Doctor MJ wrote:Texas Chuck wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
We have no issue with theoretically using drafting for EOY, but when a player is injured the year after he's drafted that won't happen. If the next year leaves us thinking for the first time confidently that that GM had an amazing draft the prior year, it makes sense to want to give him accolade love, and given the track record of exec voting in the past, it seems like this should allowed.
Let's go back in time a bit to one Joel Embiid. I remember in real-time thinking this is the clear top pick in this draft even with the very significant injury concerns because he's the one real potential franchise player staring us in the face. So I can love that pick for Philly even knowing there will be no immediate returns.
Or going back to Chet. One can love that pick (I didn't
) even though he ends up hurt and misses the whole year. Just as a player could have a surprisingly good rookie year (MCW, Tyreke) and someone might not love that choice because they believed higher ceiling prospects were available.
Not sure there should be any real guidelines on any of these awards unless its some sort of games/minutes played for the players. Team-building is a multi-year process in most cases (even the Heatles and 08 Celtics had some moves that helped set up the one huge summer).
Take the Nets when even the PC board was crowning them paper champions after assembling the 3 superstars. If they hadn't shown real competence and an ability to build a winner even while giving all their high draft picks to Boston, KD/Kyrie never choose them and Harden never forces his way there. So if one was considering their GM for EOY, one might well take into account the groundwork.
Stevens will be a popular choice and probably the winner here because its best RS team by a mile and one can point to too splashy starter additions. But they drafted Tatum and Brown when those weren't consensus picks by any means, they brought back Horford and then re-signed him on a bargain to fit him in, and of course the under the radar White addition. Most of the real work was actually done earlier and some of not by Stevens.
But its up to each of us to parse all this out.
So I like the Embiid mention because it really shows how things contort when we consider allowing previous seasons to count.
Embiid was drafted in 2014. He doesn't play until '16-17, by which time the GM who drafted him has been fired. I think it should go without saying that it doesn't make sense to give that GM (Hinkie) the award when he's no longer a working exec, and it also doesn't make sense to give his replacement (Colangelo) the award for something he didn't do.
I also remember bringing this up with Connolly last year as the team he built - Denver - won it all, while he no longer worked for that team. The idea that you give him the award for past work for a previous employer really doesn't seem to me to fit how the awards eve been done.
All of this makes me personally want to stick to actually interpreting EOY literally rather than trying to shoehorn stuff in from earlier years in the name of consistency...but as I've acknowledged in this thread, clearly when there is GM continuity, EOY votes have been pretty liberal about this.
Re: Nets EOY. So, I'll say that I voted for Marks in the year when he brought Harden in, and that hasn't aged well. Definitely worth discussing, but I don't think I'd vote any differently if we did it again.
I would emphasize that for me I didn't see it as a "paper champion" thing. I believe the Nets were a 28-8 club with Harden after the midseason trade and they looked like they were the better team against the Bucks before Harden's injury. To me, given that the GM doesn't actually play, that made it awfully hard not to look at Marks as building a champion level team.
It's weird. If they do win that chip, literally everything changes. Harden probably doesn't ask out the next year, and the Nets are likely to give the players the new deals what they want. If all that happens, then that EOY vote of mine seems pretty wise.
As I say all of this, I wasn't someone giving Marks a lot of credit for acquiring Durant/Kyrie/DeAndre. To me there was a whole lot of stupidity in that group that put up huge red flags. That stupidity would eventually crippled the entire enterprise...but when it allowed them to get Harden, and the Durant/Harden/Kyrie duo really looked like top tier contenders, I put my misgivings aside.
If I may chime in to this EOY conversation...
These issues with EOY are not new. If you look at the list of who has won it IRL life...there are more than a few that raise the eyebrows. The two consistent things that seem to drive who gets it are either "big splash" FA/trade/draft moves, or notable single-season turnarounds. But the big splash moves, as has been discussed, are sometimes rewarded after the fact, and the big turnarounds are sometimes not fully attributed to the right things. And there are some that just plain don't make sense.
Red Auerbach won it in 1979-80 for the Celtics' big turnaround, which was among the biggest ever. But the primary driver of that turnaround was the arrival of Larry Bird, who had been drafted a year prior. I mean, ok, he also hired Bill Fitch. Fair enough. But it speaks to that phenomenon of GMs getting rewarded for something that happened earlier.
Or take the case of 1996-97. I think 1996 was one of the most consequential summers ever in basketball, certainly the NBA's first really big FA summer, and there were a lot of high-profile GM moves made. The winner was Bob Bass, GM of the Charlotte Hornets. His big moves were trading Kobe's draft rights for Divac and trading Larry Johnson for Anthony Mason. The Hornets did experience a solid SRS/Net Rtg jump(~2.5 points each), but that ignores that Muggsy Bogues missed all but six games in 1995-96 and was much healthier in 96-97, where he posted a +6.6 on/off, one of the highest on the team.
But that was the summer where Jerry West acquired Shaq/Kobe in one fell swoop(even if the results wouldn't show themselves for a few years); where Ernie Grunfeld got the Knicks out of their post-Riley malaise by signing Allan Houston, swapping Mason for Larry Johnson, and signing Chris Childs and Buck Williams; where the Hawks saw a big jump in SRS/Net after acquiring Mutombo and Tyrone Corbin; where Riles changed much of the Heat roster outside of Mourning and Hardaway, acquiring PJ Brown and Dan Majerle, promoting Voshon Lenard to a much bigger role, and acquiring Jamal Mashburn at the deadline, resulting in a big improvement for the team; and where the Rockets acquired Barkley and saw a marked improvement from their 96 season, and the last real relevance of the Hakeem era. All due respect to Bass, there were more deserving candidates.
Or how about Bob Myers, who won twice. The first was in 14-15. Fair play, he had signed Kerr to be the coach, though all the other key players had already been there a while and Steph was not his acquisition(Don Nelson drafted him). But then he won again in 16-17, essentially for signing Durant, the most blindingly obvious GM move maybe in NBA history. Even though Steph and Draymond had higher on/off than Durant throughout the season. One could argue Daryl Morey deserved it more that year(though he'd win it the next year).
Anyway, you can keep poking holes. The fundamental issue, I think, is that it's a short-term award for a long-term job. This is illustrated by the fact there are two guys who never won it despite each building a perennial contender(one of which won championships) without really making any "big splash" moves: Jack McCloskey(architect of the Bad Boys) and Donnie Walsh(architect of the 1990s Pacers). Those were, imo, some of the most masterful long-term GM jobs, executed using largely non-obvious moves, that I can think of, and neither ever won it.
As for this season, I do lean towards Brad Stevens. Those may be big splash moves he made, but they weren't obvious. I don't know that anyone went into last offseason thinking "Porzingis is the guy they should go after". The fact that they had to give up Marcus Smart to do it when they didn't really want to, and then managed to actually upgrade him to Jrue through a combination of luck/timing and willingness to risk overpay...and to have a historic regular season be the result?
There were also a couple of notable
non-moves. One was the decision to not bring back Grant Williams, which doesn't seem to have hurt them, and they got draft capital back for him.
The other was the decision to keep Mazzulla. There was a lot of noise during the playoffs last year, and once they ended, about the notion that he wasn't good enough, that they should move on from him, especially because there were a number of big names available - Nurse, Monty Williams, Budenholzer, Doc. I'm not sure it was a coincidence that Nurse and Williams didn't accept their new jobs until a few days after Boston was eliminated...I would think either one would've taken that job, if it was available, over the ones they took. But Stevens stuck with Mazzulla and it looks like it panned out.
