Kenny Atkinson Called the Cavaliers ‘Unlucky’ After Their Game 1 Collapse and the Excuse Is Embarrassing
Kenny Atkinson stood at the podium after one of the worst playoff losses in Cleveland Cavaliers history and reached for the most lazy excuse a head coach can give. He said the Cavs were “unlucky.”
Not outcoached. Not soft. Not exposed by a smarter game plan. Unlucky.
The Cavaliers blew a 22-point fourth-quarter lead Tuesday night to lose Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals 115-104 in overtime to the New York Knicks. The Knicks went on a 44-11 run to close the game. That is not bad luck. That is a coaching staff getting punched in the mouth and refusing to call a timeout.
Atkinson’s full quote tells you everything about how out of touch the analysis was. “I thought they hit some really tough shots in that fourth quarter,” he said. “Those two threes, prayer threes, and the shot clock. I think we got a little unlucky, quite honestly.”
That is not what happened. The Knicks ran the same action every single trip. They forced James Harden into switches and let Jalen Brunson cook him. Brunson scored 17 of his 38 points in the fourth quarter and overtime. Harden was hunted in isolation eight times in the final quarter alone, one of only 30 times that has happened in the entire NBA tracking era. None of that was luck. All of that was a Knicks coaching staff that adjusted on the fly while Atkinson sat on his hands.
The timeout issue is the part that should get him fired in Cleveland talk radio for the next week. Atkinson called only one timeout during a 30-8 Knicks run that spanned the last 7:39 of regulation. He let his team bleed for almost the entire fourth quarter without stopping the momentum. When asked about it, he said he was holding his timeouts in case the game got close at the end. By the time the game was actually close, his team had been steamrolled for seven straight minutes and could not steady itself.
That is malpractice. There is no other way to put it. You can save a timeout in the regular season. You cannot save a timeout while your defense is collapsing in the conference finals at Madison Square Garden. The whole purpose of having timeouts is to use them when your team is drowning. The Cavaliers were drowning, and the life preserver stayed on the bench.
Atkinson also defended Harden, who was the entire reason the Cavs lost. He called Harden “one of our best defenders” and refused to consider taking him off the floor. There is not a single Cavaliers fan in Northeast Ohio who agrees with that statement after watching Game 1. Harden was the entry point for every Knicks possession during the comeback, and the coaching staff insisted on leaving him out there.
The “unlucky” framing also disrespects what the Knicks did. They scored 44 points in the final 12 minutes. They went 13 of 15 from the field over the closing stretch. That is not a hot shooting fluke. That is a team executing exactly what they wanted, every single possession, against a defense that could not stop them. Calling that lucky is what coaches say when they cannot face what actually happened.
The Cavaliers are now down 1-0 in a series they were favored to win. Their second-year head coach went out and blamed shot luck for a historic collapse. The team has to come back to play Game 2 with the same defensive personnel and the same coach who would not call a timeout. That is a recipe for losing two more in a row before Cleveland even leaves home.
If Atkinson wants to keep his job past this series, he should stop blaming basketball gods and start adjusting his rotation. The Knicks know how to win this matchup. The question is whether anyone on the Cavaliers bench can figure out how to stop them.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
