the fan, the coach, the player that remembers and enjoys each day you get to do or watch something you love, and if you don’t enjoy it, and if it only brings you misery, go do something else… There are few greater joys than watching people you care about practice and get better at something through teaching, listening, and working. There’s a divine joy in the elan of seeing someone do something they’ve never done before, something they previously thought impossible, or something honed through pure dedication, whether that be watching an eight-year-old make her first layup or seeing a goofy seven foot center correctly hedge a pick and roll.

That’s what the process means. It means, stop thinking about the end result. Focus on this play, this shot, this defense, this fast break, this screen, this game. Do your best now, in the moment, and don’t worry about some far-off goal. Sublimate yourself to your role in the moment, here, now, with your team, your friends, your coach, your players, etc. Forget what a schmuck you are, and what a schmuck your coach is, and just try hard. That’s all any coach can ask of a player, and all any fan can ask of a team.