Cavs miss chance to clinch East; Donovan Mitchell suffers injury scare

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CLEVELAND — What transpired Sunday night was a shame for the Cavaliers, and that’s it. The silver lining of it all is how much worse things could have been.

Cleveland blew its first chance to clinch the No. 1 seed for the Eastern Conference playoffs by losing at home to the Sacramento Kings 120-113 in a game of puzzling defensive mishaps, poor 3-point shooting and one astonishingly poor plus-minus for a key rotation player.

But the proceedings, as disappointing as they were, didn’t kill the Cavs. Up four games on the Boston Celtics with four to play, Cleveland has four more chances to close this thing out.

If Donovan Mitchell’s ankle roll early in the third quarter had gone a different way, we’d be talking about a potential disaster.

As it was, Mitchell was hobbling around the locker room, and he may miss Tuesday’s game against Chicago. With 9:54 left in the third, Mitchell was trailing a play when he stepped on the back of Sacramento guard Keon Ellis’ foot. Mitchell’s left ankle buckled and nearly hit the floor, and Mitchell, obviously hobbled, fell to the court on the sideline opposite the team’s bench.

He was writhing in pain and grabbing the back of his ankle, but after a minute or two, Mitchell lifted himself off the court and made it to the locker room under his own power. He returned with 3:01 left in the period and played the entire fourth quarter, finishing the game with 19 points, six rebounds and six assists.

“I wanted to get the No. 1 seed and then go from there,” Mitchell said when asked why he returned to the game, given Cleveland’s relatively safe playoff positioning and his oft-stated chief goal of being healthy for the playoffs.

“If I’m able to go, I’m gonna go,” Mitchell said. “Obviously, a little hobbled after the first adrenaline rush … but I’m trying to win, trying to help my team win in any way possible.”

Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson admitted his mind was running wild when Mitchell first went down. Something to the effect of, “Great, this is exactly what we don’t need now.” Atkinson said he told Mitchell, “‘If it’s even 5 percent where you’re a little weak or it’s bothering you, you just got to tell me. We gotta get you out, we’ve got multiple games to try and close this thing, but we don’t have to do it tonight.’ He said he was fine, felt fine.

“I look at it as a positive,” Atkinson continued. “Imagine his ankle is bad, he’s out for a couple of weeks, that could easily happen. So I am looking at it like a positive, man. He came back, finished playing the whole fourth quarter, so that might be the most positive thing of the night.”

The other bit of good news was the return, and subsequent play, of one of Cleveland’s super subs for the season, Ty Jerome. Having missed the last five games with a sore left knee, Jerome returned against the Kings and led the Cavs with 20 points in 23 minutes off the bench — including 10 in the fourth quarter during which Cleveland stormed back from a 12-point deficit to briefly retake the lead.

Jerome finished 9-of-13 from the field and was on the court for nearly the first six minutes of the final quarter. He was cooking and so were the Cavs, but Atkinson chose to remove Jerome so as not to push him at the end of the regular season, with the playoffs so close.

“Just didn’t want to risk it,” Atkinson said.

Jerome said he was out to “let (his knee) calm down a little bit, let the swelling go down.” He said he knew he would be back before the end of the regular season, and perhaps could have played last week in a home win over the Knicks. Jerome is averaging more than 12 points, three rebounds and a steal in about 20 minutes per game off the bench, which has him in the running for awards like the NBA’s top sixth man and most improved player.

YOUR 6TH MAN OF THE YEAR, CAVS FANS. 😤@tyjerome_ | #LetEmKnow https://t.co/qWtf2hLeJN pic.twitter.com/FXbZVimSA3

— Cleveland Cavaliers (@cavs) April 7, 2025

Cleveland’s other candidate for sixth man of the year, De’Andre Hunter, had an ugly number hung on him in one of those stats where no one is quite sure what it says about the player’s performance, because there are factors out of his control. But, shoot, let’s just say it: in Hunter’s 22 minutes of court time on Sunday, the Kings outscored the Cavs by 28.

Hunter’s 11 points, three 3s, two blocks and two steals would suggest he wasn’t, like, trying to play with an arm tied behind his back or a blindfold covering his eyes — so let’s move on to some sore spots that are easier to understand.

Cleveland allowed 37 points off of 16 turnovers, which suggests lazy (at best) transition defense, to say nothing of being sloppy with the ball. The Kings’ three top players are Domantas Sabonis, DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine, and the three of them combined for 92 points, 10 3s and 15 assists. They were equally dominant, and yes, they get paid too, but their shared ownership of Sunday’s game suggests some lack of attention paid to Cleveland’s game plan — unless the game plan itself was the problem, but Jerome mentioned it was the players not following through that caused the trouble.

Darius Garland shot 4-of-13 and 1-of-7 on 3s. He’s had some uneven play since his All-Star appearance in San Francisco in February. Cleveland was 10-of-38 from 3 as a team and is no longer the league’s top 3-point shooting team — a sign the entire group has regressed a little from its halcyon days of late October to mid-March (Cleveland is 6-6 since March 16).

Add it all up and you have a fairly substantial whiff on a chance to salt away the East (regular-season wise) for just the fourth time in franchise history, and the first without LeBron James on the roster. Also, after five months’ worth of historic winning streaks and dazzling play, the Cavs are now out of the running to even tie the franchise record for wins — kind of hard to believe given how dominant they were for so long this year.

“I didn’t think our energy level was as high as I thought it would be, you know, considering the first seed is kind of at stake,” Atkinson said. “Their energy and intensity level was higher. I think we did pick it up a little bit, but I was a little surprised we weren’t more on point.”

Yes, the Kings technically have more to play for right now than the Cavs and can ill afford to lose at all. They held a two-game lead over the Suns heading into play Sunday for the 10th seed in the West — the Kings need to finish at least 10th to make the Play-In Tournament for the right to continue their season for at least another game.

There was one other bad part of Sunday’s game, and this mistake belonged to the officials. LaVine clearly scored a layup after the shot clock went off with 46 seconds left and the Kings ahead by three. The officials allowed the basket and didn’t review the play.

“We made a mistake,” lead official Courtney Kirkland told a pool reporter after the game. “During live action, we thought that LaVine released the ball prior to the expiration of the shot clock. If we were going to review, we would have had to review it before the ball was legally touched on the floor during the throw-in, right after the made basket.”

Atkinson, who hadn’t heard that explanation from Kirkland, said, “We make errors, we make mistakes, they (the officials) make mistakes. They’re not perfect, so not going to make a big deal out of it. That’s not why we lost the game.”

(Photo: Ken Blaze  / Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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