Every thought for David Blatt had a Boston metaphor last night, perhaps an inevitability for a Framingham native who spent most of his adult life in Israel dreaming about home.
“It feels great, really feels great,” he said of spending yesterday in a downtown hotel. “I looked out my window as I was working at the Boston Common, saw the Statehouse, breathed the fresh New England air and the upcoming winter, and worked on ways to beat the Boston Celtics.”
The Cavaliers coach doesn’t get back here often. So even when he wasn’t talking about his local roots, a lot of those Boston references came up before his team beat the Celtics, his boyhood idols, 122-121.
Consider where Blatt took a question about his reward for going to Cleveland — LeBron James.
“Pleasurable. Great basketball IQ. A guy who like Bill Russell is about the right things — winning, about making his teammates around him better, about making them accountable,” said Blatt. “He’s a man who respects the game and badly wants to bring a championship to Cleveland. What’s not to like.”
Indeed. The former Maccabi Tel Aviv and Russian national coach whose schemes were so renowned — Celtics coach Brad Stevens admitted last night that he had long been a fan “from afar” — now gets to upgrade his system with James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving.
“Part of it is to get these guys to adjust to what I want to do, but part of it is adjusting to what their strengths are,” Blatt said. “When you have great players like Le-Bron, like Kevin Love, like Kyrie Irving, you have to be smart about how you build your system. You want to mold it to a certain extent to what their strengths are. We’re not trying to do the exciting things we did overseas because it looked good there. We’re trying to find a happy medium with what works best for this team.”
Expectations can accelerate that process.
“That’s a typical Boston question,” he said with a smile. “You can take the kid out of Boston but you can’t take Boston out of the kid. I don’t know if that’s the expectation right away. There’s a process in anything you do. I do believe we have the talent and personalities to dream of great things. But you have to be patient.”
Blatt wrapped up his media session by asking if anyone had brought along a cup of clam chowder, something that’s probably not particularly fresh in Cleveland.
A Love affair
Love returned to the scene of the summer’s most over-hyped romance yesterday, and if nothing else, didn’t back away from his appreciation of Boston.
That doesn’t mean Love has the Celtics on his wish list if he opts out of his contract next summer. But the Cavaliers forward did seem to enjoy all of the intrigue stirred up by his visit, including his accidental encounter with Rajon Rondo at Fenway Park.
“Like he said, it was like 38 seconds or whatever number he put on there,” said Love. “I saw him over the summer a couple of times, said hello. It was just kind of in passing.”
But for such a small moment, it certainly went viral in the basketball world.
“Sure, but it’s the world we live in now, stuff like that can happen,” he said. “The fact is my agent (Jeff Schwartz) is a big Red Sox fan. We’ve been planning on that for a long time to come in and check now not only the city but a Red Sox game. We had a great time. We plan on coming back.
“I love the city. I was planning on coming back here, checking out Red Sox games, obviously growing up being a big Boston Celtics fan, it’s fun to play here.”
That led, naturally, to the future. Love can opt out of his contract next summer, and according to one report, may do exactly that if the Cavaliers don’t match expectations this season. Love also denied yesterday that the Lakers — the destination most seem to have adopted for him — are in his plans.
Then again, many teams, the Celtics included, could still come into play.
“It’s tough because I wasn’t a free agent last summer,” said Love. “The potential to be a free agent this summer or next. It’s just one of those things. . . . Basketball, sports in general are huge here. (But) it’s been fantastic being a part of the Cavaliers now. We have a team that’s formidable, has a big presence.”
Smoke signals
Love has had to battle a lot of rumors lately, from his alleged interest in the Lakers to the meaning of a celebration with Irving that culminated in a move by each that appeared to imitate the smoking of a joint. Love later said through the team that they were pretending to twirl mustaches.
“I was going to say whatever we were doing with our hands was about as true as me going to the Lakers next year,” he said. “I don’t know why it was so hard for people to realize that we were actually curling our mustache. I guess because we had our fingers in the wrong place. Looking at the tape, the film don’t lie. It looks like we are doing something bad, but that wasn’t the case. Going to the Lakers, I don’t know where somebody got that.”
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