Koby Altman’s trade ledger with the Cavaliers has never been boring. Cleveland has spent the offseason shuffling pieces again, moving multiple rotation players from last season’s team and bringing in Peyton Watson to fill the starting small forward spot. That kind of activity has become part of Altman’s identity in Cleveland: one move can make him look sharp, the next can leave fans wondering how the deal got done in the first place.
When you stack up the worst ones, the list gets ugly fast - and three of the five most damaging trades from his tenure have come in the last two years.
The cleanest place to start is the one that still stings the most: Kyrie Irving. That 2017 deal remains the clear No. 1 misfire of Altman’s run.
Irving had just helped push the Cavaliers to three straight NBA Finals, then decided he was done playing alongside LeBron James and forced Cleveland’s hand by threatening to sit out the season with a back injury. The return looked shaky immediately and only deteriorated from there.
Isaiah Thomas, the headliner, was never the same because of a debilitating hip injury and never got back to even rotation-level play in the NBA. Jae Crowder was a mess in Cleveland.
Ante Zizic never became an NBA player. The best asset in the package, one of Brooklyn’s unprotected first-round picks, wound up as the No. 8 selection.
Cleveland used it on Collin Sexton, who had his moments but later became salary filler in the Donovan Mitchell trade.
A different kind of pain showed up in the Caris LeVert deal. The Cavaliers sent Ricky Rubio, a first-round pick and two second-rounders to the Indiana Pacers for LeVert and a second, hoping to use Rubio’s contract to help them in the present after his ACL tear.
Instead, Cleveland still missed the playoffs, falling in the Play-In Tournament, and LeVert’s game overlapped too much with the team’s stars to make him a true difference-maker. The draft cost was brutal, too.
Indiana turned one of those picks into Andrew Nembhard and another into Ben Shepard, with one more still to come. Keeping Rubio and drafting Nembhard would have given Cleveland exactly the kind of fit next to Donovan Mitchell that this roster has been missing.
Then there’s the first De’Andre Hunter trade, the one that looks worse the longer it sits. Cleveland sent out expiring money to bring in a long-term contract, choosing Hunter over other defensive names on the market such as Marcus Smart.
The idea was straightforward enough. The execution wasn’t.
Hunter struggled, and the move got even more expensive when Evan Mobley won Defensive Player of the Year and his contract jumped, forcing the Cavaliers to make other tough calls, including letting Ty Jerome walk in free agency. Cleveland also gave up Caris LeVert and Georges Niang, two role players the fan base liked, and attached two pick swaps to the deal.
The first one already hit this season and pushed Cleveland down a half dozen spots in the first round. That’s a lot of cost for a player who didn’t help and was eventually dumped for nothing.
The follow-up Hunter move didn’t rescue anything. Less than a year after bringing him in, Cleveland had already seen the fit go sideways.
His shot slipped, his defense didn’t hold up, and the contract loomed large. Altman found a taker in the Sacramento Kings and got Dennis Schroder and Keon Ellis back.
It briefly looked like a clever escape hatch, but that return evaporated quickly. Ellis was cut from the playoff rotation and left in free agency, while Schroder was salary dumped on the Charlotte Hornets to create flexibility.
Getting out from under Hunter’s future money mattered. Everything else about the deal was a miss.
The No. 4 spot belongs to the Darius Garland-for-James Harden swap, even if the full verdict is still forming. Garland had injuries to manage and was an awkward defensive fit next to Donovan Mitchell, so the logic behind moving him was there.
But sending him out for Harden - and attaching a second-round pick - put Cleveland in a tough spot. Harden comes with a playoff ceiling that can cap what a team can become, and his style changes the way the whole roster has to function.
He’s also a decade older and just locked into a fully guaranteed three-year deal that will pay him $34 million at age 39. That’s the kind of contract that can haunt a team for a long time.
Altman has hit on some deals, sure. But the worst ones on his résumé are loud, expensive, and in several cases still echoing through the roster today. For Cavaliers fans, that’s the uncomfortable part: the recent track record suggests the next swing could go either way.
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