Sunday, I wrote here at Crossover Chronicles that the Cleveland Cavaliers’ presence in the 2015 NBA Finals magnified the job Erik Spoelstra did with the Miami Heat.
The basic reasoning behind that claim is simple and hard to refute: Spoelstra did not get the fully mature LeBron James Blatt has in Cleveland. As Cavs general manager David Griffin said in the second half of this 47-minute podcast with Crossover Chronicles writers Sean Woodley and John Cannon, LeBron’s leadership of the 2015 Cavs is so complete that it has taken pressure off everyone else in the trenches — not just the role players, but also head coach David Blatt. Spoelstra saw in 2011 that LeBron still had to evolve as a leader. Both Spo and Dwyane Wade deserve a lot of credit for helping LeBron to evolve not necessarily as a player, but as a teammate. Cleveland and Blatt are beneficiaries of this development.
However, if the first two games of the 2015 Finals have shown us anything, it’s that Blatt — heavily criticized for much of the season (legitimately through the first 40 games, not as much in the next 42) — has really hit his stride. More specifically, he has rebounded extremely well — in fact, as well as humanly possible — from his uncalled timeout at the end of Game 4 against the Chicago Bulls. Blatt really hasn’t made a misstep since then, and his work as a coach has a lot to do with why the Cavs have homecourt advantage coming to Ohio for Game 3 on Tuesday.
Here’s the central reason Blatt’s coaching performance through two games in the Finals (and the playoffs, save Game 4 versus the Bulls) has been so impressive: While losing Kevin Love and now Kyrie Irving — two players who, at the start of the season, figured to make Cleveland a reincarnation of Miami’s “Flying Death Machine” fast-break offense — Blatt has remade the Cavs.
At the start of the campaign back in late October, Cleveland seemed — on paper, at least — to be a team that could regularly score 110 points per game (in other words, the team Golden State became in the regular season). In the first round of the playoffs, with a healthy Love and Kyrie, Cleveland scored rather easily against the Boston Celtics’ defense. Sure, this was the No. 7 seed in the Eastern Conference, a team with a losing record, but Cleveland’s ball movement and spacing were still crisp. Love gave them a floor-spacing mechanism. This team had the pieces to do a lot of damage at the offensive end of the floor.
Then Love got injured, though, and in Game 3 of the Bulls series, Kyrie was plainly limping, and his body never sustained a recovery, healing somewhat due to a week off before the Finals but then suffering a non-contact injury late in Game 1.
Blatt and his staff had to make adjustments, and by gum, the Cavs’ coach has shown his chops. He’s turned this team — conceptually built to score like there’s no tomorrow — and made it into a defensive force. Matthew Dellavedova — written about here and also here at our site — is one of the players Blatt has helped mold into a defensive force, though anyone who saw Delly in college knew he was a dogged kind of player who was always coachable and had the foundation of a capable NBA performer. (Hounding Stephen Curry to the extent he did, though? That’s something even a lot of Delly’s foremost admirers couldn’t have fully expected…)
Delly will rightly receive a ton of national ink for his job on Curry in Game 2 on Sunday night, but while you take in all the Delly coverage from coast to coast, another example of Blatt’s coaching dexterity is James Jones. Let’s take some time to realize that while Jones isn’t likely to toss in 20 points or load up the stat sheet, he’s been a million miles better than he was last year with the Miami Heat.
Jones, for trivia buffs, will long be remembered as “The Guy Other Than LeBron James Who Reached Five Straight NBA Finals For The First Time Since The 1960s Celtics.” He didn’t play in all five Finals, but still, he did join Bron-Bron in five Finals.
Last year, with Miami, Jones was a mop-up man in the Heat’s two most important series, the East Finals war with the Indiana Pacers and then the Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. Jones played just 10 total minutes against the Pacers (in six games), hitting one three-point basket and nothing else. He played 14 minutes against the Spurs, all of them in garbage time. When the Heat were getting blown out in Game 4, Jones — his team down by more than 20 points — scored 11 points in 92 seconds inside the final 2:05 of the fourth quarter. He was a nobody in the postseason. Previous playoff journeys with the Heat were far more productive. It had seemed that Jones was little more than a “Bron Buddy,” a sort of valet for the continuation of King James’s career.
Erik Spoelstra, as underrated as he is as an NBA head coach, could not find a way to get Jones on the floor in meaningful situations in last year’s playoffs.
Blatt, on the other hand, has, and it’s a key reason the Cavs are tied at a game apiece heading to Cleveland on Tuesday.
David Blatt is getting the most out of James Jones and various other role players. He’s remaking Cleveland from the flashy offensive team many expected into a flinty defensive team that is bottling up the Golden State Warriors.
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Jones doesn’t take over games whole, but in an inversion of his 2014 playoff season with the Heat, Jones is getting more minutes, not fewer, as the postseason has marched along. In the East Finals against Atlanta, Jones found 80 minutes in a four-game sweep. Simple math tells you that’s an average of 20 minutes a night. His 10 minutes in six games against Indiana in the 2014 East Finals? Under two minutes per game.
In the first two games of these Finals against Golden State, Jones has played a total of 40 minutes, remaining at that 20-minute average. Moreover, he was on the floor in the fourth quarter, providing capable defense against a Golden State team whose offensive breakthroughs came substantially at the expense of lapses by J.R. Smith. Jones’s defense offered stability to the Cavaliers’ lineup. Being on the court for 23 minutes stitched together a Cleveland team that played only eight players, one of them another Heat refugee, Mike Miller, who found only six minutes of court time.
Sure, Delly was the supporting-cast star, and Timofey Mozgov continues to flourish in these playoffs. LeBron did his thing with a 39-16-11 line, putting him in position to win the Finals MVP award regardless of which team wins the series. However, with all those points having been acknowledged, Cleveland doesn’t win Game 2 without James Jones, his eight points, his 23 minutes, and his professional defense.
Erik Spoelstra did great things with the Miami Heat, in ways that haven’t now received full appreciation.
David Blatt is beginning to author that same narrative for the Cavaliers… and James Jones, a former member of the Heat who couldn’t find a place on the floor last June, is making Blatt look better and better by the minute.
