GM of the Year: Ainge or KP?

[Charcoal Filtered]

If there is any year that should split the award, this year might be it. Both guys really deserve it.

KP lucked out getting the top pick, but making the playoffs without GO would show how carefully constructed this team is. It truly has been fun to watch the team this year.

As for Ainge, it would be easy to say he lucked into KG. I am eating crow for admitting, but he put the Celtics in position to make the trade. His idea of drafting young, staying bad, then having the assets to trade for veterans when losing the lottery was masterful.


Ainge should get it if the Celtics are in the finals and voters will honor KP later, but think it will be close.

[Goldbum]

KP deserves it Ainge will win it.

[J~Rush]

Eh? It matters how the year finishes.

[DeezXXnutZ]

KP should win it hands down...They will be rebuilding in Boston for a long time after the next two years.....

[PDXKnight]

Kp should win it but Ainge will win it (as goldbum said). Boston's record has been amazing thus far and most eyes will be on Boston when the day is done, which will most likely get Ainge more votes. No worries, KP will be out executive of the year one way or another.

[Yadadimean]

hmmm...lets see...which one of them rebuilt a poor franchise into a team that will be a force for many years, and which one ruined a team, then traded away its future to be a force for a couple years?

[listerine]

Ainge lucked out big time. Definitely in the right place at the right time.

But what can I say? I have to give credit where it's due. The man scraped together loose ends and brought in two stars. He's assembled three stars on one team and all of their styles are meshing.

Teams that exceed expectations win Coach of the Year (Blazers).

Teams that dominate the league win Executive of the Year (Boston).


But, as has been pointed out, we need to wait for two things before making judgments.

1. Where the teams stand when the season is over.
2. Where the teams stand after 5 seasons have passed.

[mojomarc]

Wow. I mean...wow. KP traded Zach Randolph for Channing Frye and cap space, signed a fair-to-middling free agent PG in Blake, and traded an exception and cash for an unwanted James Jones and drafted two players in the first round that will play exactly 0 minutes, one of which fell into his lap and one of which cost the richest owner in sports a whopping .03% of his net worth. That's pretty good, but which of these moves have had the direct impact on this season that Ainge's moves have had? Portland went from 32 wins to a pace for about 41 wins (once you correct for the predominance of home games we've played) and a chance for an 8th seed.

Let's review Ainge for a second: a deal for one of the top three players in the league in KG, another deal for a perenial all-star and the player thought of as the best shooter in the league in Ray Allen, and the acquisition of a decent role player in Eddie House. The direct results of these moves have been a 28-3 start (that's a pace to beat the Bulls 72-10 best record ever, folks), which means that 31 games into the season Boston has already won more games than all last year. Ainge started with a worse team, made two incredibly ballsy trades, and the result may be the best regular season team in NBA history and certainly the best season-to-season improvement ever in basketball.

Sorry guys, but if you think KP this year deserves it over Ainge then you're nuts. KP has certainly done a great job, but if you wanted to give him the exec of the year award, last year was the year to give it to him after what he pulled off on draft day. This year is just continuation of an outstanding stewardship of the team, but his year is hardly the statistical outlier that it is for Boston. Does that make KP a victim of his own success? Yes, a little. But it is hardly an insult to say that he hasn't even come half-way towards matching Ainge this year. Ainge has gone from one of the worst GMs to the league to a guy who is crafted a turnaround from worst to first in the league in one offseason. That is downright unprecedented, and it deserves to be rewarded.

[mojomarc]

hmmm...lets see...which one of them rebuilt a poor franchise into a team that will be a force for many years, and which one ruined a team, then traded away its future to be a force for a couple years?

1) Boston's record was worse than ours last year (and the second worst in the league), but this year they are on pace to win 73 games and 100% of that reason is Ainge swinging a superstar and an all-star to come in. Short term or no, a championship is a championship, and Ainge traded one good young player and scraps from a horrible team and turned it into a team that has to be considered one of the three favorites to win it all in one whirlwind three month span. Future or no, that's epic. Plus, the award is not for "exec who amasses the best young talent that may or may not pan out in the next decade," but for the best GM job for that season.

I honestly can't believe these responses. Have we lost all perspective on the Blazers board?

[Yadadimean]

Ainge's moves were made with self preservation as his motivation. He traded his team's future for a couple of great players at the end of their peaks from teams that they were basically useless to. Thanks to them, Seattle has their Jordan AND their Pippen and Minnesota has a future all of a sudden. Will Ainge be looked at as a great GM in 3 years?

[mojomarc]

Ainge's moves were made with self preservation as his motivation.

I disagree--the moves were made to get a championship this year, knowing that if he did that his job would be preserved. If I were going to characterize the moves as purely self preservation, they would have been a lot more conservative, more along the lines of "here's a lot of activity in the mid-level market, and I deserve more time because it will take time to pan out." That's not what he did. He radically restructured a team without giving away their best player, brought in two studs and one good supporting player, and put that team immediately into the championship calculus.

He traded his team's future for a couple of great players at the end of their peaks from teams that they were basically useless to. Thanks to them, Seattle has their Jordan AND their Pippen and Minnesota has a future all of a sudden. Will Ainge be looked at as a great GM in 3 years?

Who knows? Maybe he'll trade a 32 year old KG and a 32 year old Pierce for Green and Durant and make them contenders again? That's something we can worry about in three years, though, since the award we're talking about is about this year.

I have to point this out, so don't take it personally, but arguing that KP deserves it because we'll look better than Boston some years down the road sounds oddly like the argument that Toronto fans made for why Bargnani should have been RoY last year, and we all know how much we accepted that argument at that time.

[Yadadimean]

Mojo, you're missing the point. ONLY BLAZER PEOPLE DESERVE ANYTHING!!!! lol

Ainge did a great job bringing in guys that turned the team around, I give him that. I understand your point. But the year he traded for them is also the same year that he traded Boston's future. He traded AL Jefferson the main piece, but people are forgetting that Ryan Gomes (a very good player) was a part of that deal, as well as pick that has a great chance to turn into Rose/Beasley/Gordon/Mayo (granted they couldn't necessarily have foreseen that). Green is still a question mark but he certainly has the tools that make him work giving a shot. Boston was beginning to have a solid core for the future in place and Ainge got rid of it in favor of instant gratification.
Would you say KP should get the award if he traded Roy, Webster, Sergio, Oden , Outllaw and a pick for KG and Ray Allen? I would be pissed that he got rid of our future personally.

edit:meant to include Raef for cap purposes, but you get the idea...

[Charcoal Filtered]

Would KP be a better GM if he would have traded Greg Oden, Raef, and Miles for KG to get more wins this year? The Blazers could easily be sitting in the same position Boston is in. This team with KG would have been a strong title contender.

[mojomarc]

Would KP be a better GM if he would have traded Greg Oden, Raef, and Miles for KG to get more wins this year? The Blazers could easily be sitting in the same position Boston is in. This team with KG would have been a strong title contender.

If you're actually comparing the potential team affect of Oden to Al Jefferson, Ryan Gomes and Gerald Green (who were influential in Boston winning a whopping 24 games last year in a weak conference) then I suppose you're right. But he didn't trade an Oden. He traded a borderline all-star player who doesn't make his teammates better in Jefferson and two decent but hardly great prospects. They were no more part of the future solution in Boston than Eddy Curry is for the Knicks, no matter what the Celtics homers on RealGM thought.

Also, you have to consider the magnitude of the change that he brought to he team this year. This isn't just taking a crappy team and making it compete for a playoff spot every year for the next five years (until Oden plays, that's all the rest of the league has to go on, even though us hometown fans know Oden is going to be the Blazers' messiah one of these days) but instead is taking a truly horrendous team and overnight making it the odds-on favorite to get to the NBA Finals. Yes, KG is getting older, and Ray Allen is aging a little bit, too. That said, assuming no one of the big three blows a knee or a back, this is a team that is still young enough that they could compete for the Eastern Conference title every single year of those five because of the moves. On top of that, no team, regardless of what talent has come in, has ever improved by more than 32 games in a season (the Spurs when they got DRob)--no team that has ever started the year with 27 wins in their first 30 games has ever won fewer than 60 games, so even if the Celts slide down and "only" win 60, they'll still break the record for season-over-season improvement by more than 10%. That's epic, and there's only one man really responsible for putting together the team that is on this record pace.

Like I said earlier--this doesn't mean that KP hasn't done a great job. It does mean, however, that for him this is a relatively average job. Last year I thought his draft day moves alone were worth it, but the league disagreed. This year, he is reaping the benefits of last years' moves, but since the award is given on an annual basis, that doesn't really count until he's up for the Hall of Fame's executive wing.

Finally, this "mortgaging the future" crap is just that. Championships are not entitlements. Despite the fact we all love the direction the team is going on, we can't see far enough ahead to know if we'll actually be the Boston of next year, a dominant team that looks like they could steamroll the entire league. This is why I objected to T-dot fans that said Bargnani should win RoY because he had a higher ceiling than Roy, and this is why I object to giving KP the award over Ainge. We just don't know enough about what will happen to say that Ainge has completely mortgaged the future in Boston. Heck, they could have a run for three years and then trade all their big three to the Knicks and Wolves if Thomas and McHale are still around and get all their prospects back and then some. But in the end, if the Celts win one championship (heck, make it to the Finals even), isn't it worth it? We won with Walton's team, should have won the next year but failed, and then were at best mediochre for the next decade, yet none of us who were there would trade that championship for anything. Championships are far too rare a commodity to suggest that if Boston doesn't five-peat with this team then Ainge sucked because he sold out all the youth. If he gets one, and boy, are they in a position to get one this year and next, no one in Boston will be upset because they won number 17. Instead, they'd take a guy who most of them reviled, who looked so angry and perplexed after they lost their shot at Greg Oden, and turned that craptacular team into an instant favorite and a contender for most dominant regular season team ever. I for one cannot overlook that, and as much as I wouldn't trade Ainge for KP, I still have to take my hat off to the fabulous job he did taking huge risks and making them pay off for the Celts in the short run. After 20 years of them really not even sniffing contention, you cannot underestimate how fantastic a job that is.

[Spykes]

I still subscribe to the theory that Ainge lucked into getting KG and Allen. The only credit I'll give him is that he must have been able to tell just how desperate and stupid Kevin McHale was when they were talking about a KG trade prior to the draft.

If memory serves me correctly, the Celtics were willing to give up the package that finally netted KG and their pick prior to the draft. Talks stalled when Phoenix and LA started having some discussions, and Ainge gambled that those would fall apart and that he could still get KG mid-offseason. The gamble paid off, those other talks did indeed die and McHale got desperate to move KG.

Would KP be a better GM if he would have traded Greg Oden, Raef, and Miles for KG to get more wins this year? The Blazers could easily be sitting in the same position Boston is in. This team with KG would have been a strong title contender.

If memory serves me correctly, Quick wrote a article for the Oregonian where he reported that a team in our division offered a "HOF player and highly touted rookie" for the #1 pick (and some salary filler obviously). The only team that had 2 players that matched that description in our division was Minnesota with KG and Foye.

It's true that if Portland had pulled that deal, they'd be a playoff team and likely a contender...

Foye
Roy
Webster
KG
Aldridge

But of course, then our potential 10 year window would have become a 3-5 year window.

[Wizenheimer]

I tend to agree with Mojo on this.

The one season turnaround on wins by the Celtics will be unprecedented. Ainge gambled big-time and it appears to have paid off in record fashion. GM's who gamble and win are exec's of the year, those who gamble and lose are unemployed (with one NY exception)

But if Ainge wins, then Mchale should get an assist

[bruno sundov]

In the end it doesn't really matter. You guys must be pumped as we BOS fans are that your team is back on top. I see the blazers sustaining unlike the CHI Bulls.

You guys are only going to better that is scary. Where we might peak this year or next. Congrats on the insane start it couldn't happen to better basketball cities then POR and BOS.

[DaVoiceMaster]

I'm with Mojo. I wouldn't have argued the point as much as he did, but it's Executive of the Year. This year! Not how the team will look 3 years from now. Boston is looking to win right now, not for the next 8-10 years. That's fine. Every team has their own way which makes the league fun. It would kind of suck if all teams went the young route for 4 or 5 years and every game was like watching a college game during that time. Just enjoy what the Blazers are doing. Sure, an award this year would be great for KP, but when he's having champagne poured over his yead in a couple of years, and every year after for the next 8 years, will he really remember that he didn't win the Exec of the Year award in 2007-08?

[Andre 2999]

KP deserves it Ainge will win it.

[Red Robot]

I don't think Pritchard deserves this.

He's had basically three good moves:

1. Dumping Randolph
2. Acquiring Jones
3. Signing Blake

All three of these are important but unspectacular.

He also made some nice moves during the draft. But everyone drafted that night--Oden, Fernandez, McRoberts, Kopponen, and Green--has yet to play significant time. Should any of these players really be considered in the executive of the year discussion?

Pritchard's biggest contribution to this team came in the masterful 2006 draft, which should probably count towards last year's EOY.