Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson's competitiveness began in a Long Island home
Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson shouts in the first half of Game 6 of a second-round NBA playoff series against the Detroit Pistons on Friday in Cleveland. Credit: AP/Sue Ogrocki
Everybody shares everything.
When you are the seventh of eight boys growing up in a three-bedroom home in Northport, this is something you learn early. There is one backyard basketball hoop. One underwear drawer. One sock drawer. No one gets special treatment. But no one is left out.
This goes a long way in explaining the crazy text thread that Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson has with his brothers. Atkinson understandably doesn’t keep the phone nearby when he is the middle of a game, but the brothers would never think of keeping him off it. So if Atkinson ever has the time this week to read the screen after screen of texts that took place during his team’s annihilation of the Pistons in Game 7 on Sunday, he would see a thread bursting with both incredible pride and reminiscences from their days growing up on Long Island.
“We could just pinch ourselves,” Tom Atkinson, an assistant coach on the Northport High School varsity boys basketball team and the second oldest of the Atkinson brothers, told Newsday. “We always knew this was his identity, that he loved basketball, but who could have thought one day that he would get to this level and be in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Knicks? I mean, we used to change his diapers. We are just so proud of him.”
Atkinson made it clear that opening the Eastern Conference Finals on Tuesday against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden has a deep meaning for him.
“I’m a New Yorker,” he said Sunday in his news conference after closing out the series with a 125-94 win. “Going back to the Garden, I worked for the Knicks and I know everybody there. I have a ton of family, my whole family is there, basically. It’s special.”
Indeed. Atkinson’s ties to the New York area run deep and include coaching stints with both the Knicks and the Nets. (More on that later.)
Atkinson’s journey to the conference finals all started on Long Island, or more specifically in the backyard of the family’s house in Northport.
With eight boys born in 14 years, the Atkinsons were a sports-crazed family. Though Kenny was 13 years younger than Mike, the oldest, he made it clear early on that he was not afraid to take on anyone.
“He had this ultra-competitiveness,” said Steve, the third-oldest Atkinson, who once coached Tobias Harris’ brother at Half Hollow Hills West and now is the golf coach at Hauppauge High School. “We would play basketball in the backyard and work him over pretty good. He never ran into the house. He would lose and then want to play someone else. He just wanted to keep playing.
“He hated to lose. You saw that in him as a little kid. I’ve coached a lot of kids. That’s a tough thing to teach. Some guys or girls just have it. And he had it.”
Atkinson had it enough to aspire to play at a high level despite not being quite 6 feet tall.
Atkinson had major-college aspirations when he played for St. Anthony’s in South Huntington in the mid-1980s. Even after he spent a prep year in Maine, the Big East schools he grew up watching had no interest in him and he ended up at Richmond. He helped lead the Spiders to the NCAA Tournament in 1988 and 1990 and is best known for his 14-point game that pushed them to an upset of Bob Knight’s defending champion Indiana team in the first round of the 1988 NCAA Tournament.
A bad ankle ended any dream of playing in the NBA, so he headed to Europe, where he played 14 years, coached three years and learned how to speak Spanish, Italian and French. The experience abroad helped him land a job as a player development coach with the Rockets in 2007.
A year later, he moved to the Knicks, spending four years as an assistant and mentoring Jeremy Lin. In 2016, after a three-year stint as an assistant with the Hawks, he landed the head-coaching job with the Nets.
What happened there has been well documented.
By discovering and developing players such as Caris Le-Vert, Spencer Dinwiddie and Jarrett Allen, Atkinson helped the Nets improve from 20 to 28 to 42 wins, which was impressive enough to help convince superstars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant to sign with them before the 2019-20 season.
It was a heady time for the Atkinson brothers, who became regulars at home games. Kenny bought a house in Quogue and enjoyed that his children were able to grow up near family. Then, after a team meeting in which the then-sidelined Durant ripped the team, Atkinson was fired on March 7, 2020, with the Nets at 28-34.
“Nobody likes getting fired,” Atkinson said in an interview with Newsday last year.
Between head-coaching stints, he spent three seasons as an assistant under Steve Kerr with Golden State. It was there that his path crossed with Knicks coach Mike Brown for one season as both were assistant coaches on the 2022 championship team.
Atkinson was named the Cavaliers’ head coach before last season. And in so many ways, the team he is bringing to Madison Square Garden to try to knock the Knicks out of the playoffs mirrors the resiliency their coach has shown over the course of his career.
After finishing with the best record in the Eastern Conference last season, the Cavaliers lost to Indiana in five games in the second round of the playoffs. This year, after finishing fourth in the conference, the Cavaliers are playing their best basketball when it matters most. Both of their playoff wins over the Raptors and the Pistons were clinched with big Game 7 performances.
“He’s a great person and obviously a really good coach, and he’s got those guys playing at a high level,” Brown said. “There’s no panic in them at all, starting with Kenny on down.”
The Atkinson brothers are not surprised, not after the way they watched one of their youngest try to beat them again and again despite being nearly a decade younger.
Now they can’t wait to watch the next chapter. Because there are so many of them, no one knows if they will be able to score a ticket. But one thing is for sure: The Atkinson brothers’ text thread will be cheering him on no matter where they are watching the game.
Said Steve: “He’s given us all a lot of thrills over the years.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
