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'Greed is good': Cavs coach compares LeBron to Gordon Gekko

As far as rebounds are concerned, there’s no room for sharing.

LEBRON JAMES IS having his worst rebounding season since his rookie year.

It’s not really his fault. He’s playing less power forward than he did in Miami in each of the last two years. When he’s on the court, he’s typically joined by two of three high-volume rebounds — Kevin Love, Anderson Varejao, and Tristan Thompson — who gobble up all available rebounds.

Before Cleveland’s 97-88 win over Charlotte on Monday night, coach David Blatt went on a riff about how Lebron should look at rebounding from a mental point of view. His point: players should be unapologetically selfish about rebounding. There’s no point in deferring to a teammate, just be greedy and grab every board you can.

To make this point, he went on a tangent about the Gordon Gekko character from “Wall Street.” The way Joe Vardon of Northeast Ohio Media Group describes it, Blatt was just holding court with reporters and no one really knew where he was going with it.

Here’s Blatt’s riff from Vardon:

“Did you ever see the movie Wall Street? That was a great movie, right? There was that point in the movie where Michael Douglas (Gekko) says to his young protégé, uh, (actor Charlie) Sheen, he says ‘ greed is good.’”

“(It) is a terrible thing to say, of course. But in this case, if I were to apply that to the idea of rebounding, I would say greed is good. That there’s no reason to take a back seat to anybody in terms of rebounding. You should try to get the ball and be as greedy about it as you possibly can at all times.

“I don’t think LeBron is being any less aggressive about rebounding than he was before because he understands, he saw the movie. He understands greediness.”

There you have it. Blatt appears to be settling in nicely after his rough start.

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