CLEVELAND, Ohio - In the spotlight of playoff basketball, the Cavs have been exposed — not for lack of talent, but for something that separates the champions from the also-rans: toughness.
As fans watched the Indiana Pacers battle their way past the Knicks into the NBA Finals —the same Pacers team that dismantled the Cavs in five games — the question lingers about where Cleveland’s mental and physical toughness will come from.
An email from listener Jim Mullen to the Terry’s Talkin’ podcast struck at the heart of the issue.
As host David Campbell shared on the show: “Jim says, ‘Hey, guys, I know that on those great Bulls teams, Michael Jordan drove everybody hard in practice. He would not accept mistakes and less than 100% effort. Practices with Jordan could get brutal. Players would not dare loaf or go through the motions. Maybe practicing hard and competitively would help the Cavs again.’ ”
Terry Pluto’s response on the podcast was that something has to change next season. “I think Kenny and Mitchell have to set the tone at practices,” Pluto said.
Jordan was famous for riding his teammates in practice, and getting them to push through fatigue rather than succumbing to it. With Jordan, every possession in a practice mattered as much as the final minutes of a playoff game.
“The thing about Indiana, and I’m watching them going, they never get tired,” Pluto said. “They never get tired, you know, and how they handle things.”
Campbell raised a question about whether Mitchell needs to transition from serving an encouraging role for his teammates to something more hard-edged.
“But I do wonder though, Terry, if it’s time for him to go from being the nurturing kind of big brother... to more of what we were just talking about with Jim’s email about Jordan,” he said. “You’ve got to get on these guys, and there are not many players on that team who can do that.”
Pluto highlighted a counterintuitive benefit of Jordan’s intense practice regimen: “Here was the thing about Jordan and those practices: The Bulls never got hurt. I can’t explain it, but they never got hurt, it seemed like.”
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