OhayoKD wrote:Preamble: I started typing this a while back but lost-track as a bunch of professional, social, and creative commitments came up. Was considering just dropping things but with the TOP 100 upon us, and multiple posters(myself included) explicitly stating that they were considering “off-court impact” as a factor, I figured I’d finish.
Excuse the late reply(real life strikes again!) but
Doctor MJ wrote:Let me fix that for you:
True.
Doctor MJ wrote:I'd have been much wiser to keep my mouth shut.
Yeah, uh...
This is "nuance and context"
Jalengreen wrote:I think we should make sure we're not disregarding the possibility of a coach developing over time. If you think it was already apparent after two seasons (two first round exits) at head coach that Spoelstra had an all-time great basketball intellect, then we can discuss that. Otherwise, it might be worth considering the possibility that LeBron was unimpressed because Spoelstra wasn't as impressive as he is in 2023 and LeBron sought to maximize the Heat's championship probability by bringing in a proven championship coach for a win now team.
Heej wrote:2014 is another great point actually. I consider 2011 to be Spo's weakest showing as a coach, but 2014 vs the Spurs was just as bad. It got to the point where even the most basic ESPN analyst articles were wondering why Spo stubbornly stuck to the blitzing scheme (which has rapidly evolved to becoming the worst defensive alignment in modern basketball, and akin to signing your death warrant if employed for a full playoff series nowadays vs almost any competent team), when Carlisle in the FIRST ROUND already exposed the optimal strategy of switching the Parker Duncan PnRs and only having 2 defenders in the play, eventually forcing the Spurs to a Game 7 (albeit needing a Vince Carter gamewinner to do so iirc)
This is
not:
Doctor MJ wrote:Drafting/coaching a Duncan will get you into the Hall. Drafting/coaching a LeBron will get you fired
Notice how the quoted bit breaks down when we apply basic facts?(Spo, Lue, and Brown were not fired coaching Lebron). Notice how the reasoning you apply with Spo’s post-lebron career is not applied to Vogel or Blatt’s post-lebron career? These are internal inconsistencies. They signal you haven’t thought things through.
The issue isn't that you're criticizing Lebron, it's that you leapt before looking. For example...
He made his choices, and then he either killed the coach or tried to kill the coach whenever there was a struggle.
Sounds good. The only issue is we can immediately refute this with...David Blatt.
ESPN wrote:"We got static, without question," Blatt said. "We're good when we move the ball. We're really good when we move the ball. And when we play without motion and without ball energy, I like to call it, then that's what it looks like. That is exactly what happened."
...
Blatt did not call out Irving by name, but the fourth-year guard dissected his own play. "It starts with me and my patience in the half court and the full court," Irving said. "There were some plays that we were running, just what I see out there and exploiting mismatches and trying to do the best I can on making this team go."
Lebron wrote:I think my relationship with the coach continues to get better and better every day. It's just two months of us being together. I don't know him fully, he doesn't know me fully, he doesn't know any of the guys fully, and that's to be expected. It's our first year together. But he has our attention. ...
I'm happy who we have at our helm. He's our coach. For it to make a feud between me and Blatt or the team and Blatt, it's just to sell. To sell and get people to read it and put something at the bottom of the ticker. That's all it is.
Cavaliers Nation wrote:“I think a lot of people get it misconstrued on what it takes to win, you know just scoring or just going out and trying to will it yourself,” he added.
James went on to say, “There’s a lot of bad habits (that have) been built up the past couple years. When you play that style of basketball, it takes a lot to get it up out of you.”
Marion agreed with James, saying “we’re losing individually right now.” He said the “ball is sticking too much” on offense and better defense was needed, too.
After scoring just 11 points in Tuesday night’s 101-82 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James made some eyebrow-raising comments about why he didn’t try to take greater control when the game was still in question.
“I’m trying to do other things, to try to instill what it takes to win,” said James. “My mission is not a one-game thing. We have to do multiple things to win.”
Washington Post wrote:Waiters had rifts with members of the organization, most notably first-year Coach David Blatt and up-and-coming star Kyrie Irving.
Fox Sports Ohio’s Sam Amico reported Waiters didn’t like the off-guard role Blatt gave to him in the season.
Waiters prefers to have the ball in his hands, but that is primarily the job for Irving, Cleveland’s former No. 1 overall pick. Waiters and Irving reportedly had chemistry issues in their two-and-a-half years together, and the Bleacher Report article stated that is mainly because Waiters thought he was better than Irving, despite other reports from those close to the Cavaliers organization that the two are friends.
To recap, in 2015...
-> The Cavs struggled with Lebron defending Blatt as opposed to "killing" him
-> Lebron went out of his way to scout Blatt's sets in the Israeli League
-> Lebron encouraged his teammates to buy into blatt's system, insisted on being patient as opposed to trying to 'take over" for short-term gain, even as the Cavs struggled at the start
-> Saw the Cavs go
42-5 under Blatt with their big-three on the court
-> Led the cavs to a
+10psrs postseason run despite love and kyrie missing large chunks of the playoffs
If you want to mark 2016 as evidence of "coach-killing" for Lebron, even though Cleveland's new coach(one Lebron has repeatedly advocated for at and post-Cleveland), is now widely considered one of the best in the league and successfully guided Cleveland to a championship, fine, but "lebron will get you fired, lebron does not respect coaches, and lebron is a coach-killer" is not something you can reasonably extrapolate as a general truth without an extremely selective lens. Lebron did not "kill the coach" when they struggled in 2015. He did not "kill the coach" when the Lakers initially struggled in 2019. He did not “kill the coach” when Ham struggled to start 23. He did not “kill” ty lue when they struggled through stretches of 2016 and 2018.
Even Blatt's firing being a matter of Lebron's "coachability" is pretty questionable given that the most commonly cited issue was in-game play-calling, and it was an issue explicitly noted by multiple non-LeBron cavaliers, and something Blatt himself has admitted fault in:
“The whole team was looking at each other crazy like, ‘You do know we got this guy LeBron over here right?’” Haywood said. “But the play was supposed to be for J.R. Bron drew up a play where basically it looked like he was going to set a screen and he pops out to the corner real quick. And he drew it up and it worked.”
— -- CLEVELAND -- The day after his team's biggest win of the season, Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt had to address several controversies that sprang up in the wake of the buzzer-beating victory over the Chicago Bulls.
Specifically, Blatt avoided potential disaster when he called for a timeout with nine seconds to play when the Cavs didn't have any. Officials, who knew the Cavs were out of timeouts, did not look to the bench and missed the call. Assistant coach Tyronn Lue came off the bench to stop Blatt from signaling further.
Blatt wrote:Usually don't lose track of them, that's usually what happens," Blatt said. "Matter of fact, that's never happened before in my time as a coach. Good thing I had great guys behind me to bail me out and then a great player to bail us all out with a terrific shot. ... A near-mistake was made and I owned up to it and I own it. 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.
The second-hand sources asserting Lebron "kicked around" Blatt specifically cite Lebron occasionally calling for play-calls or adjustments, a tactic which has repeatedly won his team's playoff-games...
;t=57s
...and has explicitly been noted as a positive both by Lebron's teammates and David Blatt himself. Even
if it was a negative and the Cavs replacing Blatt with a coach currently considered elite at in-game coaching was a bad-call, this does not come close to establishing that Lebron "consistently" disrespects coaches or does not consider coaching important. You claim Lebron has "never shown signs" of thinking coaching matters, but he has repeatedly expressed a desire to be coached by Popavich, actively petitioned for the Lakers to hire Ty Lue, publicly called-out his team for not buying into Blatt's "flexible" "high ball-energy" offense, has gone along with Vogel, Ham and Spo playing him as a 5 and a 4, and has most recently allowed Ham to use him as an off-ball spacer for significant stretches of playoff games.
Simply put, there's little to suggest the things you assert "always" are true happen even occur "most" of the time. Since 2000, the average nba-coach lasts
2.4 years(bleacher report,
1.8 excluding Popavich). Even if you want to give lebron the entirety of the responsibility of his fo's decision-making, 9/20 is
2.2 years. As for actual firings, there have been 5 which would put him well above the curve at
4.2.
Of his coaches, 2 seem like safe bets for the hall-of-fame and neither were highly rated prior to their tenures with Lebron. I don't see much to support the notion Lebron is bad for the shelf-life of an nba coach. More importantly, I'm also not seeing much to support the notion that Lebron has a negative net-effect on how well coached a team will be. That he "leaves" is only meaningful if you think there's more value in hoarding success as opposed to spreading the wealth.
As of now, the only real example you have of Lebron being a "coach-killer"(as a discernible negative) is the aforementioned interaction with an at-the-time unproven rookie. You have also for made little mention of when firings have been followed by significant team-wide improvement(malone, walton, vogel, blatt, and silas). Counting spo as a guy who would have been fired if Lebron had his way, and assuming "Lebron should be held responsible for his front-offices decisions and corresponding team-success", Lebron "getting coaches fired" has hit at an 83% clip. If what you are criticizing him for generates winning more often then it inhibits winning, then it should be marked as a positive. If that somehow doesn’t demonstrate Lebron is “reasonable” then why does being “reasonable” even matter here?
Moreover I don’t understand the decision to frame Lebron as if his general-level of team success is sub-par…
He doesn't get to blame bad situations for this, given that he's hand-picked his situations more than any other in NBA history with the possible exception of players who came after him.
Are we also then giving him more credit for his general success than we would any other player? Lebron has had enough playoff wins to average a conference final-trip over the course of 20-years. To my knowledge there are two other players who were drafted to bad situations in your top 10(Hakeem and KG). Both look similarly valuable to Jordan by “isolated influence on winning”, and one was a significantly less volatile locker room presence.
Combined they managed
3 championships in
39 years. Lebron hit
3 in
13 and
4 in
17. That includes 3 years where he was college-aged(which we could reasonably expect Hakeem to do worse in).
Post-Decision, CP3, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, and Kevin Durant have all made similar use of player-movement with the latter 3 all being drafted into significantly better situations. Together, in
63seasons of basketball, they have only matched Lebron’s
4.
What is the rationale by which Lebron’s off-court decisions haven’t been conducive to winning? What is the rationale by which players who did not have to make similar choices would have made better ones?
The one and only time Jordan was handed the opportunity/burden of Lebron-like decision-making, he ended up blowing up a franchise. Even Duncan was willing to trade Popavich for Doc Rivers. Did he not see the value of coaching?
It doesn’t really matter how Lebron compares to “optimal”. What matters is how he compares to however you are considering when you mark Le-GM as a comparative negative or positive. And these comparisons are not going to be anything but misleading if you’re just going to cherrypick the parts of a player’s “off-court portfolio” you want to see and then leap here and there so they lead to a conclusion you’re looking for(eg: “Lebron ruined David Blatt!”).
That said Doc, to your credit, you offered some reasoning with examples you thought justified what you were asserting. Can’t say the same with…
Loufan wrote:It's always been so strange to me that LeBron fans feel the need to so rigorously defend LeBron off the court. Like news flash guys NBA superstars by and large are massive åssholes. Jordan was an åsshole too this is not some biased irrational anti LeBron agenda (chill with the victim complex btw). Like you don't have to pretend LeBron is some great guy for him to be the greatest basketball player ever no one is going to buy that bridge anyway especially given the insane amount of media coverage we see of him. We all get to see what an egomaniac he is everyday.
Where did “nba superstars by and large are massive ****” come from? What exactly are you looking at to derive he is an “egomaniac every day”?
Let’s compare this with what we got from the “mob”
Heej wrote:Paul Silas (03-05) - absolutely not an assassination. LeBron was a 2nd year player at this point who loved Paul Silas. I credit him with 0 assassinations (henceforth referred to as A's) and CLE with 1 A
0-1 LeBron/Franchise
Brendan Malone (finished 05 as interim head coach) - I'll credit LeBron and the Cavs with 0.5A each here given that they finished 18-8 and just to indulge the opposition just so I can demonstrate how casual that title is, and to discourage people on this board from using coach killer so flippantly going forward.
0.5-1.5
Mike Brown (05-10) - Half each. LeBron screwed him by leaving and the Cavs blinked instead of letting him develop thru a rebuild which would've played out beautifully for them given what he's become this year.
1-2
Spo No question an "assassination attempt" albeit a VERY weak one. But like I said I'm doing my best to indulge the narrative on these ones.
2-2
David Blatt (14-15) - I'm sorry, but LeBron tried his hardest protect this guy. More than any coach I've ever seen him with tbh other than T Lue. By this point he's matured enough to know he needed stability and every article from the time was LeBron trying his hardest to boost him up. I honestly think Blatt screwed himself (got the yips when he came over) like another coach we'll see later in this post, so I won't credit either LeBron or the Cavs in this
2-2-1
Ty Lue (15 interim - 18) - Let's be real here, this is the most favored coach LeBron has ever had. This is easily on the Cavs, unless we're blaming him for leaving. To keep criteria consistent, even though I think the Cavs deserve 100% blame for bumbling this situation I'll put both at 0.5 even though this is undeserved.
2.5-2.5-1
Luke Walton (18-19)- Lets just all agree Walton simply is not head coaching material just yet.
2.5-2.5-2
Frank Vogel (19-22) - LeBron never tried to undermine this guy, this was purely the Lakers. I'm not subscribing to weird roundabout reasoning like blaming LeGM for getting Westbrook leading to a butterfly effect of his firing. You're a coach, do your job with the players you have. And as a franchise why are you panicking and blowing up your team because of an outlier short off-season and injuries screwing a championship core. This is 50/50 Vogel/Lakers for me.
2.5-3-2.5
Darvin Ham (22-present) - Highly doubt Bron tries to off this guy. He hasn't loved a coach this much since Lue. TBD
2.5-3-2.5
So over a 20 year career spanning 8 fired head coaches, even subscribing to the worst mental gymnastics possible I can't even find fault in half those firings. Realistically the amount of blame he deserves is even less than that.
This is the only post from the discussion that covered each and every coach Lebron has played with yet it was not acknowledged or addressed by
any of the 4 posters running with “Lebron-is-a-coach-killer”. Tell me again, who is pretending?
We are, again, making assertions
we cannot hope to defend. And
yet again people who disagree are characterized as a “mob”.
Maybe there wouldn’t have been “backlash” for this a year ago. But
maybe, that’s just proof that standards have improved.
Don't get me wrong, Doc’s combination of complex sentence structure, decently integrated passive-tense, and high-octane word-choice makes for a fun read. But being a wordsmith is not the same as being impartial. Nor is typing with a blunt flow-of-consciousness-type-whatever an indication that Heej is arguing from bias.
Saying something
with style does not make it reasonable. And when such confident assertions are met with counter-points, factual corrections, and actual “nuance and context” only for you(general) to regret upsetting a fanbase…the right question to ask isn’t
“are they biased?”. The right question to ask is
“am I?”.
