New Cleveland Cavaliers head coach John Beilein recently made an appearance on “The Woj Pod,” a podcast hosted by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, and a key takeaway from that appearance was what Beilein seemed to look for in his players. Playing off that, three players on the Cavs first come to mind as having the makings of a ‘Beilein player.'”
We’ve hit on how the Cleveland Cavaliers are going to be a team that is primarily focused on their full-rebuild in coming years often here at KJG over several months now, and again, that is the right mindset for them.
Cleveland is an NBA squad that is likely years away from legitimately vying for a postseason berth, even in the less deep Eastern Conference, and they seem to have enough self-awareness currently to recognize that, which is a plus for me as a lifelong fan of them.
The Cavaliers are not a team that’s going to likely be able to rebuild in a hurry again, as they did in an anomoly scenario before when superstar do-everything player LeBron James came back home for a return stint via free agency in the summer of 2014, and then the team had their best four-year run in franchise history with a Big Three of big Kevin Love (who is now the Cavs’ best player) and team prior draft pick guard Kyrie Irving as James’ primary sidekicks for the vast majority of that stretch.
Leading Cleveland’s rebuilding efforts now is realistically new head coach John Beilein, who does not have any NBA head or assistant coaching experience, but has had success turning around programs at really ever other level of basketball, and I’m excited to see how Beilein’s ball and man movement-predicated offense can work for the Cavaliers in coming years.
The other big focus with Beilein, which fit right in with the Cavs organization in the near future, is that Beilein is a coach that will emphasize players having an outstanding work ethic, he’ll prioritize players that are going to want to do the little things to be successful and also put an emphasis on players that are going to willingly add other elements to their game over time for the betterment of his teams.
In a recent appearance (this link via Stitcher) on “The Woj Pod,” which is hosted by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Beilein essentially talked about what he looked for in players at the college level, and brought up how an example of one of those sort of players for him in his most recent coaching stop at Michigan (before the Cavs, that is) was former Michigan guard Spike Albrecht.
Beilein touched on how Albrecht was an under-recruited player (and for reference, was one that only started in 19 of his 116 career appearances at Michigan, per Sports Reference) but basically did the little things willingly when he was in and was a player that fit the narrative Beilein would look for in terms of (as Beilein put it on the podcast) “putting the team first.”
One player on the Cavs was cited by a source of Cleveland.com’s Chris Fedor (and h/t Cavaliers Nation’s Brad Sullivan) as being a “quintessential ‘Beilein kid,'” but not yet a “quintessential ‘Beilein player.”‘
So what player was that source referring to (and I agree with them and I’ll explain why), and who are a few other Cleveland Cavaliers that come to mind right away as having the makings of what Beilein values in that way with his players?
We’ll get into that now.