CLEVELAND — Cleveland Cavaliers’ head coach Kenny Atkinson used his media availability before Game 2 against the Indiana Pacers last year to complain about how officiating changes drastically from the regular season to the playoffs.
“I know there’s this rhetoric going around the league about, you know, ‘Oh man, that’s playoff basketball.’ To me, that’s not playoff basketball,” Atkinson said last year when asked about two plays that kept Evan Mobley and then Cavs’ forward De’Andre Hunter from playing Game 2.
The Cavs are in a similar spot a year later. They lost two close games at the start of their second-round series, this time against the Detroit Pistons. Their opponent was physically stronger in both games and wore the Cavs down.
Instead of using it as an excuse and pleading for the league to change how these games are called, Atkinson is instead challenging his players to adjust.
“It’s on us to adapt to how the game is being called,” Atkinson said on Saturday afternoon. “That’s a big part of this… It’s on us. This isn’t on the referees. This is on us to adapt and understand how the game is being called.”
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Few teams take advantage of the extra leeway more than the Pistons. They’re one of the most physically imposing teams in the league, and that’s by design.
“We just wear on you,” Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said before Game 3. “We legally hit you, we legally bump you. We’re legally handsy, and we just make it difficult.”
The Cavs’ three best players, Donovan Mitchell, James Harden, and Evan Mobley, have struggled with this at times. Mitchell has seen his free-throw rate cut in half from the regular season. Harden has had a difficult time valuing possessions. And Mobley hasn’t been able to get to his spots in the first two games of the series.
This has also affected the Cavs’ three-point shooting. Cleveland had their third-worst shooting game of the season (21.9%), which included going 0-11 in the fourth quarter. Many of those looks were wide open.
According to Atkinson, there’s a correlation between Detroit’s physicality and his team missing threes. He made an analogy to NBA 2K, saying that his team’s stamina meter was drained too low by the end of the game. “Every time you get hit or you run a sprint, your [stamina] level goes down. … I think there’s something to that fatigue effect on shooting and that’s why they try to wear teams down.”
Atkinson is right on all of this. At the same time, I’m not sure how you get your team more prepared for physicality at this point in the season. This isn’t a playing style this team has thrived in since their inception.
We’ll see if the Cavs have a response in Game 3.
“We get this one, and it’s on,” Atkinson said. “We were there. I don’t think we played great. Let’s play great. Let’s get this one.”
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