Blatt's bizarre firing, and good not being good enough for King James

In many ways, David Blatt's days have been numbered since the day LeBron James decided to return home, and the rebuilding job Blatt thought he had signed up for immediately became a win-at-all-cost proposition.

Still, Blatt's firing on Friday afternoon, with the Cleveland Cavaliers less than 24 hours removed from dominating the Los Angeles Clippers on national TV, sent shock waves through the basketball world.

The Cavs were eviscerated earlier this week by the same Golden State Warriors team that popped champagne in Cleveland's visiting locker room last June, but surely there has to be more than meets the eye when it comes to Blatt's dismissal.

The Cavs stuck with him despite struggling to play .500 basketball for the entire first half of last season, with reports of unrest and James calling the shots running rampant.

The organization stood behind him when Blatt forgot how many timeouts the team had left - a potentially crippling error in a postseason game, no less - and when he was going to use James as the trigger-man in a late-game play call in the same series.

He kept his job when the battered and bruised Cavs, held together by duct tape and James' indestructible will, fell to the Warriors in The Finals.

Now, with the Cavs sitting comfortably atop the Eastern Conference standings despite star point guard Kyrie Irving missing a significant chunk of the season, with Blatt likely cruising to an All-Star coaching gig, with Cleveland on pace for just the third 60-win season in franchise history, and their 30-11 record bested only by two all-time teams in Golden State and San Antonio, the Cavs have curiously decided the time was right to relieve Blatt of his duties and entrust their championship-level roster to a first-time head coach in Tyronn Lue - who has already been granted a multi-year contract.

Blatt's quality as an NBA head coach can be debated, particularly when any successes he enjoyed will always be overshadowed by the presence of the generation's best player, flanked by two All-Star quality teammates.

At times, Blatt came across as prickly and arrogant with the media. He surely could have better utilized Kevin Love on the offensive end, letting Love operate more from the elbows, and he obviously could have done a better job connecting with his players.

But again, over Blatt's year-and-a-half at the helm, the Cavs have overcome a myriad of crippling injuries and have seamlessly incorporated newly acquired players (think Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith, and Timofey Mozgov), en route to putting themselves in position to be a 60-win, repeat finalist that boasts a top-five defense to complement its top-five offense, despite starting Love, Irving, and Smith.

The very notion that the Cavs are somehow underachieving despite all of that evidence to the contrary only further underscores the curse that comes with the blessing of coaching James.

Unless you're standing atop the mountain with a trophy in hand, good simply isn't good enough.