The Cleveland Cavaliers could make drastic changes this summer. However, those moves won’t come at the expense of either the front office or the coaching staff. According to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, the Cavs are expected to retain both.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, despite how things ended on Monday night.
Koby Altman and the rest of the front office have built a sustainable winner. This team has won 50 or more games in four straight seasons and has won four playoff series during
that span. They haven’t been able to reach the goal of winning a championship, but that is a major accomplishment for a small-market team that doesn’t have the built-in advantages that the coastal powerhouses do.
Altman took over for David Griffin after the 2016-17 season. During his tenure, he oversaw LeBron James’s final season with the team, a multi-year rebuild, trading for Donovan Mitchell, and the team’s recent ascent back up the Eastern Conference standings.
Head coach Kenny Atkinson will also be back next season for his third season with the team.
It’s easy to blame Atkinson for a lot of this group’s failures in the postseason. Some of the in-game adjustments came too late, and he does bear some of the blame for the team not being able to close out multiple winnable postseason games.
At the same time, Atkinson guided the Cavs through a rocky regular season, navigated the addition of James Harden, and has earned the trust of his team’s star players. This is after revolutionizing the Cavs’ offense the previous year, leading them to a 64-win season, and winning Coach of the Year.
“We’ve done something that we haven’t done since 2018,” Mitchell said after the Game 4 loss to the New York Knicks. “I love Kenny. We love Kenny. We ride with Kenny, and ultimately that’s all that matters.”
Earlier on Wednesday, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst reported that Cavs’ chairman Dan Gilbert is “heavily involved” again with the team after not being as hands-on while dealing with some health issues. Presumably, both the front office and coaching staff have earned his trust.
We’ll see what moves are made this summer. At the very least, we know that there will be continuity in decision-making and coaching.
