CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Cavaliers plan to retain coach Kenny Atkinson, even after the New York Knicks swept the team Monday night, two league sources told The Athletic.
Atkinson guided the franchise to its first appearance in the Eastern Conference finals since 2018 and first without LeBron James on the roster since 1992. Still, there were some questions coming out of the series about potential changes Cleveland might make. Instead, no major changes to the front office or coaching staff are now expected, per those sources, and team officials will begin their deep and necessary review of the league’s most expensive roster.
Atkinson, 59, has coached the Cavs for two seasons and has three seasons remaining on his contract. He won 116 regular-season games and was NBA Coach of the Year in 2025 and was in charge when Evan Mobley enjoyed his finest season as a pro last year. But the team is 13-14 in the playoffs under Atkinson, and several of his decisions at crucial moments this postseason came into question.
Cleveland needed two Game 7 victories to reach the conference finals. After getting past a depleted Toronto Raptors roster in the first round, the Cavaliers had a chance to close the series out against the top-seeded Detroit Pistons in six games. The Cavs were crushed at home before taking Game 7 in Detroit. They were swept in the conference finals by the Knicks, but the series began with Cleveland building a 22-point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 1, only to blow it. Atkinson held onto timeouts and left top defensive player Dean Wade on the bench when the objective was to protect a lead.
The day after the Cavs fell behind in the series, 3-0, Atkinson said, “Analytically, we’ve won two out of three.” His point was that Cleveland’s players were taking open shots and missing them, whereas the Knicks were making tougher shots, but he was lampooned for what he said because New York was ahead by 40 points through three games.
And then the Knicks beat the Cavaliers by 37 in Game 4, where it appeared there were more Knicks fans than Cleveland fans in Rocket Arena (or close), and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert left his seat after halftime.
After the game, Gilbert posted to social media that the team was “nowhere near where we need to be.” Gilbert’s declaration was not a call for change, league sources said, but rather a promise to fans that the organization as a whole would work to build on the progress shown to reach the conference finals.
Atkinson and his players pointed to the lopsided nature of the conference finals as the result of their tired legs, and the Cavaliers’ cardinal sin was losing two Game 6s in their earlier series.
Asked about his job security Monday night, Atkinson said, “Listen, I have confidence, confidence in myself first of all, confidence in the group.”
He added, “From a player and coaches’ perspective, being with that group in there, I’m pretty darn proud of what we did.”
Last season, Cleveland won 64 games and finished first in the East, while Atkinson won Coach of the Year, but was bounced in five games in the second round by the Indiana Pacers.
Atkinson took the 2025 playoff failure hard and rewatched every possession from the series against the Pacers, looking for what went wrong. He was hard on his staff, numerous league sources said, in part because he felt he couldn’t be overly hard on the players. But at the same time, with Darius Garland and Max Strus out to start the regular season, Atkinson tried to lean on Evan Mobley to be more of an offensive threat. Mobley and the team struggled with that priority.
After languishing around .500 through December, the Cavaliers began to improve in January. On Feb. 3, the team orchestrated one of the biggest trades of the season, moving Garland for James Harden. Atkinson played a role in convincing Harden to accept a trade to Cleveland by the LA Clippers.
“Ultimate player’s coach, he gets it, he understands his team,” Harden said of Atkinson after Monday’s game.
Donovan Mitchell, the Cavaliers’ resident star before Harden, has a strong working relationship with Atkinson. Mitchell called the Atkinson criticism and speculation “hilarious” in a mocking way, and said, “We’ve done something that we haven’t done since 2018, and we’re still going (on about Atkinson)?”
“There’s always going to be criticism,” Mitchell said. “(People) are on Kenny, right? But why? We got here. Some people consider this (reaching the conference finals) like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ We did it, but we did it with Kenny.”
The Cavs had the most expensive roster in NBA history this season, totaling $229 million before taxes. They have decisions to make regarding role players like Wade, who will be a free agent, and stars like Harden and Mitchell — who can, in Harden’s case, be re-signed to a new deal, or in Mitchell’s, receive a massive contract extension.
