Cleveland Cavaliers: John Beilein’s failure calls Koby Altman’s competence to question

The Cleveland Cavaliers are poised to move on from yet another head coach in what has become an annual tradition. At what point is this Koby Altman’s fault?

During Sunday’s NBA All-Star game, the revelry was smashed with a Woj bomb. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski broke in with the announcement that embattled Cleveland Cavaliers head coach John Beilein would not finish the season with the team, and in updates through the night the timeline for his departure was shortened to perhaps sometime this week.

Regardless of the form or timetable his exit takes, Beilein’s tenure in Cleveland will not survive the season. This means the next coach of the Cavs will be their sixth in the last seven seasons. Remember, the Cavaliers have been to four straight NBA Finals and won an NBA championship in this span.

It’s an unprecedented level of turnover, and while the team that went to the Finals is certainly not this team, the lack of continuity is an issue that goes beyond the head coach himself.

Since Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert essentially pushed general manager David Griffin out the door and hired then-assistant general manager Koby Altman in his place, the decision-making from the executive suite has been questionable at best.

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The trade of Kyrie Irving for Isaiah Thomas comes to mind. The Cavs believed they had to move on from Irving, and to do so right away. However they were so concerned by Thomas’s physical results they demanded extra compensation to consummate the deal. Isaiah Thomas has been a fringe NBA player at best since injuring his hip in the playoffs before.

Altman also signed Kevin Love to a four-year, $120 million contract extension in 2018. This extension immediately appeared to make him untradeable, and he has three years and $91.5 million remaining on it as he’ll enter his age-32 season in 2020-21.

Altman’s specific decision to hire Beilein last summer was a puzzling one as well. At the age of 66, he was the oldest rookie non-interim head coach in NBA history. The previous oldest, Dave MacMillan, was hired at the age of 64. This took place in 1950, and the team in question was the Tri-City Blackhawks. Generally, when a team breaks a record nearly 70 years old, it’s a good thing, but leave it to the Cleveland Cavaliers to screw that up.

Perhaps Altman wanted to bring in a teacher of sorts for his young squad, and Beilein’s over-reliance on teaching his professional basketball team the fundamentals may have been an indication they were on the same page.

Clearly, it’s not always a good thing when a mutually overmatched head coach and general manager are on the same page.

The Cleveland Cavaliers will move deeper into an uncertain future. A franchise that has experienced very little success outside the two eras of LeBron James will get to pick another coach, perhaps from its own ranks in the form of assistant J.B. Bickerstaff.

The most experienced assistant on the Cavs’ bench, Bickerstaff has been an interim coach before with stints for the Houston Rockets and the Memphis Grizzlies. He has a record of 85-131 in his three years as a head coach, but this is weighted heavily by a bad Grizzlies era in 2017-18 and 2018-19.

Since the start, the question hasn’t really been about John Beilein. He’s been outmatched and drawing dead from the start of his NBA career. The real question is about Koby Altman. Is he really the man to lead the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first true successful era without LeBron James?

Maybe. But at this point in the young executive’s career, there is no proof that he is.