The Indiana Pacers beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in the second round of this year’s playoffs in five games.
The Cavaliers went 0-3 at home in the series despite being the top seed in the East.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that Darius Garland, Evan Mobley and De’Andre Hunter didn’t play in Game 2. Garland had a left big toe injury, Mobley had a sprained left ankle and Hunter had a dislocated right thumb.
Richard Jefferson, who helped Cleveland win the 2016 championship against the Golden State Warriors, slammed Garland, Mobley and Hunter for missing Game 2 of the Pacers series on the latest episode of the Road Trippin’ podcast.
“All of us can’t not play,” Jefferson said. “As a player, you’re like, ‘Wait, all three of us aren’t playing? Somebody’s gotta go. Somebody has to help this out. We’re down 0-1. We might fu*k around and be down 0-2.’
“If that’s not your mentality, that I’m going to push through this sh*t. … Somebody has to.”
Cavaliers president of basketball operations Koby Altman met with local reporters on Monday for his end-of-the-season press conference and even he admitted that his players have to get tougher.
“I think there’s a mental toughness that you have to get by going through these failures in the playoffs,” Altman said. “I think people speak to the physicality, it was a physical, physical series against the Pacers. But watch every single series, they’re all physical. They’re all grabbing hold. They’re all pushing from afar.
“There’s a mental toughness that we’re going to have to get to that a lot of the Pacers had. At the end of some of those games, that’s what we saw. They made those winning plays at the end.”
The Cavaliers are expected to stand pat this summer.
“I think we can all agree that coming into the season, no one predicted us to be No. 1 seed,” Altman said. “I don’t think anyone had 64 wins. Because we were so good, we recreated the expectation of Finals. I think everyone in here saw potential champions, which is a new space for us.
“We recreated the expectation and now we have to live with that. I think it’s a space we want to live in and take that into the playoffs next year, knowing we’re going to have to change that narrative, knowing that we have get over the hump.”
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