gswhoops wrote:Texas Chuck wrote:yep this was overdue. He had a good long run, but hadn't been on his game for years now. This is great news for the Raptors.
A buddy in the groupchat called him the Doc Rivers of GMs and honestly...I don't hate the analogy
The parallels between Masai and Dumars are really incredible. In both cases, we have two guys who were hailed as geniuses when they captured lightning in a bottle. In both cases, their failure to replicate that exposed how much they had gotten lucky the first time around.
The Pistons looked like a doomed franchise when Dumars arrived. He was brought in to wave goodbye to their beloved star Grant Hill, and things looked bleak. Yet every move Dumars made looked like genius. In his second trade, he turned Grant Hill’s departure into a win by asking for them to send him Ben Wallace as a “throw in” in the sign and trade. Nobody thought Ben Wallace was even any good. He even had them include a decent-ish point guard in Atkins. He acquired 6MOY Corliss and a future lotto pick from the Raptors by conning them into thinking Montross and Jerome Williams were good. He found Okur in the 2nd round, and acquired Cliff Robinson for cheap. Some of those sound like minor moves, but guys like Cliff, Atkins, Corliss, and of course Ben, were huge in the Pistons surprising everyone with a 50 win season in 2002.
Dumars wasn’t done. He got Prince with only the 23rd pick, signed the undervalued Billups for the MLE, and then traded Stackhouse for Rip Hamilton. All these were out of the park home runs. When he finally acquired Sheed for nothing at the trade deadline, the title team was complete. He even added McDyess for cheap. What a GM.
Of course, there were actually many mistakes that were overlooked, just because of how much success the Pistons were having. Okur was allowed to leave, but he wanted a bigger role so it’s understandable. Rodney White, who Dumars had praised as a future star, was a complete bust. Carlos Delfino was a bust. Then there was Darko, a move Pistons fans continue to defend until he was traded.
Of course, if Dumars was really able to evaluate talent so well, then it would continue to show itself moving forward. What future events made increasingly clear was that Dumars was not a genius, he just got very lucky when he acquired guys who other teams had undervalued. He continue to make bad draft selections like Jason Maxiell, DJ White, A.Daye, etc, and continued to make bad moves (e.g. trading for Iverson), all that changed was the lucky flukes were gone. But what really typified the Dumars regime was doubling down on past mistakes, because of overconfidence that you had a special talent evaluation ability that would trump everything. Afflalo was moved, because they didn’t need him, not after Dumars drafted future star Rodney Stuckey. He’d moved Billups, but that was fine because he was able to clear the cap space to sign big names like, um, Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva. Dumars would later need to send out what would become the 9th pick, just to get off Ben Gordon’s contract.
The pattern of drafting flawed players who don’t work, like Stuckey, Greg Monroe, Brandon Knight, etc, is particularly reminiscent of Masai. He would then misevaluate the value of the guys he drafted who were actually good, like Middleton and Okur and Afflalo, and just let them go.
Masai’s experience in Toronto has been very similar. He was able to win a title by trying to “win now”, and not bottoming out, and that led him to think he had a magic eye for talent, and that he was a guy who commanded loyalty that would let him do anything. When he drafted guys with a little talent, but a bad fit, he would convince himself they would work out and stick with them. The results has been a team in no-mans land for years now, with no clear direction moving forward.
If Masai had been a less delusional about how he was an amazing negotiator, he would have seen that guys like FVV, OG, Lowry, Siakam, etc, were never going to take discounts to re-sign, and that he needed to either pay them or move them as early as possible. If he had a real eye for talent, he would have done what I advocated the whole time; keep the band together and let the fans enjoy a 50-ish win team compete in the weak East, and hope they could make one last move to get them over the top. Even if it’s unlikely, the fans will enjoy seeing this homegrown group play out the string. A team build around Siakam, OG, FVV, Norm, and [insert 5 here], would have been a 50-ish win team each year, with Scottie coming off the bench where he belonged. Instead, he moved better players because ‘they don’t fit with Scottie’, who is the Greg Monroe or Stuckey of Masai’s eye.
The most dangerous GM is one who is bound by their past mistakes, and has to make moves to validate them. Masai was so sure Scottie Barnes was a star, and that the team could build around him, that he traded future assets to bring in “win now” vets, like Poeltl, Thaddeus Young, RJ Barrett, Quickley, Bruce Brown, etc. These were just flawed guys, who you mostly don’t want in big roles on a winner, and Masai’s inability to see that has ben fatal. Some of these trades he made were just horrific as well. If he was going to let his vets go, that would have been fine too; just trade them for young rebuilding assets and enter a rebuild. But Masai had convinced himself he was too smart to need to rebuild in Toronto (a market with almost no free agent appeal), and that delusion has left the Raptors in a dire situation.
Now, Masai has a better track record on the whole than Dumars. He did well for 2 teams, which Dumars did not, and his draft record is better. He has bad picks like Caboclo, Delon Wright, M.Flynn, Dick, and Ja’Kobe. But he has more out of the park hits than Dumars too. I don’t give him much credit for the Kawhi trade, because that was a no-brainer and Kawhi’s market value was zero, but he made many good trades over the years before he started to buy his own PR hype (moving Bargs, getting Gasol, etc). But on the whole, Masai and Dumars suffered from the same delusions of grandeur. The top organisations focus on vision and process, where even the top decision maker knows they aren’t special and rely on lots of people. I prefer a great organisation to a supposedly great GM, because it relies far too much on that one guy being special (when he might just have been lucky).
