Sometimes it’s better not to say the thing you’re thinking. To keep the quiet part quiet. Because there are times when you say the quiet part out loud and later on you end up really wishing you hadn’t.
Kenny Atkinson had one of those moments on Sunday. The Cleveland Cavaliers are down 3-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals to the New York Knicks. No team in NBA history has ever come back from that kind of deficit. You know that. Everyone knows that. Atkinson — who was the NBA’s Coach of the Year just last season — certainly knows it, too. Except if you ask him, the Cavs aren’t really down 3-0. If you tilt your head and squint at the right kind of numbers the right kind of way, Cleveland is actually winning the series. I’m paraphrasing. Here’s what Atkinson said during media availability on Sunday.
“Analytically…we’re two out of three in the expected [score],” Atkinson said. “I don’t know if you guys follow that, the expected score. And I know you’re looking confused.”
Confused is one way to put it. Astounded and bemused might be another. To put it in context, Atkinson’s point was that the Cavs have gotten good looks in the series, and he was pleased with their process overall. In Game 3, he said the Cavs shot “way below” what was expected and the Knicks shot “way over.” And that might even be true. Except, as Atkinson seemed to realize as he was creating an alternate universe in his head, that particular message probably would not be well received by almost anyone.
“I know no one wants to hear that,” Atkinson said. “[With the] general public, everyone is outcome-based.”
A pesky and unfortunate fact. You know what else is outcome-based? The actual NBA Playoffs. The league has this annoying habit of rewarding teams that make real-world shots and win the actual games by advancing them to the next round. Here on Earth 1, it appears the Knicks are headed for their first NBA Finals since 1999, and there’s nothing Atkinson or the Cavs can do about it. But maybe on Earth 2, Cleveland wins the Parallel Dimension Playoffs and gets to hold a killer parade. They can hang a hypothetical banner and everything.
Atkinson is a bright guy. What he said was something well south of smart for a host of reasons. The whole thing smacked of something Doc Rivers said last year. Rivers is a Hall of Famer when it comes to quotes and can’t-miss in terms of content, which does not always mean that what he says necessarily reflects well on him. When it comes to being a head coach in the NBA, it’s generally better not to draw comparisons to him. But here Atkinson is, reminding so many of us of when Rivers was asked about the three times his teams blew 3-1 leads in the playoffs — with the Magic in 2003, then with the Clippers in 2015 and 2020 — and how he said, presumably with a straight face, that everyone was thinking about that all wrong.
“I don’t get enough credit for the three wins,” Rivers said. “I get credit for losing. I always say, ‘What if we had lost to Houston in six?’ No one cares. One of the things that I’m proud of is we’ve never been swept. All the coaches have been swept in the playoffs. My teams achieve. A lot of them overachieve and I’m very proud of that.”
If you don’t count all the games he lost, Rivers won them all. If you look at the expected scores instead of the actual scoreboard, the Cavs are beating the Knicks. Same energy.
In an unsurprising development, various accounts on social media had some fun at Atkinson’s expense. Dunking on him for those comments was to be expected. What was harder to understand was why he bothered saying it at all. Maybe he was trying to make himself feel better about the Cavs faceplanting so far, or maybe it was a message to his players and/or Cavs fans that they could climb back into the series if only their shots start falling. Whatever the motivation, it came off as decidedly tone deaf. Not to mention that dreaming about this fantasy world where Cleveland is leading the series willfully denies the reality of how good the Knicks have been in the Eastern Conference Finals and the playoffs writ large.
The Cavs blew a 22-point lead with less than eight minutes remaining in Game 1. It was a historic collapse. The Knicks ended up winning that game in overtime by 11. Then New York won Game 2 by 16 and Game 3 by 13. At no point in the last two games did it feel like the Cavs were going to win either. Their largest lead in Game 2 was six points; they never led in Game 3. That probably has something to do with all those shots they missed here in the real world. For the series, the Cavs are shooting 42.9% from the floor, 29.4% from 3-point range and a ghastly 67.6% from the free-throw line.
Contrast that with the Knicks, who have won 10 playoff games in a row. If Atkinson is so fond of the numbers, we ought to be honest about the ones New York has produced. It’s not just that the Knicks are shooting well against Cleveland. They’ve crushed it this entire postseason. Through the first three rounds, New York is first in field-goal percentage, 3-point percentage and defensive rating and second in offensive rating. The Knicks are playing really good basketball when you look at the data that reflects what’s actually happened on the court.
But as a wise man once said, “people can come up with statistics to prove anything. Fourteen percent of all people know that.” Or to paraphrase another wise man, analytics will only get you so far — and in cases like these, it would have been better for Atkinson not to lean on them so publicly.