CLEVELAND — There should be no complaining about 60-win teams until May at the earliest, for two reasons.
One, any team good enough to win (at least) 60 out of 82 should make it to May, or the second round of the NBA playoffs. Two, any team to win that many games earned the right to finish up the regular season however it sees fit.
The Cleveland Cavaliers are a team that good, and for most of the last two weeks have been in a general malaise. Their coach, Kenny Atkinson, had largely abided by the rules I laid out above, shrugging, prioritizing health and rest for the postseason, tinkering with lineups, and blaming the schedule makers while his team essentially sleepwalked after piecing together five of the greater months in NBA history.
Well, on Sunday, Atkinson snapped. And maybe his team reached the 60-win mark because of it.
According to two of the Cavs’ top players, Donovan Mitchell and Jarrett Allen, Atkinson came into the locker room before Sunday’s game with the LA Clippers and opened on a light note.
“He came in, talking about Duke and the Final Four and s—, and then he threw (his) water bottle at the (TV) screen,” as Mitchell described it. “Just out of nowhere, he (started screaming).”
“There was a very (explicit) message with a lot of choice words from Kenny that got us fired up,” Allen continued.
The result of Atkinson losing his cool on his team was a 127-122 win over the Clippers — the Cavs’ 60th this season — in what was easily their best performance in quite a while.
Since they won their franchise-record 16th consecutive game on March 14 in Memphis, the Cavs lost, then lost again, then shrugged and yawned collectively, then lost two more, then lost again Friday night in Detroit when the Pistons didn’t have Cade Cunningham.
There were two ways to look at it. The first, which was the talking point for just about every Cavalier in public, was that a combination of fatigue, the schedule, and having won so much in such spectacular and historic fashion all season set the team up for a letdown that almost anyone could see coming.
The other was that the Cavs were not living up to the only real regular-season goal they set for themselves. Amid the winning streaks — they opened the season by winning 15 straight, then ran off 12 in a row a little later, and then, up through that road win in Memphis, tallied off 16 consecutive victories — the first thing they all said was important to them was simply to be playing their best when the playoffs arrived.
And that was shaping up to not be the case.
“We needed to, maybe for psychological reasons, get this game and get it in a good manner,” Atkinson said.
Mitchell was second on the team in scoring (24 points), tied for first with Allen in rebounds (12) and led the club in memorable fourth-quarter hustle plays (at least two I can think of) against the Clippers. One was with 50.1 seconds left and the Cavs ahead by seven when LA’s Norman Powell corralled a loose ball as he fell to the court, but Mitchell wrestled it away from him and then called timeout before anyone else could tie him up.
And then with 8.6 seconds to go, Mitchell knocked the ball away from James Harden, and as it was headed out of bounds, Mitchell raced over and tossed the ball behind his back to a teammate at half court. Mitchell ran so hard after the ball that his momentum took him to the Clippers’ locker room tunnel, and the pass turned out to be a perfect strike to a teammate. The Cavs dribbled out the clock and won the game.
I can’t tell you that Mitchell hasn’t given an effort like that in weeks. But I can say he shot 2-of-18 in one game of the losing streak and 9-of-29 in another.
Allen’s 25 points and 12 boards were notable in part because he was matched against the Clippers’ Ivica Zubac, who in a win over Cleveland in Los Angeles on March 18 went off for 28 points and 20 boards. By comparison, Zubac’s 14 points and 13 rebounds on Sunday seemed pedestrian, especially with Allen playing like that in the middle.
Evan Mobley added 22 points and three blocks, including one on Zubac in the fourth quarter. After he blocked the shot from behind, Mobley patted Zubac on the butt and wagged his finger, à la Dikembe Mutombo, which Zubac didn’t seem to like. He was shouting and raising his arms in the general direction of an official and Mobley, either demanding a foul or a technical foul on Mobley for taunting. Mobley is not one for trash talk, but he feels he needs to boost his Q rating to win NBA Defensive Player of the Year, so Zubac got a finger wagged at his person.
Even Atkinson stepped up his coaching, beyond the impromptu bottle toss. Before the Cavs took the court and before he shattered his team’s collective slumber with the surprise pep talk/outburst, Atkinson sat in the media room explaining to reporters that he was trying to find a balance when navigating the last eight (now seven) games. Play better, sure, but also stay healthy, give Craig Porter Jr. minutes, play Javonte Green, you know, just in case.
This is nothing against either player, but if either of them is to be counted on in the postseason, it would be because of multiple injuries to rotation players, or, to multiple rotation players performing so poorly that Atkinson has no choice but to try them.
If Atkinson wants to use the final stretch of the regular season to find out if they are viable options, that is his prerogative, but it’s also hard to say to the entire team that these games matter while he is experimenting with lineups in the event he has to grab a mallet and shatter the emergency glass in the playoffs.
On Sunday, Porter didn’t play (even though the regular backup point guard, Ty Jerome, was still out with a knee injury) and Green logged just five minutes. Mitchell and Mobley played 37 minutes, and Atkinson otherwise almost exclusively stuck to the kind of player rotation we should expect in the playoffs, where either Mitchell or Darius Garland, and either Mobley or Allen, are on the court at all times.
“I was just thinking, ‘Man, this is a playoff game — this is what the playoffs are going to be like and that group was rolling, stick with that group,’” Atkinson said. “I think if it was game 42, I would have done the normal rotations, but I felt like they had to (win) this one for a lot of reasons.”
Mobley said the Cavs would play for the rest of the season like they did against the Clippers. What they need to do is play like this for four of the remaining seven games, or, I should say, they need a combination of four wins OR Boston Celtics’ losses to secure the No. 1 overall seed in the East.
Cleveland has a 4 1/2 game lead on the Celtics with seven games to play; blowing such an advantage, no matter how much the Cavs say they are prioritizing health for the playoffs, would be a huge blow. Dasani would have to send truckloads of water bottles to town for all the tantrums that would (and should) ensue.
The Cavs host the New York Knicks on Wednesday and then travel to San Antonio to play the Spurs on Friday (Cleveland beat them last week). Then there’s a couple of home games, a tough back-to-back next week in Indianapolis and New York, and a season finale on the last Sunday of the regular season against the Pacers.
Just a couple more nights like the game the Cavs put together on Sunday in the playoffs, and all the good feelings and habits built from late October through March 14 will surely carry over, which is all they’ve said they ever wanted out of the season’s first six months — to set themselves up for the part of the year that counts the most.
Do that, and Atkinson can save his arm.
“That really got us going,” Mitchell said. “He’s fiery. We all knew that about him coming into this job … he reminded me of Rick Pitino in college.”
(Top photo of Donovan Mitchell, left, fighting for a loose ball with Norman Powell: Ken Blaze / Imagn Images)
