By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
David Blatt lost his job with the Cavs, but the president of the NBA Coaches Association, Maverick coach Rick Carlisle and coaching legend Gregg Popovich were ready support him.
As Carlisle said to the local press of Dallas: “It’s a shocker. It’s just a real shocker. I’ve gotten to know David in the last year and a half since he came over and he’s one of the greatest coaches in European history. The ironic thing about this is he adjusted and adapted to the NBA game, in my opinion, much quicker than any of us could have adjusted and adapted to the European game”.
“I mean, he did a tremendous job just from a strategic standpoint. If you look at his record, this is bizarre, but he has the second-best coaching record (percentage-wise) of all time in the NBA behind Phil Jackson. He’s got a higher winning percentage than Red Auerbach and Pat Riley, a whole laundry list of the greatest coaches ever. The bottom line with this is that I know a couple of things about coaching in this league. I know integrity. And I know knowledge. I can’t speak to the internal things that (might) have gone on in Cleveland. I’ve read some of the comments that came from the Cavaliers. Teams have a right to make changes”.
“But David Blatt is going to be a highly sought-after coach this summer, if an when there are openings _ if he chooses to stay. After this, you just hope a guy like this is still open to coaching in the NBA. I’ve coached against him many times. We had two exhibitions and we’ve had three regular-season game and we lost an overtime game to him and their team last week”.
“He’s done some phenomenal things adjusting to this league. I’m embarrassed for our league that something like this could happen. It’s just bizarre. Now is Tyronn Lue going to coach the All-Star Game? It just leaves you with a bit of an empty feeling. Because Blatt’s a great guy and he did a great job there”.
“Change is an absolute in this business. Chuck Daly once said that the NBA is a league of dynamic change and great opportunity. When you see things like this, you never come to grips with such a statement, it’s just really true. Blatt’s a great guy and one of the best coaches in history. He’ll be a Hall of Fame coach, no question, just purely on his European record and international record and Olympic record. But in the meantime, everybody will have opinions and so forth. The other side of it is, a good man perhaps has been liberated and is now going to have some great options and he’ll find a much better situation here if he wants it. And a guy like him deserves that.”
Every coach in the NBA supported Blatt and San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich said prior to his team’s game on Friday night: “All of us in the business know how it works. We all feel badly when it happens to a colleague. He (Blatt) is a heck of a coach (but) circumstances often dictate what happens to certain coaches that have nothing to do with their record.”