Atkinson isn’t impressed with Cavs pickleball skills: ‘They’re just hoopers’

Not every elite athlete has the skills to be a pickleball master.

Cleveland Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson is a proponent of breaking up the monotony of the NBA season with different games and activities.

“[The season is] too long, in a sense, to just grind it out every day,” Atkinson said. “And I think mixing it up, with variety in what you do just kind of helps the spirit of the team.”

We’ve already seen the Cavs play wiffle ball and touch football. On Tuesday they tried their hand at pickleball. According to Atkinson, this wasn’t an activity that everyone excelled in.

“Well, I’ll just say this, there’s some guys, you know, they’re just hoopers,” Atkinson said. “They just hoop. There are other guys that I’ve seen when we play wiffle ball too, you know, you got guys like, holding a bat, like this, (gestures holding a bat with a six-inch gap between his hands) which would never happen to any of us.

“We have our multi-sport guys like Donovan [Mithell]. Darius [Garland], he’s a stud. And then we got some guys like, the racket just does not seem natural. So, I’m not going to get into particulars, maybe go and watch the video on it.”

The video doesn’t show much, but we can see that neither Garland nor Tristan Thompson fully grasp the rules about the kitchen.

“That’s part of the fun of it,” Atkinson said about watching some of his players struggle. “A guy takes his first swing or a backhand and everyone’s like, ‘What is that?’ Everyone just dies laughing. ‘Have you ever picked up a paddle?’ And that just makes it fun.”

Atkinson has been embracing anything that adds some spice to mundane tasks. Warming up with activities like this is just one way to do that.

“You always do the same warm-up every day,” Atkinson said. “So I just have this thing about more variety. We’ll do the same thing with film. We’ll put funny clips in and, you know, kind of grab the guy’s attention a little, and then we get down to business. And I always feel like, you get it back when you do that. It’s like, okay, they know the fun is over, and when practice comes, they lock in. And we had a good practice.”