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.
Advertisement 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 his shoulders, 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 —.
