The Cleveland coach says the context behind his infamous line got lost, even as he admits the Knicks simply dominated the series.
Kenny Atkinson is still explaining himself. Months after the Cavaliers fell behind 3-0 to the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals, the coach's claim that Cleveland had "analytically" won two of those first three games remains a punchline, one that Josh Hart, Karl-Anthony Towns and plenty of others have gotten mileage out of.
Atkinson says the quote came in response to a specific question about whether the Cavaliers had any hope of becoming the first NBA team to erase a 3-0 series deficit. He feels that framing got stripped away once the sound bite started circulating on its own. "When you take the context of the question, I'm not sure that was taken into account, that's a little bit of a lesson for me, you can just take a sound bite," he said.
Even so, Atkinson is not pretending the series went any other way than it did. He has acknowledged that he answered the question as it was posed, while also conceding that New York was clearly the better team and dominated Cleveland in that series.
The jokes, by his own admission, are not going away anytime soon.