AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -– The series was over and Tyronn Lue was finished recapping his Cleveland Cavaliers’ closer-than-it-seemed 4-0 win over the Detroit Pistons when he let out a loud, lengthy exhale as he got up from the podium.

Sunday’s Game 4, a 100-98 win that wasn’t decided until Reggie Jackson’s 3-pointer with one second remaining fell short, mirrored the rest of the first-round series.

It will go down in the books as a sweep, but Lue will remember the way his team trailed by seven in the second half of Game 1 and was down by as many as 10 in Game 2, six in Game 3 and nine in Game 4 -- as the Pistons started the potential closeout contest up 12-3.

As Lue walked out of the postgame press conference area surrounded by a couple of security guards, a couple of public relations staffers and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s son, Nick, he continued to talk about what just went down against Detroit with a hint of disbelief in his voice:

“That was a hell of a series.”

“That was a good-ass series.”

“That had to be one of the better 1-8 series ever, even though we swept.”

In just one week, Lue went from having zero playoff experience under his belt as a head coach to taking out a guy he once played for, Stan Van Gundy, with four wins in four games.

Van Gundy, a veteran coach with 17 playoff series under his belt as head coach from his days with Miami and Orlando to Lue’s one, didn’t have the level of players Lue had to work with. But Van Gundy did have a collection of young athletes and the confidence in his past to push his players to believe that they had a chance against the best team in the East.

To make up for the talent gap, the Pistons junked up the series, resorting to bully tactics on LeBron James and evoking the franchise’s “Jordan Rules” from Detroit's Bad Boys era, only without any of the success to show for it. After being the target of several dirty hits in the series, James left the court and headed to the Cavs locker room as soon as the final buzzer sounded Sunday, forgoing any exchange of pleasantries with a group of opponents that chose to compete through feigned intimidation rather than through sharpened execution.

Lue stayed on the court long enough, however, for Van Gundy to find him.

“Stan just said I did a phenomenal job this year coaching the team,” Lue told ESPN.com. “He said these playoffs were great with my ATOs (after-timeout plays) and baseline out-of-bounds plays.

"He said I’m doing a hell of a job and to keep it up. And he said when I played for him, he knew I’d be a great coach one day.”

If the Pistons’ play veered toward over-the-top physicality, Lue’s mark on the series came through his subtle adjustments to bring the best out of his players.

His ATOs might as well be rebranded "A-Ty-Os" after all the success his team had in executing them: from the layup James scored at the end of the first quarter in Game 1 -- checking back in the game with less than two seconds to go in the period just so he could convert the play Lue drew up; to the misdirection inbounds pass in Game 2 that used J.R. Smith as a decoy to free up Kevin Love for a point-blank look right at the rim; to the game-sealing 3 that Kyrie Irving hit in Game 3 based on an ATO play that Lue thought up while killing time before tipoff; to the baseline out-of-bounds play midway through the fourth quarter of Game 4 that sprung Smith for a 3 with just 2.2 seconds left on the shot clock.

“It means a lot from a premier coach like Stan who is well respected around the league, and to have a chance to get a compliment from a guy like that and then to beat him 4-0, it means a lot,” Lue told ESPN.com. “Because I know he’s very smart, he’s very intelligent, and I knew this was going to be a tough series. Which it was. It was a tough series for us. It was just a great grind-out game for us. It was a great grind-out series for us, and we needed that, to wake us up early.

“And I mean, to beat Stan and beat him 4-0, that means a lot to me. Because I know he’s a bad m-----f-----.”

Van Gundy wasn’t the only one impressed by Lue.

“We definitely recognize it and understand that it’s his first challenge, and he succeeded as well as any coach could, or if it was a player, as any player could in their first series,” James said. “He physically, mentally and spiritually prepared us every single night and gave us a game plan, along with the coaching staff. We as players could execute that as close to 100 percent, then we had a good chance to win every game, which we did, because of the preparation of those guys -- starting with Coach Lue, our captain -- put us in position to do.”

With only 41 games on his coaching résumé before this postseason since he was promoted when David Blatt was let go, there was a wild-card factor to how Lue would fare. So far, so good.

“For him, his first playoffs, he’s been great,” Cavs center Tristan Thompson told ESPN.com. “We actually talked about it. We were like, ‘Man, you can just see it on the court.’ His poise. It’s his first time, and a lot of guys might be nervous or shaking or come to timeouts and not know what to say. But T-Lue, he was fearless. Like he knew exactly what to do like he’s been in this situation before. It’s almost like him as a player helped him in terms of coaching in these big moments; it’s like nothing to him. You don’t see that too often.

“We were just sitting on the bench looking at him like, ‘Damn.’ Like, ‘Wow.’ For a guy’s first time, it’s like nothing to him.”

Nothing but a first step toward a championship season the Cavs were assembled to complete.