From reddit, a Grizzlies fan on David Fizdale:
"When times got tough Fizdale showed his true character, and that's where things fell off the rails.
Fiz is a coach who is a smooth talker. He can win you over with speech and if everything is going well, he sounds great. However as the head man, he WAS NOT going to be blamed for any loses. He would continually throw players under the bus in loses. You could tell it grated on several of them and as our season fell apart, the situation became toxic.
He runs his offense and doesn't adapt. His offense is a fast pace offense where everyone has the green light from 3 whether they're good at it or not...and if the players miss shots, see the paragraph above...not his fault.
In Memphis, i think he saw the writing on the wall that the team was going to go into tank mode, and being his first season he didn't want to bea part of it, so he sabotaged his own career in Memphis by holding out Gasol. He wanted to be canned.
I think he's an overrated coach who can be polarizing. On a team like the Warriors, he'd be fantastic and a star. On a middle of the pack team, it's like playing with fire because he could cause the situation to go South fast. Frankly I'm much happier with Bickerstaff than Fiz. Much healthier situation."
Also from reddit, a Cavs fan on Blatt:
"I don’t have any specific articles, but I can share some opinions/memories on him and his hiring/firing.
For starters, I was very excited when we hired him. I was also glad when we fired him. At the time we had a very good roster, in my opinion. But, we were playing like garbage. It had come out that he wasn’t standing up to LeBron. Most importantly he replaced his critisims of LeBron and directed them towards role players, and that rubbed a lot of the locker room the wrong way. He also reportedly was polarizing within the front office and with the media. It may have been unfair of him to be forced into a situation he did not sign up for, but he played a part in his own firing. The decision to fire him was a good one, in my opinion.
That’s not to say everybody disliked him, though. Dellavedova, Mozgov, and others reportedly did like him. Most importantly, Kyrie liked him. One thing I often think about is Kyrie basically saying earlier this season that he is glad to finally be playing under a good coach. I think the change to Lue was a factor in Kyrie eventually asking for a trade. Blatt is more similar to Stevens in coaching style than he is to Lue. Blatt clearly WANTS to run a system. LeBron even praised his offensive sets during training camp prior to his first year back here in Cleveland. (This is the same time everybody was talking about LeBron’s photographic memory). The problem is that playing with LeBron means you are going to run A LOT of iso plays. That works. It even won us a championship. But, we basically abandoned a systematic offense in favor of what we still have now, with the exception of inbounds plays which were fantastic. We went away from Blatt‘s strongest coaching ability.
Blatt was brought in to grow a young promising team and implement a new system. The hope was that he would change the culture put in place by former coaches Mike Brown, Byron Scott, and... Mike Brown again. Fortunately for us, but ultimately unfortunately for Blatt, LeBron came back home, and we traded a lot of assets including young players for Kevin Love. We also later traded other young players and other assets for important role players like Mozgov, Shumpert, and JR Smith. We became an instant championship contender. But this isn’t really what Blatt signed up for. GM at the time, David Griffin, even said had we known LeBron was coming back, Blatt would not have been considered for the job.
It became pretty clear that Blatt, coming over from coaching in Israel, was not used to the enormous spotlight that came with the NBA, but mostly being a part of the same organization as LeBron James. He became testy with the media and rubbed people the wrong way.
This is the only question I have about Blatt if he chooses to coach the largest market in the league and media intensive situation with the Knicks. Is he willing to play the politics of of the media? Will he stand up to his players?
If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then I think he can be a fantastic coach. The decision to fire him was the correct one, but there are times where I wish we still had him as our head coach. But as far as I’m concerned his offense has the potential to be great, and those first two years with the team happened to be the years where are defense actually existed and was actually pretty good at times. Knicks fans should be excited for him. I guess a simple way of describing his ability in the NBA is that he has a low to decent floor, but a pretty high ceiling in this league if he can stick around and implement what he wants to implement. His motion/Princeton offense was beautiful when we actually decided to run it."