I know some pro sports PR guys, FUCK that job lol.

Odds are they told him not to do that shit and Kenny said what he said anyway.

Yeah a lot of fans advocate for all the things bad organizations do. Firing Kenny isnt likely to lead to an upgrade. It also upsets one of the things they got going for them continuity.

They still have roster stuff to sort out that decides their ceiling. You only fire the coach if thats no longer the case.

Like the Knicks last year.

Do we know he is a pretty damn good playoff coach though? We know he is a good regular season coach.

What you did there, I saw it.

That’s not a good way to think about coaching changes lol. Theres 8 billion ppl on this earth you think no one is out there that can be better than a guy you want to replace?

He’s gotten all the questions he wants, and in good spots too. Just hasn’t nailed the answers

Every coach has choke jobs. This is an overreaction. When players are melting down, it is very hard to stop it.

Getting to the conference finals amid all the adversity this year is a win imo.

I think it was more that DG and Mitchell were ballin out last year. Plus we still had good defensive chemistry from JBB. And Ty Jerome was playing out of his mind

He definitely was outcoached by Mike Brown, and heck maybe all the other coaches. However I understand Koby’s decision. There are too many variables this summer, so they are going with continuity. The good news is they progressed and everyone on the team seems to generally like each other.

I think team brass is giving him one more year, and we’ll all have to see if Kenny is able to rise to the occasion. The situation could be a lot worse as there are worse coaches out there. Or heck even imagine having Darryl ‘sold high’ Morey as the GM instead of Koby

They didn’t have a PG for almost the entire fucking year and still won 50+ games. I feel like the entire discourse around the Cavs this year is sheer lunacy and do not understand one ounce of it.

Yeah I think the positive outlook could be that they got Harden only at the trade deadline and shortly after multiple guys got hurt and out of rhythm with that. Give them a full offseason and hopefully healthy season together and maybe they will actually play up to their potential. Not sure thats going to happen but there is also not much else they can do to improve the team.

There are issues with the defense but I think a lot of that was banking on internal development. The defensive roster construction is the one thing I have a problem with though; everyone in the starting lineup other than Mobley was a defensive liability against New York

I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to read this as :[…] haven’t performed up to expectation.

It’s one thing if a GM makes objectively bad choices. It’s another if the choices they make make sense but just don’t quite pan out. Sometimes you take two incredible players who should work perfectly together on paper, and it just doesn’t pan out.

Just look at Dame and Giannis. Pretty much nobody had any doubt they were going to tear the league apart, and yet once they were put on the same team, it became clear that they didn’t work quite as well together as we thought they would.

Altman is in one of these situations. If you look at the Cavaliers roster, you’d be forgiven for believing that they should absolutely be capable of at least reaching the NBA Finals. Yet they didn’t, and I don’t think it’s the GM’s fault. He did the best he could to get great pieces, but the player never managed to find their stride at the same time. Sometimes that’s just how it goes.

Hell, that’s how it went for the Knicks earlier during the KAT experiment. On paper adding him was an excellent idea, but in reality it looked very shaky for a while. Thankfully Town eventually adapted to the system, and now the team has hit its groove, but there is a version of these 2026 Knicks that don’t go to the NBA Finals because KAT doesn’t pan out the way he should, and I don’t think the GM would have to be blamed for that.

That’s the thing though; outside of this year and 2022-23, the Cavs have had bad injury luck in every other playoff run

Injury luck is a pretty big deal. Last year they were a 2 weeks from the playoffs about to finish with 60 wins and fully healthy and able to rest guys a ton in preparation. They had 4 injured starters by end of the first round. This year they lost their backup pg due to apron, their starting PG’s surgery didn’t go well and he remained injured all year. Their attempt at a high risk high reward backup Pg didn’t work out. He ended up getting a better PG and a much better backup pg. new pg immediately breaks his hand. Mobley and Allen basically spent the whole season trading on off the injury report. Strus and Wade were injured most of the season. They win 50+ games despite the playoff starting rotation barely playing any games. Mitchell pulls his groin a week before the playoffs and can barely jump or shoot almost the entire playoffs minus a few games when he probably got injections. They make it to the ECFs. I’m sorry but how is this the gm failing?

It isn’t though. This is such a perfect example of how the average fan does not grasp the cap and the fact that the Cavs have no ability to acquire someone else to fill that role. They are WAY more than \(30 million above the cap, so deciding to pay James Harden \)0 would not give them any additional space to sign someone

This is a bad take. He has a huge player option next year. It’d put the team in a much better position both financially and on the trade market to get Harden to opt out and give him an extension with a smaller annual number over more years.

Have they done that already? I thought they brought him in on a 1 + 1 deal

How many years now have we been saying that

He’s signing for 2 years at 30 mil per.

He’s worth that.

At 36 harden just had a better season than literally any year the young all star pg the Cavs just had on the roster. Harden doesn’t have to do a lot on this roster, but they desperately need his high level playmaking. He was also very clutch offensively and defensively this year without being the focus of the offense. He’s a very good player and 2 years 60M is less than Allen or Poetlr or plenty of other non all star centers.

IMO they should have traded Garland for Wemby or Ant. Not sure why they got Harden instead.

Keeping Garland would’ve had the same outcome or worse. His body is breaking down

Cleveland loses to Toronto with Garland.

The only reason they were anywhere sniffing the finals is because of Harden. Absolutely nobody thought the Cavs were a legit title contender at any point in the regular season

I don’t blame him for wanting to wait to see how the playoffs went and revisiting it later

Oh yeah he’ll get one more season, if that roster doesn’t change he’ll be gone after next year 

Cause you guys actually care about trying to win. I’d love to have Thibs though honestly lol

I trust the science and the science says the Cavs won that series. 

I’m just glad we didn’t trade for D Mitch, he’s just not a winner. hell of a basketball player, but not a winner 

Yeah but the term ‘fall guy’ is generally someone who didn’t deserve to be fired but fans, management, owner etc. wanted blood. Doc Rovers deserved to be fired, Atkinson didn’t.

We have footage of Darvin Ham not knowing what to say during a timeout. I just wanted to throw shade at him

Well yeah, that’s why the offseason and trade deadline exists..

For example, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility for LeBron to come back, which would fix most if not all of their problems

I agree the team built as is at most is an ECF team. I was actually surprised they got there, I thought it was either going to be Knicks, Celtics or Detroit. So Kenny Atkinson in my eyes overachieved. The only thing he did that was wrong was say that they won from an analytical standpoint point.

I agree. I really like his game but wish he just ate up more of the offense. Can handle can kinda shoot. Can pass. But I’m just left wanting more.

Up until those games, the word was that he was absolutely getting out muscled. It’s great that he turned it around in Game 7 to keep the team in the hunt, but he needs that intensity in every single game once the playoffs start.

Leaving harden in to get cooked was WILD

Firable if they lose the series, then they got SWEPT and they’re still keeping his bum ass around. Maybe it makes sense but as an outside observer I’m surprised

In game 2 he made the atrocious decision to leave Strus on KAT and put mobley on hart so he could sag off of him and protect the rim.

That sounds like a good idea until Hart makes 5 wide open threes. Hell josh shot 41% from three this year even if it was pretty low volume. All the knicks had to do was dump the ball into Kat on the block, force Mobley to come guard the rim, then kick the ball out to Hart. At some point Atkinson has to adjust and that game he never did.

Only one who came to my mind during the “should we fire Kenny” discussion was Jason Kidd

Doc Rivers

nuggets fired malone bc he had an irreparably bad relationship with the GM (who was also fired). it was more of a house-cleaning measure than a performance-related firing iirc

Good points, but to play devil’s advocate: firing Thibs seemed to work out for the Knicks this year.

The roster was the reason the Cavs lost to the Knicks; the talent gap was too large and the Mitchell/Harden pairing seems suboptimal. That said, I’m not sure I agree with Atkinson or Altman’s vision for how to use Mobley, which is what is most important for the Cavs going forward.

They fired bud, then fired griffin (you forgot about him; just adds on to your point) after half a season, then they get doc for another 2.5 years and give up.

For any team that’s been ready and trying to contend the last few years, the 2026 ECF was the floor.

They barely squeaked by

As a Knicks fan, I want to believe that, but I don’t think so

I see that the /s grows more necessary every day