The Ringers’ Howard Beck: What’s Next for Cavs after “Embarrassing” Knicks Sweep

Howard Beck said the closeout in Cleveland depends entirely on which prism you watch it through. Through the Knicks' lens, it was dominant, efficient, devastating, the natural product of a team that has been clicking for weeks. Through the Cavaliers' lens, it was humiliating and embarrassing, a franchise that had been knocking on the door for years looking like it did not even want to be there.

This was a 64-win team not long ago, Beck reminded Suzy, one that traded for James Harden at midseason. To go out like that stings. In fairness, he added, the Knicks have made a lot of opponents look unfit for the moment, from Atlanta to the Philadelphia sweep to this one. Maybe, he allowed, it is just the Knicks.

Then came the analytics, because Suzy could not resist. Down 0-3, Kenny Atkinson had been asked what still gave him confidence and answered with a breakdown of shot quality. Beck, who has known Atkinson since his days as a Mike D'Antoni assistant with the Knicks and as Jeremy Lin's development coach before Linsanity, did not want to sound like he was making excuses. He understood the point: the process was good, the looks were open, the team should have made more of them. Joe Mazzulla, he noted, got into similar trouble for a comparable quote a year ago.

The problem was the phrasing and the world it landed in. In an environment where everything is instantly clipped, aggregated, and stripped of context, Beck said, it was the wrong answer said the wrong way, even if it was not quite as damning as the cycle made it.

As for Atkinson's job, Beck declined to speculate, but he laid out the pressure honestly. The Cavaliers have bumped up against the ceiling for four years with Donovan Mitchell, a first-round exit and two second-round exits before finally reaching the conference finals, their first without LeBron James in roughly 40 years. That is not nothing. But when you lose this badly, Beck said, the optics alone can take you down, the way they did when Philadelphia fired Daryl Morey after the Knicks took over their building.

Owners are emotional too, he pointed out, and game one will haunt the entire franchise, not just the coach. Blowing that 22-point fourth-quarter lead, Beck said, is where the series was really lost.