Kenny Atkinson has done an admirable job of leading the Cleveland Cavaliers so far in his first season as the team’s head coach.
With Atkinson at the helm, the Cavaliers have seemingly taken that next step as a team into title contention.
Cleveland is off to one of the best starts to a campaign in NBA history, considering the team has yet to lose a single game at 15-0. The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors are the lone team in the history of the league to string together a longer undefeated start to a season. Golden State went 24-0.
Atkinson drew up three points when coming up with the blueprint for the Cavaliers’ successful season, and he came up with the team’s offseason plan while he was on France’s coaching staff in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“On hot summer nights, in an old barracks where the French national team was training for the Olympics — Atkinson was on the coaching staff that helped the squad to a silver medal in Paris this summer — he put the fine points on a plan,” ESPN’s Brian Windhorst wrote.
One of his points was to utilize the Cavaliers’ depth. While the team is led by stars in Donovan Mitchell, Darius Garland and Evan Mobley, it has proven NBA players up and down its roster.
“1: Play his roster,” Windhorst wrote. “Atkinson felt like president of basketball operations Koby Altman, who had made a series of aggressive trades that had landed him Jarrett Allen, [Caris] LeVert and then, the big one in Mitchell, had built a deeper team than Altman had gotten credit for.”
In addition, he wanted the Cavaliers to up the pace and the frequency with which they shoot the ball from 3-point range compared to one season ago. To this point, they have done just that, as the Cavaliers 13th in the league in 3-point attempts per contest and seventh in pace.
“2: Unleash the offense,” Windhorst wrote. “Two years ago, the Cavs ranked, miraculously, eighth in the league in offense, despite being dead last in pace, 24th in 3-pointers attempted and in the bottom half of the league in assist percentage. They ran a low-space, low-speed, old-fashioned offense that worked.”
Last but not least, Atkinson wanted Mobley to have a larger role on the offensive side of the ball. In 14 games played (all starts) with the Cavaliers this season, the big man is averaging a career-high 18.1 points per game while shooting 57.1 percent from the field and percent from deep.
“3: A new role for Mobley,” Windhorst wrote. “A big part of the Cavs’ coaching search was listening to candidates’ plans to get more from Mobley, who was a defensive star from his first weeks in the league but had underachieved on offense. The conventional wisdom was to get Mobley to stretch the floor with long-range shooting, something he didn’t always show a great interest in.”
For as great as the Cavaliers have been playing to start the campaign, the team’s lengthy winning streak will seemingly be at risk of coming to an end in the near future. Cleveland will have maybe its biggest test of the season thus far when it takes on the Boston Celtics at TD Garden on Tuesday night.
Boston owns the second-best record in the Eastern Conference at 11-3 and has a home record of 4-2.
