By Larry Durstin
Just as the talk of Cavalier coach Byron Scott’s job was in jeopardy began to percolate a few weeks ago, The Plain Dealer’s Tom Reed wrote an article saying that Cavs guard and current face-of-the-franchise Kyrie Irving “declined” to discuss Scott’s future with the team.
Sounds innocent enough, but soon the fact that Irving failed to say anything specific about Scott to Reed had morphed into charges that Irving was out to get Scott and was primarily responsible for the locker room discontent that ended up getting the coach fired last week.
Loving this kind of gossipy interpretation of events, the sports-talk hosts ate it up and their callers spit it out. Even the PD’s sainted and ubiquitous Terry Pluto asserted that Irving “refused to comment” about Scott’s future and could have done a better job of “backing” his coach to the media over the final weeks of the season.
Of course, what Reed and Pluto failed to mention is that Irving had said glowing things about Scott numerous times throughout the season and even the day before his “failure” to comment he had praised the coach rather profusely. Yet somehow, Irving’s relative silence on this single occasion was portrayed as possibly the final dagger thrust into Scott’s back.
In the press room before the last home game, a media member loudly and angrily denounced Irving as having “no heart” and vowed that he would not let Irving be deified like LeBron James was. Uh-uh, he won’t get fooled again.
While acknowledging the central role of hyperbole in sports discussions, how someone can state with defiant certainty that the 21-year-old Irving is absent a heart and furthermore will never, ever have one, is somewhat bizarre on its face but speaks to a certain perverse mindset prevalent in the fighting-the-last-war Cleveland sports media.
It’s true that Scott got a raw deal in that the organization clearly had a plan to develop young players, acquire draft picks and free up enough cap space to make major moves this summer. That’s what Scott signed on for and that’s the position the team finds itself in now.
Unfortunately, the dreadful performance of the Cavs over the last month of the season – blowing huge leads at a historical level and looking embarrassingly lost on defense while the coach appeared as if he were mailing it in – made it extremely difficult to give Scott another year, as seemingly unfair as that may be.
But now that it has been “established” that Irving was instrumental in the firing of Scott, the media will turn its convoluted attention to the re-hiring of Mike Brown – a decision which was the right one for the team to make. Brown is a brilliant defensive coach and tireless worker who was canned because the Cavs hoped to appease the duplicitous James into staying. We all know how that worked out.
Of course, Brown’s return is not the narrative the Cleveland media and most Cavs fans really want. They want James to return in 2014, which would be — as has been noted innumerable times locally in print and on the air — the greatest sports story ever told. And that brings us back to Kyrie Irving who, right now, is in the media crosshairs for his apparent failure to support a well-respected coach; his, at times, flippant responses during interviews; his numerous injuries and un-chiseled physique; his nonchalant manner of playing defense and seeming lack of leadership qualities.
If the media and the fans are looking for a whipping boy to bring down, Irving certainly appears to fit the bill. However, Kyrie — due to his superstar potential and friendship with James — may be the key factor in bringing LeBron back and delivering a championship to Cleveland.
It’s difficult to predict how this “greatest” story will play out on the air, in the press and over the Internet in the next year or so. But the belief here is that – fueled by the hopes, fears and fury of a forlorn fandom – it will take many twists and turns, get spun in a dozen different directions at a dizzying and erratic pace and, ultimately, have the same impact on what ends up happening as a bunch of hot air would.
Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com