It’s still New York or nowhere for Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson.
He may be a temporary enemy of the Empire State during the Eastern Conference finals, but Madison Square Garden will always be a special place to the native of Northport, Long Island.
“I’m a New Yorker,” Atkinson said after the Cavaliers trounced the Pistons 125-94 in Game 7 to win the second-round series.
“Going back to the Garden, worked for the Knicks — know everybody there. My whole family’s there basically. That’s special.”
After all, the 2025 Coach of the Year’s local roots and great relationship with former Knicks assistant coach Phil Weber gave Atkinson an unforgettable spot in team lore more than a decade ago.
“Phil Weber actually lived literally around the corner from us,” Michael Atkinson, Kenny’s oldest of seven highly athletic brothers, told The Post.
“Phil knew Kenny. Phil’s a super personable guy.”
Atkinson played for more than a decade overseas as a point guard — he first dropped jaws at St. Anthony’s High School and later with the 1988 Richmond Spiders, who reached the Sweet 16 — and broke into the NBA as Rockets director of player development in 2007.
Michael said his brother’s work in the Lone Star State quickly impressed Weber, who knew it was time to get Atkinson back home.
“He ended up recommending Kenny to Mike D’Antoni, and Mike D’Antoni hired Kenny with the Knicks,” said Michael, a former Sachem hoops coach who Rick Pitino pulled to Kentucky.
Atkinson spent four years at MSG, from 2008 to 2012, where “he had the guys towards the end of the roster” to look after, his big bro said.
“One of those guys happened to be Jeremy Lin, and so Kenny worked with Jeremy Lin on a daily basis,” Michael added.
“Jeremy Lin even gives Kenny a lot of credit for being ready when his number was called.”
The Atkinson clan was bleeding blue and orange long before Linsanity — or the Knicks’ 1973 title, for that matter.
“We were Knicks fans forever,” Michael said.
The brothers were also just as intense with one another as Walt Frazier’s group was with the rest of the association.
“Everybody was competitive, everybody had their own level of confidence,” said Michael, the eldest at 71.
There was something about Kenny, the second youngest who is now 58, that stood out well before he became the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets from 2016 to 2020 and won an NBA Championship with the Warriors as an assistant in 2022.
Mainly, it was discipline and work ethic passed down by their Marine officer father Neil, and Pauline, a no-nonsense mom who once chased Kenny with a Wiffle ball bat when he was a 6-year-old.
“When you have eight kids — eight boys — you better have discipline,” Michael said.
“He just took, and I think you saw it [during Game 7], that level of focus and intensity just to another level.”
It was a driving reason Kenny was the only sibling pulled from Northport public schools for St. Anthony’s, a program led at the time by the late Gus Alfieri, a local basketball legend and St. John’s Hall of Famer.
A middle-school-aged Alan Hahn, who would go on to play for the Friars and LIU before becoming a Knicks analyst with MSG Network, still remembers being starstruck when he saw Atkinson play as a helper at a Long Island basketball camp in the 1980s.
“The first player that drew my attention and made me go, ‘Wow,’ was Kenny,” Hahn said.
“It was a counselors and coaches game at lunchtime. He’s such a competitor, dominated the scrimmages, and I was just drawn to him ever since. … He was my first basketball idol.”
Atkinson was all about paying it forward, and that passion was palpable in any instruction he gave to up-and-coming Long Islanders.
Both Michael and Hahn said Kenny’s basketball “lectures” were anything but academic.
“The guy was dripping with sweat when he was done,” Hahn said.
“When he was a player development guy, he was just as drenched in sweat as the player he was warming up for the game.”
Long Island is proud of the homegrown hoops guru’s success — but locals will just have a funny way of showing it in the next few days.
“Of course I will be rooting for the Knicks,” St. Anthony’s alumni affairs director Denise Creighton wrote on Facebook, “but CONGRATULATIONS to Friar Alum Kenny Atkinson and the Cavs on their defeat of the Pistons.”
