RealGM

We asked our ESPN Forecast panel to rate every owner, basketball decision-maker and coach from zero to 10, and we asked the panel to tell us how important each role is.

In particular, we asked the voters to rate each team's coach in terms of their performance in guiding the franchise to overall on-court success, both in the short and long term. From there, we simply calculated the ratings to determine the best and worst coaches in the NBA.

So ESPN ranked all the owners, coaches, GMs in the league. As is usual with the Hawks, we fell right in the middle. Not good. Not bad. Just...average.

17th overall for the entire Front Office with a weighted score of 5.23 out of 10. San Antonio came in first place with the only rating above 9. Milwaukee and NY brought up the rear.

14th overall for Head Coach with a weighted score of 5.82 out of 10. San Antonio came in first yet again as Gregg Popovich rated 9.70. The highest score of any person in any category.
Noteworthy: The top 6 coaches include 4 cooches with NBA Titles, with Thibs of Chicago and Vogel of Indy both added on for their regular season/playoff success. Also worth noting, 1st year coaches Steve Clifford, Jeff Hornacek and Brad Stevens all rank higher than Bud. As does Dwayne Casey who once upon a time was a candidate for the Hawks job.

Two ex-Hawks coaches bring up the rear as the two worst coaches in the league. (Not counting Pistons interim HC John Loyer.)

Thoughts?

Danny Ferry in particular ranks 17th as GM...just behind Jim Buss/Mitch Kupchak of the Lakers. (Ouch)
http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/10711364/2014-nba-front-office-rankings-top-executives

I think this is kind of asinine. How could you possibly rate the Magic and the Lakers AHEAD of the Hawks?

the bobcats deserve to be higher, the Celtics at 6? Because they tanked?

Ferry's ranking seems about right...for now. He's made solid moves, nothing awful, but nothing spectacular either.

Bud seems ranked fairly low considering how little he's had to work with. And any team that ranks this highly in overall assists without a top PG on the roster clearly is very well coached.

Clifford of Charlotte and Stevens of Boston seem much too highly rated. Even Casey of TOR was a dead man walking coming into the season. Can one good year really undo the last 3 years of poor play his team has shown?

Poor Drew is looking more and more like the fall guy for the terrible roster Milwaukee put together. With new ownership looming and a top young pick on the way, no way he survives.

Mike Woodson just needs to go to Indiana University and salvage that program (or Georgia Tech).

I agreee on Ferry, i have not seen anything WOW me yet. Hes proven he can be frugal, now i want to see the fruit of that frugality . Build me a team. Draft me a star.

Bud I think is one of the top first year coaches. Every other 1 year coach has a legit star, we had Paul Millsap........

PandaKidd wrote:I think this is kind of asinine. How could you possibly rate the Magic and the Lakers AHEAD of the Hawks?

the bobcats deserve to be higher, the Celtics at 6? Because they tanked?

The Celtics I at least get. They had a good run, but tore down the roster once they knew they couldn't contend. Acquiring a number of nice young assets in the process. If you're going to lose, that's the way to do it. (Easy to forget that in 2007, both ATL & BOS were lottery teams. Ainge moved young players like Jefferson & Green and got back All Stars, building a contender on the fly. While we settled on mediocrity. Now he's equipped to do the exact same thing again.)

Orlando Magic, meh. They at least came out of the Dwightmare with the single best prospect (Vucevic) and nailed there top 3 draft pick last summer.

Lakers...no way in H3LL! Their entire organization is in ruins, and the Team President refuses to get out of the way and make the necessary decisions. That team is going nowhere fast.

I still think Ainge AND Doc get more credit than they deserve for the 1 title we got (should have 2 IMO, maybe 3).

Ainge is in a good position, but his team stinks this year, and if he doesnt pull a rabbit out of his hat, they will stink next year too.

True story, I HATE Danny Ainge as a GM. Disliked him as a player, despise him as a front office person.

From multiple seasons of intentional tanking, to repeatedly tossing aside Boston Legends (Pierce, KG AND A-Walk).

Would have served him right if he'd gotten the #1 pick in 2007 and wasted it on Oden. Dude is a D0uchebag to the nth degree.


(I will now come down from my soapbox.)

Also...where's Parson? I, in all honesty, miss chatting with him...

I understand Ferry's ranking. He hasnt done anything to get this team off the treadmill. All of his moves have been very safe low risk cap friendly moves. Until he uses that "flexibility" to make some savy moves to get this team off the treadmill or to load this team up with future assets I dont expect him to get much respect around the league.

im guessing the lakers are up there because of their reputation for the past years. That is my only explanation. if they dont turn it around quickly next season I expect their ranking to plummet.

Ainge did a good job of acquiring future assets this offseason. He was able to trade a near retiring paul pierce and KG for multiple future 1st rounders and he was also able to trade a coach that didnt want to be there for another future 1st. He has loaded that team with future assets.

Thanks for linking this...

Some thoughts:
1) I wonder how much the Expert Panel really knows how to divvy up credit/blame and/or differentiate between reputation and reality.
2) The fact that we hit such a prolonged slump at the end of the season killed us in these rankings. I'm sure if we had held onto a 4/5 seed then Ferry and Bud would each be at least 5 slots higher.

- Questionable picks in my mind:
- SAS Owners as the run away #1. Now, I'm not saying they're bad by any stretch, but they've basically hired Popp and stayed out of the way while their decision makers rode two of the greatest big men in history to several titles. I don't question that it's a good sign that an owner can step away and give the room to those s/he has hired to do their job, but I also can't think this would rate as the run away #1 either. You have someone like Cuban who had some pretty creative ideas in bringing in excitement and fan support to a moribund franchise, while the ownership groups like those in MIA and BRK who have proven that they'll go well into the tax when they have a championship teams. Just can't see SAS being the call here.
- Other questionable rankings in the owners category in my mind include GSW ownership @ #7 (GSW is one of 6 clubs that has never had paid the LT) and CHI @ #9 (in the 3rd largest market in the NBA and has a fan base that still remembers the Jordan-led Bulls, yet even though they landed of Rose in one of the luckiest lotto winners in history, the ownership has consistently refused to go into the LT to retain talent). Both seem to be given credit for good choices by their underlings and/or simple luck over being competent in their own right.

- In the executives category, Neil Olshey at #7 is the one that sticks out to me. Olshey was the one who traded LAC's unprotected 1st that became Kyrie Irving for CLE. He left LAC for PORT after the G Wallace trade that netted the #6 pick in the draft, so it's hard to argue he made up for it with this trade. He's drafted well with PORT (landing Lilliard and McCollum) and swooped in on the CP3 trade after Stern voided the LAL deal. Still though, it's a tough pill to swallow to say that the only guy that I can recall who traded a future #1 overall pick lands in the top 10.
- The other questionable call here IMO is PHX @ 11. They do get points for snagging Bledsoe for Dudley and cap space and Hornacek is obviously a great hire, but on top of some questionable drafting (Len and Goodwin have offered very little to the current playoff run), they were slow to react to the situation where Hornacek had molded the team that the FO had already given up for dead into a playoff team. I don't think they should have mortgaged everything, but I do think they could have thrown in 1 of their 4 mid-to-late 1sts and/or Goodwin on top of Okafor's insured contract and gotten a piece to show the clubhouse that they'd help in a playoff push.

- I agree that the y1 coaches get a lot of love while Coach Bud is left behind as being the eye-opener here. Brad Stevens @ #11 is by far the most overrated ranking across all 3 polls IMO (sure, he may be there on merit eventually, but all he has right now is a good first impression and a bad basketball team - this is one of the more overt pieces of evidence of the Boston bias at ESPN), but he's been discussed enough already.
- After Stevens and even Clifford, I'd have to put in Thibs as being the guy that strikes me as the most overrated. Sure, he was a wonderful assistant coach and his defensive scheme revolutionized NBA basketball, but as a HC, I think he falls well short of being a top 5 guy - so forth #2. An HC has to strike a balance between pushing his players to gut out a hard fought win in December and peaking going into the playoffs and Thibs has shown he has absolutely 0 concept of this. As sure as death and taxes, we hear about key components of the CHI team limping though the playoffs because they've given so much in the regular season. Sure, he may be a great X's and O's guy, but the fact is that he needs a strong personality over him who can put an end to his overplaying his stars and possibly even putting them into positions where they risk serious injuries.
- The 2nd coach that I think is overrated is former Hawks' coach Terry Stotts. Now, yeah, some of this could be the bad taste that he left us with in the "Guarantee" season, but the truth here is that he's been a below average coach for years, and now, all the sudden one 20-3 hot streak that has taken PORT from outside the playoffs to a 5 seed means that he's a top 10 coach (#8)? Yeah, I'll put this squarely into the "blind squirrel" category.

One last thought: I wonder which exec will win the "Joe Dumars" award. Right before Dumars signed Ben Gordon and Charlie V while extending Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, I'm sure he would have ranked top 5 in this list (and would have deserved it IMO), but oh how the mighty have fallen. If he wasn't ousted, I'm sure he would have been close to the rear in this list. My candidates for the role:
1) Danny Ainge. Former player who had an incredibly hot run and appears to think he'll be able to replicate the same success instead of needing to do things a bit differently.
2) Doc Rivers. With CP3 and Griffin, I think LAC can maintain a middle seed in the West for the next few years, but with an owner who is notorious for not paying the LT (this will be the 1st year LAC pays the LT), I could see this team imploding in 2-3 years and Doc might be the poster boy in the mutiny.
3) Daryl Morey. Honestly, he would be my choice for the "Kevin Pritchard" award moreso than Joe Dumars. Pritchard was a good - not great - GM that ESPN just fell in love with for some reason, and it appears that the same is happening with Morey. As with Pritchard, Morey is now faced with having to transition from an asset collector to someone who can put the finishing touches on a team. From his handling of the Asik situation, something tells me the answer will be no.