CLEVELAND — Before the Cavs’ thrilling home win over the Indiana Pacers late in the regular season, I playfully asked J.B. Bickerstaff why he was so mean to the officials.
Bickerstaff usually spent game nights barking at the referees from the opening tip to the final buzzer. Some nights he yelled so much during the game that it stole his voice. After 4 1/2 years of watching it, I finally asked him about it. I thought about his answer often this week and especially after the Cavs fired him as their head coach.
“It’s a matter of being in the competition and showing your players support,” he said. “When your players feel as if they’ve been wronged, it’s our responsibility as coaches to protect them. … If our guys feel wronged, whether they’re right or wrong, I’m going with them.”
GO DEEPER
Cavaliers fire J.B. Bickerstaff after 4 full seasons
He consistently had his players’ backs. Even when they didn’t have his.
The Cavs parted ways with Bickerstaff on Thursday in a move that was long expected. I first heard rumblings about his job security as far back as last summer, well before the season even began.
I don’t believe Cavs president Koby Altman wanted to fire Bickerstaff. I believe Altman felt he had no choice. The players rule the league in the NBA, and the players in Cleveland collectively decided they’d had enough of their coach.
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It left Altman with two alternatives: Stick by his guy, tell the locker room to shut up and get back to work; or relent, fire the coach and start anew. Choosing the former risked a mutiny in today’s world of player empowerment, particularly with the high stakes of this offseason. Altman chose the latter.
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For all the team issues revealed over the past week, let’s be clear: The Cleveland Cavaliers are a good team and had a good season with a good coach. Their trajectory continues to trend upward. You can dispute the way they manipulated Game 82 and faced Orlando in the first round, but the fact remains that the Cavs went from a Play-In team two years ago to a first-round team last season and now an Eastern Conference semifinalist this year. That’s tangible progress.
There’s a lot of skill here. Whether all of their best pieces fit together is debatable, but they’re a talented team and any roster players they choose to move on from this summer will command value in trade.
The curious part in all of this is the list of Bickerstaff’s sins is relatively mild. Yes, his offense can be unimaginative. Fine. I’ve thought for years they were too pick-and-roll reliant.
And yes, he did treat the Cavs as kids at times, particularly last season, and seemed to make excuses for early exits and poor performances rather than hold them to high standards of a team trying to make a deep playoff run. That especially seemed to haunt him with the early exit to the Knicks, which immediately started the questions about his job security.
I believe they owed it to Bickerstaff to bring him back this year and give him another opportunity with a complete roster. The Cavs simply didn’t have enough shooting last season to compete in the postseason. Altman tried addressing that in free agency, but the moves they made didn’t have the impact expected this postseason.
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I heard complaints that Bickerstaff was too hands on, that he wanted to be in control of everything at practices and shootarounds. Players grumbled about playing time, either too much or too little. Again, all fairly ordinary and pedantic. The most damning criticism, and one that sticks, is the second-half fade most of his teams here experienced. Injuries can be blamed for part of it, but he has to wear that one.
Evan Mobley hasn’t progressed offensively the way the Cavs expected. Some of that falls on coaching. Darius Garland seemed to regress this year. Bickerstaff has to wear that one, too, although Mobley showed in the Boston series what it can look like with him as the lone big on the floor. He never really had that opportunity this season because Jarrett Allen played in 77 straight games to close the season.
There are good guys and not-so-good guys in every profession. Bickerstaff is one of the good guys. He is deeply respected around the league as a good man. That’s what makes his exit difficult on the organization. He isn’t a coach with an enormous ego. He wasn’t locked into a power struggle internally, constantly seeking leverage. He’s an old-school coach who believes in old-school basketball with bigs and physicality on defense.
This was Bickerstaff’s first time going through all of this, too. He had brief interim runs in Houston and Memphis and one full season as head coach of the Grizzlies, but he was nevertheless an inexperienced head coach when he took over the Cavaliers. Mistakes were certainly made, but progress was undeniable.
There was a time the Cavs had another inexperienced head coach who prioritized defense over offense. The Cavs fired him — twice. Now Mike Brown has revitalized the once-woeful Sacramento Kings.
Will that ever be Bickerstaff? Perhaps. Brown, too, irritated players early in his career. He acknowledges now he made plenty of mistakes in his first few years as a head coach, both in Cleveland and even Los Angeles. Brown grew and learned from it and is a better coach for it now. Maybe that will be Bickerstaff one day.
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For now, the Cavs are moving on. Yes, Donovan Mitchell was one of those aggravated by some of Bickerstaff’s tactics and strategies. He wasn’t alone, but a locker room follows its star. If Mitchell had Bickerstaff’s back, everyone else would fall in line. When he didn’t, the others fell into that line, too.
Could Mitchell have a voice in who is selected as the next Cavs coach? Nobody knows at this point if he even wants that responsibility, but it wouldn’t be the first time a superstar picked his own coach. If Mitchell agrees to an extension, that could certainly be part of the hiring package.
Full disclosure: I’ve covered plenty of coach firings, but this one hits a bit different. My first interaction with Bickerstaff when he arrived in town was personal, not professional.
I received an e-mail the summer he arrived from his wife, Nikki. They moved to the same town where I live and she was introducing herself as my son’s new soccer coach on his co-ed team. I laughed.
Bickerstaff was an assistant coach at the time. At the first game, there was J.B. sitting on the sideline in his camping chair. I plopped down next to him and said “Well, let’s get this over with because this is going to be awkward.”
I’d covered the NBA for a decade but our paths never really crossed. I introduced myself and told him we’d be seeing a lot of each other over the next few years.
I’m not around the team every day, so we navigated through the personal, family stuff that fall and it became the same professional coach/media member relationship I’ve had with plenty of other coaches across plenty of other sports. But the origins on this one were unique and gave me a peek into Bickerstaff as a dad and husband before I saw him as a coach.
The Cavs are losing a good man today. He always had his players’ backs. Even when they didn’t have his.
(Top photo of J.B. Bickerstaff talking with Donovan Mitchell: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
