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Strus? In the closing lineup? Already? His second game back following an extended layoff — the result of late-summer foot surgery that cost him for the first 67 games? While on a minute restriction? On a night where he had two airballs and wasn’t playing nearly as well as Sunday’s debut? Yes, Strus. “I have such a comfort level with him,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said following the win. “I could see it going any way with him. Maybe starting lineup. Maybe sixth man. We will see how that plays out. But it’s hard not to finish with the guy because he is such a clutch player. We’ll see where it ends up. He has a way of imposing his will and makes you put him in the lineup.”
Strus’ immediate usage raises an interesting — and difficult — question: How does Atkinson find minutes for everyone? Is it even possible? “We’re going to have those decisions,” Atkinson explained. “That’s part of our job. Have to make the right choices.”
Atkinson then furthered his point, making a claim that produced something of a record scratch in the press room. “Derrick White is a top-five player in this league,” Atkinson said. “I know no one says that in the standard media, but analytically, if you look at all the advanced stuff, he’s a top-five player in the league. Superstar.” On ESPN’s “Inside the NBA” pregame show, Charles Barkley had a quick response. “The reason nobody says that, Kenny,” Barkley said, “is because it’s not true.”
According to Mazzulla, NBA coaches and players have access to stats that aren’t readily available to the ordinary fan or even the media, and White’s ranking in those listings was the basis for his statement. Although Joe didn’t say outright that his starting guard is indeed a Top 5 player in the league, Mazzulla explained what makes him more valuable than a lot of his peers. “At the end of the day, you guys don’t have a ton of access to the advanced analytics, so I think that’s part of it,” said Mazzulla. “The second piece is that type of player is just not commercialized. But at the end of the day, do you watch a connector? I think one of the hardest things to do in the NBA is learn how to have complete confidence and also be a connector, make other people around you better, and I think he does both of them.”
Cleveland Cavaliers big man Jarrett Allen missed practice for the second straight day due to a right knee injury, and, unsurprisingly, he has been ruled out for Sunday's matinee clash with the Boston Celtics as a result. “He's still got a little soreness,” Cavs head coach Kenny Atkinson said on Saturday. “We'll get the feedback from today and see where he is. But, like I said [Friday], not concerned about long-term.”
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Theo Pinson: My second year. Kenny Atinson is my coach. Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, DeAndre Jordan, all these guys just get there. We on a the path has changed. We in championship or bus mode at this point because you got bonafide guys. And it shifted so quickly. It took everybody a minute to get themselves together because like at first we had D'Angelo Russell, Caris LeVert, Jarrett Allen. We were just in figuring it out. We just made the playoffs. We played Philly, blah blah blah. Everybody was like, "Yo, Brooklyn's on the way." Blah, blah, blah. And then these guys come. I'll never forget, bro. We played in Miami. I think we played the game and we had practice in Miami before we got on the plane. I don't know what the f*ck happened. I don't know. And I f*ck with Kenny Atkinson. That is my guy. He gave me opportunity. I f*ck with him. But I don't know what the f*ck happened, but Kenny was on one that day. This motherf*cker was going off. We were trying to run all types of sh*t like y'all know what Pistol is. Pistol is a like when you come down the court, guy sets like a flat screen on the sideline just to get the switch or whatever. People do it all the time in the playoffs just to get the matchups. And pretty much KD and them, they weren't really rocking all that like, ‘Hey, look, just give me the f*cking ball and all this shit.’ And we weren't, they weren't really running it, bro. Next thing you know, he flips the f*ck out. He's like, ‘Run the sh*t! I'm the f*cking coach! Run the sh*t.’ And everybody's like, “Oh sh*t.’ And I ain't he never seen it before. And he's yelling at superstars now? One game, he got an altercation in the huddle, the next morning he was gone. He got fired. That's when I was like, ‘Oh sh*t.’ The NBA is 1,000 percent a players’ league. (…) You don't talk to your star the same way you talk to everybody else.
Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson was bullish on the addition of the selfless guard, touting his vision and playmaking. Atkinson, however, could not find ample minutes for Lonzo Ball. The 28-year-old Ball has been under multiple mentors in the NBA, but on “Ball in the Family,” he claimed that his father, LaVar Ball, and his former coach at UCLA, Steve Alford, coached him harder. “I felt like I was coached a certain way for a long period of my life, so when I got to the league, this was weird to me. Like if I was playing badly, somebody would be, ‘Oh, it’s okay.’ That wasn’t translating to me. I'd rather hear like, ‘What the f***? Do your s***.’ It was an adjustment. I haven’t been around a lot of coaches who are going to get on you like that,” said Ball. “Stan Van Gundy was kind of tough, I guess. But other than him, there’s really not hard coaching out here. I got coached much harder in college and by my pops for real.”
Atkinson said Harden's addition has unburdened Mitchell, who was carrying the weight of the team's injury and inconsistency issues earlier this season. Mitchell's 32.8 usage rate this season is his highest since 2019-20, his final season with the Utah Jazz, and ranks fifth in the NBA. During his postgame interview session after beating the Knicks, Mitchell pointed to Cleveland's previous game against New York, on Christmas Day, as a measurement for how far the team had grown.
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Cleveland snapped its two-game losing streak Sunday afternoon, holding off the pesky Brooklyn Nets, 106-102, inside Barclays Center. “We didn’t play great and I thought they played really well,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said postgame. “Thought they got up under us, pressured us and forced us into a lot of turnovers. In the second half, we cleaned it up and we were a little better. Offense wasn’t great tonight. Wasn’t perfect. But we found a way.”
Vincent Goodwill: Kenny Atkinson on Donovan Mitchell's groin strain: "We don’t like soft tissue injuries ... the feedback I’m getting is that it’s not a long term thing."
The Cleveland Cavaliers are in the midst of one of their best stretches of the season, one coach Kenny Atkinson attributes to a "renewed confidence" brought on by the addition of James Harden. "Bringing James on has given us a renewed confidence, if that makes sense. We understand we're a better team," Atkinson said after the Cavaliers' 109-94 win over the New York Knicks on Tuesday night. "That spirit, that confidence for some strange reason, it makes you play harder, compete harder, compete harder defensively. "I felt like we were kind of missing that edge, that belief. I feel like we're regaining that. A lot of it has to do with who we added in the trade."