When the Cleveland Cavaliers usually find themselves in trouble, the one person they know they can count on is Donovan Mitchell. He’s been hitting big shots throughout his entire career, and nothing recent has shown that he should stop anytime soon. So when the Cavs were down to the Boston Celtics with seconds remaining, it only made sense for him to get the ball.
Mitchell did get the ball, but he was the one inbounding instead of taking the final shot. The Cavs ended up losing, and after the game, head coach Kenny Atkinson had to answer for why he didn’t draw up a play for his best player.
“We were trying to take it out with our best passer in that situation,” Atkinson said via Ethan Sands of cleveland.com.
The play was supposed to be set up for Darius Garland to come off a down screen for a shot. If that didn’t work, the next option was going to be for Evan Mobley to get a shot. Neither one of those plans worked because the Celtics went into a zone, so Mitchell gave it up to Mobley, and he didn’t have enough time to get a shot up.
That led to the Cavs’ third straight loss, and now they are seventh in the Eastern Conference. After a historic start to last season, things have not gone their way as much to start this season, but it’s still very early to even bother panicking.
The Cavs are missing players due to injuries, but they should still be able to win some of the games that they’ve played. When it gets to crunch time, everyone knows that Mitchell is the player who needs the ball in his hands to take the shot.
At the same time, the fact that teams know that may mean all the attention is on him, which makes getting plays for other players easy. That may have been what Atkinson was thinking in the moment, but it didn’t work out.
