Kenny Atkinson and Curtis Blair have known each other since their Richmond Spiders days, but the Cavaliers coach said that history stayed mostly in the background when Blair worked Game 2 of Cleveland’s series with Detroit on Thursday.
Atkinson, who has been on an NBA sideline as an assistant or head coach since 2008, said in a phone call with The Athletic on Saturday after Cleveland’s 116-109 Game 3 win that the relationship is defined by competition, not nostalgia. “You know, listen, there’s no, like, friends, right? We’re competing,” he said. “There is no, I’m not going to say anything to Curtis because we went to school together.”
Blair called a loose-ball foul on the Cavs in the fourth quarter of Game 2, one of the few moments the two crossed paths in public during a game officiated by someone who once shared a college locker room with the coach. Atkinson said he largely steered clear of Blair and described their interactions as “super professional,” adding, “But we both know we have this shared history.”
The shared past runs back to 1988 to 1990, when Atkinson and Blair were teammates at Richmond. They also led the Spiders in scoring when Atkinson was a senior and Blair was a sophomore, a detail that still surprises some NBA circles because their college connection has remained little known. Blair is now in his 18th season as an NBA official and has worked three games in the 2026 playoffs so far, including the Cavaliers’ losses in Game 2 to Detroit and Game 3 against Toronto in the first round before Cleveland beat the Raptors handily in Game 7.
That history gives the matchup a layer that rarely surfaces on an NBA sideline: one former college scorer now coaching an NBA contender, the other calling the game from the floor. Atkinson said they do not dwell on the past. “We’re never like, ‘Hey, Curt, remember when you hit the buzzer-beater against American University to put us in the finals of the CAA tournament?’ We don’t reminisce,” he said. “We’re not joking about Dick Tarrant.”
Richmond alumni have reason to take pride in both careers, and Atkinson and Blair fit a familiar NBA pattern of former players becoming officials or coaches. Leon Wood entered the league as an official after playing in the NBA in 1996, and other former players such as Haywoode Workman and Bernie Fryer followed similar paths. For Atkinson and Blair, though, the unusual part is not the professional overlap. It is that they still meet each other at the highest level of the sport, with the same old balance of familiarity and distance intact.
