Cleveland Cavaliers assistant Phil Handy was pissed at his team after they dropped Games 1 and 2 of the NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors.
Like, really pissed.
So pissed, he uncharacteristically laid into his team after the fact, which Game 3 superhero Richard Jefferson admits helped light a fire under the Cavaliers’ derrières, per Cleveland.com’s Chris Haynes:
Lue could tell that his players just wanted out of there. He walked toward the middle of the locker room and called for his guys to bring it in. The players came over and extended their arms, but before they could break, an unlikely voice asked Lue if he could have a few words, and the head coach obliged.
Assistant coach Phil Handy, who happens to be a native of Oakland, erupted with a profanity-laced tirade, questioning their toughness and the lack of fight they displayed on such a grand stage. The players were shocked. Handy is relatively quiet. In Handy’s outburst that lasted a few minutes, his overall message was clear and to the point: You guys were punked and you did absolutely nothing about it.
That message was candid and straightforward during what was a highly frustrating period, but it was well received.
“He’s an Oakland boy, and we went out to Oakland and got our ass whipped twice,” Cavs forward Richard Jefferson told cleveland.com. “He was pissed off. He has to show up there every day. It means a lot to him, it means a lot to us, and for us to go out there and play the way we did was embarrassing. Look, we personally feel that no team should handle us the way they did the last two games, and it was disrespectful.”
Players told Haynes that Handy’s explosion of emotion stuck with them in the days leading up to Game 3. And, well, whatever he said worked.
The Cavaliers came out firing in Game 3, defeating the Warriors 120-90 after being outscored by 48 points, the largest opening-two game deficit in NBA Finals history, per Basketball-Reference. That’s absurd.
It’s even more absurd that head coach Tyronn Lue and his players have talked about vacillating effort levels during the postgame press conferences. Effort and energy should never be an issue at this stage of the season, in the NBA Finals, with a championship and basketball immortality on the line.
And if it ever was for the Cavaliers, they appear to have fixed it. And Handy definitely helped.
There is something about hearing the cold, hard truth from an unexpected source that hits you. That Lue was trying to usher his players out of Oracle Arena swiftly likely only added to surprise.
Maybe the Cavaliers would have played better in Game 3 regardless. After all, they couldn’t get much worse. But the pep talks that stick with you for days, explosive or not, matter. And Handy’s handy work (sorry) is no different.
