David Blatt Compares Coaching Basketball To Being A Fighter Pilot
(CBS) Despite the Cavaliers' buzzer-beating win against the Bulls on Sunday that perhaps saved their season, it's been a rocky past 24 hours for Cleveland coach David Blatt.
After narrowly avoiding two massive coaching blunders in the waning seconds of the game, Blatt has received heavy criticism and questions of whether he's the man to lead the Cavs to the championship they're chasing.
To recap, for those who missed it:
After Chicago's Derrick Rose tied the game at 84-all with a layup with less than 10 seconds left, Blatt tried to call a timeout when Cleveland was out of them. Had the officials granted his request, a technical foul would've been assessed, giving a free thrown and the ball to the Bulls. Luckily for the Cavs, assistant Tyronn Lue pulled Blatt back before the official recognized it.
Then even more puzzlingly with 1.5 seconds left, Blatt initially called for a baseline out of bounds play in which star LeBron James was the inbounder. James quickly overruled the call and told new inbounder Matthew Dellavedova to get him the ball, but the sequence of events understandably had people astonished.
How on earth could you call a play in which the world's best basketball player was rendered useless and, at the very least, unable to even be a decoy on a final-second set?
Perhaps in a way that only he can, Blatt responded to the criticism Monday afternoon with quite the comparison.
"A near-mistake was made and I owned up to it and I own it," Blatt said, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. "A basketball coach makes 150 to 200 critical decisions during the course of a game, something that I think is paralleled only by a fighter pilot. If you do it for 27 years, you're going to blow one or two. And I blew one. Fortunately it didn't cost us.
"As far as the play is concerned, that's just not fair. Sometimes you go with your player's feeling because you believe in what he can do. That at the end of the day was my decision to go with what he felt. That's just not fair."
As far as we know, Blatt has never been a fighter pilot. So perhaps he's not the best one to make this analogy.
But hey, if we've learned anything lately, it's this: David Blatt's going to David Blatt.
