What are the Cavaliers without Donovan Mitchell? Cleveland has more questions than answers

BOSTON — An injured Donovan Mitchell stayed in the hallways of TD Garden long after his Cleveland Cavaliers lost a close-out Game 5 to the Boston Celtics, 113-98, dapping up each of his teammates upon their exit from the arena and congratulating rivals Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown on his own way out.

There was no way of telling whether this was the five-time All-Star guard’s farewell to the organization he has known for the past two seasons, even as The Athletic published its postmortem on the Cavs’ season, complete with speculation about Mitchell’s wayward status and the future of head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, who in the aftermath of this series called this “a difficult year for us — for a bunch of different reasons.”

Mitchell, relegated to street clothes for the final two losses of the series with a left calf strain, was not made available to the media. For his part, Bickerstaff said, “I’ll keep showing up until they tell me not to.”

Cleveland framed its Eastern Conference semifinals exit as a steppingstone from last year’s disappointing first-round loss, but behind every answer were lingering questions about what comes next this offseason.

“We’ve got a good team,” said Bickerstaff, shifting around a pointed question about Mitchell’s status. “We’ve got good individual players. We’ve got high-character players that are concerned about winning. Any time you have that, you’re going to give yourself an opportunity. I would love to see what we look like when we’re whole for an entire season, what pressure we can put on the league from that standpoint, but we’ve got a good basketball team of guys who want to win and guys who want to get better.”

Two years ago, the Cavaliers had no ceiling. Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen were first-time All-Stars. A rookie Evan Mobley looked like a young Kevin Garnett. All of them were under 25 years old. Together, they formed the foundation of a 44-win team that narrowly missed the playoffs, largely due to injuries.

The sky was the limit, and Cleveland’s front office reached for it immediately, outbidding the New York Knicks by trading Lauri Markkanen, Collin Sexton and the…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-05-16 05:25:52

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