Donovan Mitchell scored 26 of his game-high points in three quarters at Madison Square Garden and then went silent. Three in the fourth quarter and overtime, no field goals down the stretch, a Cavaliers offence that initiated through James Harden instead of him and a 22-point fourth-quarter lead that disappeared in just over seven minutes. When he reached the podium afterwards, Mitchell took the same position he has taken after every Cleveland loss this postseason. He refused to panic.
"It's one loss," Mitchell said. "It's a bad loss, but all we can do is go back and watch the film and fix it."
He sat next to Karl-Anthony Towns at the joint podium and was asked how a team comes back from a collapse this public.
"You said it's one game," Mitchell said. "We could have lost by 40, still would have been 10 — so just watch the film. We played pretty solid for three quarters or so. We'll make adjustments and go from there."
The reporter pressed him on what changed inside that fourth quarter, when Cleveland's ball stopped moving and possessions devolved into late-clock isolation looks. Mitchell was careful not to publicly point at Harden, who was the player New York hunted in pick-and-roll over and over.
"I'll watch the film and figure it out, and I don't think it's anything to overreact to," he said. "But you know those scenarios, you got to feel it. And like I've always said, it's a feel thing. Go back and watch the film and I'll have an answer for you tomorrow."
When the question circled back specifically to Harden, Mitchell answered it as a team failure, not an individual one.
"Different coverages in different ways," Mitchell said. "Maybe we could have got to it a little bit earlier. I think kind of getting out of Brunson's hands is something we can adjust to. But ultimately this isn't on him. It's on all of us. This isn't just because of a certain stretch — like, no. We still have opportunities on the other end as well to take advantage and score, and we didn't. So it's not just on one person. When he's been around the league long enough, he understands — 17 years, right. But in the same token, hey, it happened, and we'll respond for Game 2."
Mitchell was also asked, pointedly, about the symmetry. Last year his Cleveland team lost a Game 1 to Tyrese Haliburton on a hammer shot at the buzzer in the second round. The year before, the Timberwolves lost a Western Conference Finals Game 1 on a Luka Doncic step-back. This time the Cavaliers were on the other side of it.
"It's always great when you can win in the playoffs," Mitchell said, when asked how it felt to be on the losing end of one of those games. "Obviously a special win against a great team, to find a way to win as a unit. That shows that they can go out there and we just got to play better. An expensive lesson learned tonight."
Karl-Anthony Towns, sitting beside him, leaned more openly into the language of rust. Cleveland had won its second-round series in six games on Saturday. New York had been off for more than a week.
"Yeah, to be real, yeah, there was definitely rust," Towns said. "It's a testament to the great of this locker room and this team that, as the game went on, you can see the rust was coming off a little bit and we were able to find ourselves in the game. At the end of the day, great offensive plays by JB, amazing clutch plays by Landry Shamet, clutch plays right next to me, Mikal Bridges, but it was our defence that has always been special in these playoffs. That's what carried us, and that showed up in the fourth quarter and in overtime and allowed us to be sitting here against a really great team."
Kenny Atkinson, the Cavs head coach, framed the loss as a small-margins problem.
"I thought they hit some really tough shots in that fourth quarter," Atkinson said. "Those two threes — prayer threes, and the shot clock. I think we got a little unlucky, quite honestly. Brunson obviously took over at the end, and we started double-teaming, trying to do some different things. But I'm super proud of the way our group played. We played great basketball tonight for three quarters. Unfortunately, the fourth quarter, they dominated us."
Mitchell, asked for his message as the leader of the locker room, offered the cleanest line of the night.
"I said in the locker room, just that we lost," he said. "We blew it. All right, let's run for Game 2. Simple as that."
The Cavs have less than 48 hours to figure out the rest.
---
*Originally published on [NBA News Global](https://nbanews.global/article/donovan-mitchell-cavaliers-game-1-loss-knicks-comeback-may-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
