INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — This week hasn’t been some new frontier for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Playoff preparation is something that they’ve grown accustomed to.
The Cavaliers are in the playoffs for the fourth consecutive season with mixed expectations and mixed results. This is the third time they’ve qualified as the No. 4 seed in the East in the past four seasons, with last year being the outlier with the team finishing with a conference-high 64 wins. They’ve won a series in each of the past two seasons, with one being considered a success and one a catastrophic failure.
It’s a group that knows how to get ready for what’s to come. Even if some of the pieces in Cleveland are new to the team, there are very few newcomers to the postseason. This is a group that knows how to prepare and knows what to look for as things grow nearer.
“I’d say just focus, engagement, especially when you’re in the film, how engaged are they? How focused are they? And then the last one is confident, right? Those are kind of the three things,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said when asked what he looks for from the team this week. “I feel like this group is in that space right now.”
The sentiment of focus, which hasn’t necessarily been a mainstay of the Cavaliers throughout the regular season, was echoed consistently throughout the week.
“I would say just the mental, right? The execution details. It's all good to have fun, laugh, but to be able to do that and then also be in a situation where we're executing things right,” Donovan Mitchell said. “I think we did a really good job of that this week.”
That sort of focus is the bare minimum entering the postseason.
