Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5497268/2024/05/15/cavaliers-donovan-mitchell-darius-garland-jb-bickerstaff-future/?source=user_shared_article
> Bickerstaff’s tenure was mired by post-All-Star break slumps each of the last three years and a Play-In collapse in 2022. Last year, the Cavs entered the playoffs as the No. 4 seed and were dismissed by the New York Knicks in five games.
> The second guessing of Bickerstaff started there. Multiple veterans in the Cavs locker room grew frustrated with Bickerstaff for treating the Cavs as a young team with much to learn, instead of as a team ready to contend. They were also less than enthused by the Cavs’ offense last spring and into the first part of this season. Mitchell was among them. Players would leave practices and morning shootarounds wondering aloud: “Why did we even do that? What did we accomplish” — so perplexed by the lack of structure and intensity in the workouts.
> Bickerstaff’s usage of Mitchell, league sources said, was a reason Mitchell provided when declining an invitation to play for USA Basketball last summer at the FIBA World Cup — a refusal that went a long way toward his exclusion from the Olympic team.
by UnbiasedNBAFan_
14 Comments
Sounds like they’ve had this ready for months now.
fire the clown.
Now these are the leaks I wanna hear. No BS about dudes wanting JA to play through his injury.
This is good news. We can convince Mitchell to stay (in part) by firing JB. Win win scenario
Hahaha yes… YES…
All the leaks feel like the Cavs will get a new coach and trade Allen then Mitchell or Garland depending on if Mitchell wants to stay.
Need to find a way to get a wing or 2 but I’m worried they will settle for Ingram. He has his flashes but is too iso heavy and injury prone.
He was probably making them watch Finding Nemo or something embarrassing
Imagine being a cheerleader for BJ a shouting it from the rooftops daily on here
this piece is written as if hes already been fired lmao
JA refused an injection to play? That’s soft behavior
The cheapo and incredibly predictable Athletic hit jobs after a team exits the playoffs. I’d like to see them move on from this coaching staff, but these type pieces are purest chickenshit.
>The Athletic
>CLEVELAND — In the second game after they learned in December they’d be without both Darius Garland and Evan Mobley for a while, the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Houston Rockets in overtime. That night on Dec. 18, Donovan Mitchell played 45 minutes, including the entire second half and all but four seconds of the extra period.
>After the game, Cavs president Koby Altman walked into the coach’s office and admonished head coach J.B. Bickerstaff in front of his entire staff for playing Mitchell such heavy minutes, multiple sources briefed on the interaction told The Athletic. Descriptions of the incident spread across the organization, including the locker room.
>“(Altman) got at J.B.,” one player said of the incident.
>The immediate aftermath of that night was confusing. For instance, Altman was unaware at the time he was scolding Bickerstaff that the coach had asked Mitchell if he wanted to come out, according to league sources, and Mitchell declined. Yet, Mitchell was absent from the court for Cleveland’s next four games due to what the team called a non-COVID illness.
>As it turned out, that singular saga from one night in December foreshadowed how the season would end for Bickerstaff. Key players out all over the place, and with him in danger of losing his job.
>League sources briefed on the Cavaliers’ mindset told The Athletic that Bickerstaff’s job is in serious jeopardy after five and a half years as head coach, following the team’s season-ending loss in Game 5 of the second round to the Boston Celtics. Two league sources said the team is likely to take some time — multiple days — to make a decision. Bickerstaff, despite all the pressure he and members of the organization above and below him were under this season, has built equity with the front office and was at the helm for Cleveland’s first appearance in a conference semifinal since 2018. This spring marked the Cavs’ first playoff series win without LeBron James on the roster since 1993.
>Doing better this season than last was paramount, and Bickerstaff succeeded there — Cleveland advanced past the first round with a Game 7 victory over the Orlando Magic. But the pressure on him all year (which boiled over in that one exchange with Altman in December) was always about more than simply winning.
>In trying to do everything they can to persuade Mitchell to accept a four-year, $208.5 million contract extension this summer, the Cavs need their star player to feel comfortable with the long-term direction of the franchise, which includes the coach. Multiple league sources have said, for months, that Mitchell did not have great confidence in Bickerstaff, and he was not alone. Several players questioned Bickerstaff’s strategies, game management, practice habits and accountability measures, privately and publicly, throughout the season.
>“No one has told me I’m not (the coach), so I’ll keep showing up until they tell me not to,” Bickerstaff said when asked about his job status after Wednesday’s loss.
>He added: “We’ve continued to build this thing the right way. Every single year we’ve improved, continued to get better. Play-In, playoffs.”
>Bickerstaff may take the fall for all of this, but there are issues in Cleveland to be worked out, beyond who is coaching the team. While three players — Mitchell, Caris LeVert and Jarrett Allen — were not on the court for Game 5 Wednesday due to injury, Allen missed his eighth consecutive game due to what the team said was a rib bruise. Allen’s extended absence, which stretched more than two weeks, caused frustration toward him in at least some corners of the organization with teammates and staff members who felt he could have done more to try and play.
>There are also questions of fit on the roster to work through, such as whether Allen and Mobley, two non-shooting bigs, can co-exist in the same starting unit, and whether Garland can thrive playing alongside Mitchell as two smaller guards who need the ball.
Yeeesh.
Man, it just sucks that our team doesn’t fit together it sucks even more that all of them are entering their primes, but we need to trade some of team