Donovan Mitchell, Cavs using last year’s hurt to fuel NBA playoff, championship chase

Almost one year ago, Donovan Mitchell sat in the middle of the media room at the Cleveland Cavaliers’ practice facility in Independence, Ohio. As reporters and videographers watched on to the All-Star guard’s exit interview after a premature bump from the NBA playoffs at the hands of the Indiana Pacers, he glanced at the television. It was tuned to ESPN’s First Take with the topic reading: “How much criticism does Donovan Mitchell deserve?”

“It is going to be a lot of voices about what the Cavs are, what the Cavs should [be],” Mitchell said in May 2025, noting that he hoped everybody, like him, felt the embarrassment of a five-game series loss to the Pacers as the Eastern Conference’s top seed. “There’s going to be a loud summer. I’ve been through a few of those. Use it as fuel because it’s the only thing you can do. Show up to work every day. Show up to the gym and keep going, keep going.”

More bluntly, Mitchell’s version of the message to the locker room was to “let it eat away at you.”

“I have no doubt everybody will, because everybody’s a collective group,” Mitchell said. “We’re a connected group. We’re a group that really wants it. And I have no doubt that we’ll use this.”

Let It Fuel You pic.twitter.com/kdGNcgNqCU

— Spencer Davies (@SpinDavies) May 14, 2025

Eleven months later, Mitchell and Cleveland have a chance to rectify the last postseason and similar shortcomings that preceded it.

“I think you just remember those feelings,” Mitchell told ClutchPoints in a media scrum at Friday’s practice. “It allows you to go a little harder, right? Maybe do a little extra conditioning or do a few more reps in the weight room, a few more reps on the court. Extra hours of sleep, eating right. Whatever that does for each individual in the locker room, that’s their own thing. But I think it definitely helps you in a positive way.

“I don’t think we respond the way we did as a team this year if it doesn’t help us in a positive way, throughout guys being in and out. So much unpredictability. So I think now’s that time. We’re in a similar position. We’re like, hey, we have an expectation upon us, and we know what’s at stake. and we get to go out there and control our own destiny and understand that, throughout the positive or the negative, whatever happens throughout this run, we’ve got each other.”

The Cavs did not have the same kind of success in the regular season as last year, but they are still in the top four and won 52 games despite playing with a partial roster for almost the entire 2025-26 campaign.

“The experience,” Evan Mobley said of how the Cavs are better equipped now for a long playoff run. “I think also this year, in general, how we went through trials and tribulations early, fought through some things. I think we’re just all ready. The trade, we’ve got some different people. We played with them a few times now, and we’ve got good chemistry together. We know what we want to do and what we want to get to, and I think we’re in a good spot right now.”

Although not everybody from those days is still around, the majority of the core is, and those with battle scars are taking it to heart.

“I definitely understand what went wrong, the last playoffs that we’ve been in,” Jarrett Allen said Thursday. “Understand the shortcomings that we had, understand what we’re looking forward to, and how to achieve those goals. I mean, you have to give and take. You can’t linger on the path and think, ‘Oh, it should have been this way or that way.’ You have to use that to push forward.”

“Every experience that you’ve gone through can help in some aspect,” Max Strus added. “And I think a lot of the guys in this room have learned that. At the same time, you don’t want to dwell on the past. Like, you don’t want to dwell on the negatives. You don’t want to dwell on the things that didn’t work in the past. But it’s time to look forward. It’s time to kind of put everything together that you’ve learned in that experience and be better from it, and I think we’ve shown growth in that area from this whole season and throughout this whole week of preparing and understanding the mindset that it takes.”

Donovan Mitchell and the Cavs are champing at the bit

Only one sleep away from Cleveland tipping off against the Toronto Raptors in the first round, Mitchell is eager to get to it.

“This is another situation where we get to go out there and prove we belong, but also it’s going to come down to us,” Mitchell said. “We go 16-0, phenomenal, but no team has done that. There’s going to be adversity at some point, and understanding that we have what’s in this locker room. For me, it’s just we go out there and get to compete and try to win at the highest level.”

“Every playoff run is significant,” Strus added. “Playing in the postseason is a privilege. Not everybody gets to do this. It’s the best time of the year. It’s the best basketball. You live, and you work all season, you work all summer for this moment, and it’s just the best time of the year. Can’t wait to play.”

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