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Being a coach means understanding how to get the most out of your players. For Kenny Atkinson and the Cleveland Cavaliers, no player’s development has been more important than Evan Mobley’s.
Drafted in 2021, Mobley was a lottery ticket for the future. Five seasons later, his development has largely come secondary to prioritizing Donovan Mitchell’s prime. The Cavs have tried to blend both timelines, bringing Mobley along while staying all-in on Mitchell’s timeline.
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This has further complicated an already challenging question: How do you get the most out of a player?
What’s the balance between pushing someone outside of their comfort zone without losing the big picture of who they are at their core? And how does that fit into the broader team system?
Cleveland has been trying to figure that out for years — and Atkinson thinks he might have solved it.
“Threading the needle,” Kenny Atkinson said. “We’ve been on different planes of that scale with Mobley, you know, we’ve pushed it, we’ve pulled it back… I feel like he’s in a good place now; I have a much better grip on how he can be successful on both ends of the floor for us.”
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Most players in Mobley’s position spend the first few years of their career racking up usage on uncompetitive teams. You can learn a lot by throwing someone into the fire. But Mobley and his coaching staff haven’t had that opportunity while trying to compete in the playoffs.
Everyone is learning on the fly.
Sometimes Mobley is bringing the ball up the floor and running inverted pick-and-rolls. Other times, he’s isolated in the corner as a proto-floor spacer. In his most refined role, he sits in the dunker spot and waits for someone to throw him a lob.
Mobley has tried on all of these hats to varying success. He’s a great play-finisher, but a sketchy three-point shooter. He can create advantages when using screens, but Mobley isn’t a skilled one-on-one creator. All of this has been slowly uncovered by Atkinson’s experiments.
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“We’ve dialed back to [Mobley] getting it in the flow [of the offense],” said Atkinson. “Lean into the creativity a little bit more,…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/kenny-atkinson-believes-cracked-code-110000451.html
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Publish date : 2026-10-12 11:00:00
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