Prior to today’s contest against the Mavericks, Cavs GM David Griffin spoke with reporters about a number of topics concerning the team, including recent speculation about first-year coach David Blatt. Chris Haynes of The Plain Dealer has the goods and the entire recap is worth a read, but here are just a few of the highlights from Griffin’s chat..
On rumors concerning coach David Blatt’s job security:
This narrative of our coaching situation is truly ridiculous. It is a non-story. It’s a non-narrative. Coach Blatt is our coach. He’s going to remain our coach. Do not write that as a vote of confidence. He never needed one. It was never a question. So don’t write it that way. I heard the entire audio file of LeBron James‘ comments. No more than three different times he said, ‘We’re growing together every day, the team grows together every day and I’m happy with who we have at the helm.’ “But that wasn’t a sexy pool quote, so we kept looking for something else until we could pool something that sounded negative. That narrative is done. No change is being made, period.
On trade activity:
We’re very actively working the phones and doing everything we can to improve the team. At the same time, unfortunately our timing doesn’t always match the timing of everybody else. Until the trade deadline, people typically don’t have a lot of reason to do anything in a specific time. So we’re doing what we can and certainly working every angle we can. This ownership group has always been one to turn over every stone and this is no different.
On the team’s areas of need:
Clearly we came into the year talking about our need for rim protection before Andy got injured. I think it’s very clear that we have a real need for more size. Our team is versatile in that we can play multiple position but we’re not terribly big. I’d like to improve that at multiple positions.
I think it’s clear that point-guard depth is something we need to address. [Matthew Dellavedova] missed 15 games and a big portion of that, we really didn’t have a backup point guard that knew our system and was available to play a lot of minutes, and that’s on me. All of that responsibility lies with me. So I think relative to what we need to do to improve, certainly we could address some talent issues but more than anything else, what we need to do is address our fit and our size.