IN THE VISITORS locker room in Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, shortly after the Cleveland Cavaliers had sealed their Game 7 victory over the Pistons in the Eastern Conference semifinals, coach Kenny Atkinson paused and pointed to a single player across the locker room.
“We turn to you,” Atkinson said to the team’s superstar and most consistent player, Donovan Mitchell.
Mitchell had responded after one of his most disappointing games of the postseason -- a 6-for-20 shooting, 18-point dud in Game 6 -- with one of his most complete games: 26 points on 10-for-22 shooting and his playoff-high eight assists to win Game 7 and eliminate the top-seeded Pistons.
Atkinson had devised a postgame plan prior to the game with Cleveland’s season hanging in the balance. He wanted to highlight Mitchell, regardless of whether the Cavs advanced beyond the second round or their season ended that night.
The reason was simple: It was Mitchell who had guided the Cavs throughout a turbulent season, from preseason favorites, to barely above .500 in December, to a franchise-altering trade, to a pair of seven-game series through the first two rounds. In the locker room, Atkinson continued his tribute.
“Not just your on court, but your leadership,” he said. “Your positivity when things were really not going great. Whether we won or lost tonight, we never celebrate you in these things -- you don’t want that, you don’t want the praise -- but tonight you deserve the praise.”
Mitchell has made the postseason in each of his first nine seasons. But each of his first three years in Cleveland has ended in disappointment. An embarrassing first-round exit to the Knicks in 2023, losing two straight years in the conference semifinals, including last season as the No.1 seed in the conference.
In this, his ninth season, the six-time All-Star has led his team to the conference finals for the first time.
“I know I leaned on him,” Atkinson said before the start of Game 2 in New York. “That’s the first place to go when you’re struggling, to your leader. We had a lot of conversations, just talking through things, how we can get this thing back on track. And again, he never kind of swayed towards the negative.”
After Atkinson finished, he turned the locker room over to Mitchell.
“Enjoy it,” Mitchell told the team. “But we didn’t just come here to do this."
Still, the start of the conference finals has fit the theme of the Cavaliers’ rocky 2025-26. They blew a 22-point lead in Game 1, an epic collapse in NBA playoff lore. In Game 2, they lost by 16 in a game that was rarely competitive.
“I’m not sitting here like, oh man, scrambling and trying to figure things out,” Mitchell said after the Cavaliers fell to 0-2. “At the end of the day, we make some shots, we’ll be in good shape. ... We’ll make our adjustments. We’ll be at home and protect home court.”
Now, as the series shifts to Cleveland on Saturday for Game 3, the Cavaliers are confronting a similar reality: They’ll need to lean on Mitchell once again to save their season.
The good news, for them, is that he has already done it before, some six months ago.
IN WHAT WOULD ultimately prove to be a preview of their Game 1 loss to the Knicks, the Cavs also blew a double-digit lead on Christmas Day at Madison Square Garden.
Cleveland had carried a 96-84 advantage into the fourth quarter and extended the lead by as many as 17 points.
But the Knicks stormed back, winning the fourth quarter 42-28, behind 34 points from Jalen Brunson.
After the crushing loss, the visitors locker room was somber -- and quiet.
Mitchell, who had 34 points, seven rebounds, six assists and four steals, sat alone at his locker, reflecting on the night’s loss and the Cavaliers’ maddening start to the campaign.
He had played one of his best games of the season, yet the Cavs lost and were barely hovering above .500.
“You could just tell it really weighed on him,” Cavaliers forward Dean Wade told ESPN. “He played out of his mind, he played his heart out. ... It was unbelievable. Hitting tough shots, doing everything he could to win. It really was awesome to watch. We just didn’t play with the same intensity he played with.”
Suddenly, Mitchell called everyone’s attention.
“We got to be better,” Mitchell told the team. And then he started passing out words of encouragement
“He was like, ‘We good,’” Wade said. “‘We’re fine.’”
Still, the Cavaliers continued to falter. Two nights later, the Cavs lost by 17 points in Houston. Their record fell to 17-16.
Despite the preseason hype -- some experts had predicted Cleveland would win the East -- the Cavs were injured, disjointed and alarmingly average.
With the season in disarray, it was Mitchell who remained the team’s constant. His usage rate on the court climbed during the first half of the season to levels he hadn’t seen since his time in Utah. But, perhaps more importantly, his teammates saw the way he reinforced his belief in the group in the locker room.
“He’s our vocal leader. He’s our leader in general,” Wade told ESPN. “We go as he goes. When we were having a little rough parts of the season, he was just monumental. He just kept us together, didn’t let us split at all, kept everything positive.”
Slowly, they began to believe, too.
“He just told us, ‘We got so much talent in this locker room. We’re going through a rough patch right now, but keep putting in the work, keep coming in every day, have your routine, stick to it, believe in it and believe in each other. It’ll all come together.’
“And I mean, we all did that. Injuries happen here and there, which kind of messed some things up, but we truly believed in it. He was the engine to that. Pushed us through the season.”
The day after that loss to Houston, Cavs players came together for a film session. It had been organized by Mitchell.
“That’s when we tried to flush what had happened in the prior season, kind of started over,” Wade said. “We came out and we played with way better energy. That was our biggest thing. We were playing so flat before that. No energy, no passion. He did a great job of just instilling all the belief in us and helping us get over that.”
Cleveland won its next game, a 113-101 victory at San Antonio on Dec. 29. It wasn’t Mitchell’s best game -- he scored just 10 points -- but he added seven assists and finished a game-high plus-15 while on the court.
“It’s that just relentless positivity that he has,” Cleveland guard Sam Merrill said. “Yeah, he’ll yell occasionally and get after it, but it’s always finishing off with positivity. And that’s what we’ve needed at times during this season when we were struggling early. His leadership, his commitment to developing camaraderie and chemistry, all that stuff he does such a great job of. That’s why we look up to him so much.”
The Cavs turned around their season after Christmas, catapulting back up the Eastern Conference standings with a 35-16 record to finish as the No. 4 seed.
“I’ll follow him into war,” Cavs center Jarrett Allen said. “I’ll trust every single decision that he makes. Every shot that he takes. And every single word that he speaks in the locker room.”
THE CAVS HAVE endured some devastating losses throughout this playoff run.
They had a chance to close out their first-round series against the Raptors in Game 6 in Toronto, before RJ Barrett’s game winner bounced high off the rim and into the hoop.
They fell behind 0-2 against the Pistons in the conference semifinals, and then after taking a 3-2 advantage, they blew a chance to close out the series at home in Game 6.
Throughout the run, Mitchell’s steadiness has sustained them.
“It also helps when you got a lot of playoff experience,” Mitchell said. “This is four years now together where we’ve been through playoffs. And honestly, some of them have gone sideways, some of them haven’t exactly gone our way.”
After falling behind 0-2 on Thursday night against the Knicks, Mitchell reiterated his confidence in the team, spilling cliché after cliché about processes, shotmaking and giving credit where it’s due.
“No need to get discouraged,” Mitchell said. “We just got to go to Cleveland and handle business.” The message, apparently sent immediately after their Game 2 loss, seemed to penetrate every corner of the locker room.
“We’ve been here before,” Evan Mobley said. “We know what it takes.”
“That’s just how our whole playoffs have been,” Allen added. “Our back is against the wall. We like to keep things interesting. We like to keep everybody stressing about what the next game is going to be like. This is no different from what we’re doing now. We’ve got to take care of home court now.”
Only two teams in NBA history have rallied from multiple 2-0 deficits in the same playoffs (the 2020-21 LA Clippers and Milwaukee Bucks). Yet, it’s a challenge Mitchell has been ready to embrace with the same steady mantra that kept the Cavs afloat all season.
“It’s the work you put in,” Mitchell said. “In tough moments, in anything, life or the game, if you don’t have anything to pull from, if you don’t have a foundation or something that you work hard at -- Kenny was stressing that throughout the whole playoffs, it’s like, ‘This is why we work harder. This is why we’ve did the extra sprints. These are all the things that we’ve done.’”
“This is why you do those things,” Mitchell said. “So you don’t waver.”
