The New York Knicks announced on Thursday that they have hired former Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt as a basketball operations consultant.
Edited by: TJVNews.com
According to a report on the NBA web site, Blatt, who had a lengthy coaching career overseas and coached the Cavs in 2014-15 and half of the 2015-16 season, will be joining the team.
“I look forward to my next step in my career as I officially retire from coaching and pursue other opportunities in basketball,” Blatt said in a statement released by the Knicks. “I’ve long been intrigued by working in a front office and thank Knicks president Steve Mills and Knicks general manager Scott Perry for the opportunity to be a resource to the basketball operations staff.”
Blatt and Mills played together at Princeton University and have remained friends through the years.
According to an ESPN report, Blatt is also close with Craig Robinson, who is also working in the Knicks’ front office. “David Blatt is a great basketball mind and we look forward to adding him to the organization,” Mills said in a statement.
Blatt played point guard at Princeton University from 1977 to 1981 and played in the Maccabiah Games for the USA national team that won a gold medal in 1981. He then played professional basketball in Israel for nine of the next twelve years, before an injury ended his playing career, and he began coaching full-time.
As a coach, Blatt has been the Israeli Super League Coach of the Year four times (1996, 2002, 2011, and 2014), the Russian Super League Coach of the Year (2005), and the EuroLeague Coach of the Year (2014).
Blatt was born in Boston, grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts, and is Jewish. As a boy, he went to a Reform Temple, and until his Bar Mitzvah he attended Hebrew school twice a week. He says that in Israel he became “much more Jewish and much more Zionist.”
In 1981 Blatt immigrated to Israel, and served in the Israel Defense Forces on the Schneller military base.
Blatt led the Cavaliers to the NBA finals in his first year as coach in 2015. He was fired mid-season in 2016 despite the Cavaliers having the best record in their conference. Tyronn Lue replaced Blatt as coach of the Cavaliers and that group went on to win the NBA championship.
Blatt was hired as the Cleveland Cavaliers coach in 2014 after an extensive search before the franchise knew that LeBron James would be leaving the Miami Heat to return to Cleveland, according to the ESPN report.
ESPN reported that after leaving the NBA, Blatt went to Europe and coached in the Turkish Super League and then coached in the Greek Basket League. Blatt left his post as coach of Olympiakos in October, two months after announcing he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Blatt announced in August he had been diagnosed with MS, which attacks the central nervous system, a few months earlier.
Blatt was in attendance at Knicks practice on Wednesday.
