Cavs hire Beilein
Years before the Southern District of New York decided to send undercover agents into hotel rooms in Las Vegas to monitor meetings with college basketball assistants, any honest conversation about the sport devolved into two categories: Which coaches were dirty and which players were getting paid.
Of course, you never really knew for sure most of the time. Even after wiretaps and text messages and courtroom testimonies, some will argue we still don’t. But beyond the allure of the NCAA’s made-for-TV tournament where college basketball is presented as a pure spectacle of sport, the reality has long been that its defining characteristic is its filth.
That, perhaps more than anything else, is what made John Beilein stand out so much from his high school and small-college roots to West Virginia to Michigan and two chances in national championship games. In a sport where everyone is cynical about everything and coaches who get fired are all too happy to down a beer and tell you the real story about why they didn’t get the McDonald’s All-American who would have turned everything around, Beilein was the one guy who pretty much everyone in the business agreed was doing it the quote-unquote “right way.” Now he’s gone. Ultimately, Beilein leaving Michigan after 12 seasons for the Cavaliers shouldn’t be too big of a surprise. He’d flirted with NBA jobs before, his offensive system makes sense in a league obsessed with spacing and shooting, and at 66, the window of opportunity to try his hand at the highest level (and make a ton of money) wasn’t going to be open much longer.
There will be skeptics about how an older, first-time NBA head coach will adapt. There was also skepticism when Beilein went to Michigan in 2007 that someone who had made his name as a tactician and skill developer on a smaller stage would be able to go into places like Detroit and Chicago and navigate the world of middlemen who are often attached to top prospects.
What Beilein did was recruit around them. He took players like Trey Burke, who was ranked outside the top 100, and got to the Final Four with them. He routinely recruited players like Nik Stauskas and Caris LeVert and more recently Mo Wagner and D.J. Wilson who were not necessarily supposed to be NBA prospects but had them in the first round of the draft after the end of their careers.
In the end, Beilein won because he’s an exceptional basketball coach. And that won’t change regardless of whether he’s able to win with a Cavaliers roster that currently includes one nice prospect in Collin Sexton, a top draft pick coming this year and a bunch of bloated contracts they’ll try to get off the books if they can.
Regardless of whether this actually works, this isn’t an NBA team hiring a slick, big-name college coach to juice ticket sales only to find out he has no feel for personnel or the dynamics of an NBA locker room. This is a gamble on Beilein’s ability to teach and put in a high-level offense and, ultimately, on the fact that he has won everywhere from Division II LeMoyne to Richmond to the Big Ten.
And no matter who Michigan finds to replace him, it’s invariably a blow to college basketball.
Maybe at this point, nobody really cares.
It’s hard to watch the NCAA tournament anymore without wondering how certain high-level players landed on certain teams, but at least with Michigan and Beilein, that conversation pretty much never came up.
To be able to make it as far as he did in college basketball without igniting those suspicions is a pretty remarkable legacy to leave in a scandal-ridden sport. Now he’s leaving it behind for a shot in a league where they pay the players up front and you’re not constantly fighting those who are willing to bend the rules.
Can you really blame him?