2022-23 RealGM All-Season Awards - Discussion Thread

[eminence]

Doc, if we follow this literally, you absolutely should be voting for Pelinka, yet of course you are (rightly, in my opinion) not, because what he did was undo his own disastrous moves prior. Executives do not build in a vacuum. Shrewd draft picks take time to pay off. Pat Riley looks a lot better for Vincent, and Martin, and Strus this year than he did last year. We want to call Bam, Butler, Duncan, and Lowry an ongoing passive “bonus” with only light relevance in any year after they pay off, fine, but these executives build their rosters across years, and to treat it otherwise is to play a game of “who made the best signing / trade” rather than who actually did the best job. Calvin Booth has made two good roleplayer signings for his team; that is not more active than what Riley did building his roster.

Yup, if we are criticizing Pelinka and the rationale for not voting for him is because he undid a previous move he created, then we are taking into account previous years actions/moves.

Please see my response to AEnigma, but I'll add this:

I'm not saying that you must ignore the context of what came before '22-23 when deciding how impressive an EOY candidate is now, I'm saying explicitly listing a GM's multi-year moves every year we do this leads to the possibility of just giving the guy the EOY year after year on the basis of something he did once, which has never been how EOY has worked - either the official NBA EOY, or ours.

Pop for EOY.

[Colbinii]

When the Timberwolves win a title in 2024 and the only reason they lost this year was because All-Defensive snub McDaniels and Reid missed the playoffs [along with SlowMo getting injured], im voting Connely EOY.

[Doctor MJ]

yep Doc we argued about this before, but I don't see any justification for insisting on the following together:

1. Nothing about prior season should be considered in vote
2. But oh if I think you made mistakes before that you now fixed, you can't get a vote either.

I strongly disagree with one in principle for reasons we've gone over. Long-term planning is a thing. And I even more strongly disagree with 2. It basically says once you made a bad decision(or sometimes you made a good decision that blew up in your face) no matter how well you perform I won't consider you.

One of your favorite players is Steve Nash, and while you disagree, this guy wasn't even good really until he was 26. Wasn't a legit superstar until 30. Under these parameters we should have written him off when he was getting benched for Robert Pack or Travis Best well into his NBA career. But we know that is silly. We know he is allowed to get better. Why can't executives?

First: I never said you had to ignore all prior context when doing your vote. In fact I said that it was unreasonable to expect that any of us could. I've just emphasized that there is a difference between using past as context, and with literally re-crediting the GM repeatedly with making a single move every year. Acquiring Jimmy Butler is an EOY worthy move, it doesn't mean you win EOY from that point onward so long as you keep your job.

Second: I'll emphasize again the difference between the criteria I set as a project runner and my own personal stance as a voter:

As a project runner, I have zero problems with someone choosing Pelinka as EOY simply on the basis of trading away Westbrook.

As a voter, I'm not that impressed with a GM managing to partially undo a mistake he previously made which I think a good GM wouldn't have made.

Re: Why can't execs get better? They can, and if you personally think that Pelinka is now the smartest GM in the game, then it certainly makes sense to see him as an EOY candidate. I, as a voter, am more skeptical than that.

[AEnigma]

I edited in rationale for the rest of my votes and will do a thorough case for Executive later.

If I were voting solely off single season acquisitions then my ballot would probably be James Jones, Monte McNair, and Rob Pelinka, because I cannot factor in the potential relevance of trading for Durant in the future, I cannot factor in the likelihood that Haliburton will be a much better player from this point than Sabonis will be, and I cannot factor in that Pelinka’s decisions this year were primarily designed to repair the historic damage done by trading for Westbrook.

The best GMs in the league in my opinion have been Riley, Masai, and Bob Myers, but only one of them is on my ballot because only one of them built a Finals team this year. It is one thing if an executive essentially just rolls over a strong team and they get worse, e.g. 2018/19 Bob Myers. I understand not rewarding that repeatedly. But when players an executive drafted continue to progress, I think the executives deserve to be awarded for that vision. No one knew Vincent or Strus would be key contributors in the Finals when they were signed. If you want me to walk a line where those count but some of the other players do not, alright, but then we have already compromised on this idea of what it means to act as an executive for a single season.

[Texas Chuck]

They can, and if you personally think that Pelinka is now the smartest GM in the game, then it certainly makes sense to see him as an EOY candidate. I, as a voter, am more skeptical than that.

As stated before, none of this has to do with Pelinka for me. I'm simply talking about the process. Do I believe a GM can make a mistake one year, and then pivot to something much better the next? Absolutely.

Take the Nelsons in Dallas. In 03 Dallas goes to the WCF and maybe if Dirk doesn't get hurt they even steal a title. We'll never know. Then they trade for the dueling Antoine/Antawn and 04 is a mess. Then Nash walks. But the Mavs go on to immediately have the best 3 year stretch in team history, come within 5 quarters of a title, followed by a 67 win team. The Nelsons(especially Donnie as Don quits) should get some credit for this despite the mistakes made right leading into it.

Or look at Boston and how many missteps they have made in recent years and yet, they keep figuring out how to plug in new guys and keep going on deep playoff runs. Their front office shouldn't be excluded because say they gambled on Kyrie and that didn't work. They pivoted, and smartly.

I don't care about any specific guy. I disagree with a process that says if you made a bad move before that you smartly cleaned up, you should be out of consideration for that year. Pelinka aside as clearly you have strong feelings there.

[Colbinii]

EOY is such a difficult award to properly assess in the present. There is a good chance Trey Murphy becomes one of the best 5-6 players from the 2021 draft.

Did anyone even vote for Jeff Weltman in 2021?

Traded Vuc for a kings random, including the pick that became the player below, #11 in this years draft and Wendell Carter Jr
Drafted a perennial all-star talent in Franz Wagner at #5
Moved on from Aaron Gordon as he was never going to be a 3rd/4th option on a tanking team

[Doctor MJ]

I edited in rationale for the rest of my votes and will do a thorough case for Executive later.

If I were voting solely off single season acquisitions then my ballot would probably be James Jones, Monte McNair, and Rob Pelinka, because I cannot factor in the potential relevance of trading for Durant in the future, I cannot factor in the likelihood that Haliburton will be a much better player from this point than Sabonis will be, and I cannot factor in that Pelinka’s decisions this year were primarily designed to repair the historic damage done by trading for Westbrook.

The best GMs in the league in my opinion have been Riley, Masai, and Bob Myers, but only one of them is on my ballot because only one of them built a Finals team this year. It is one thing if an executive essentially just rolls over a strong team and they get worse, e.g. 2018/19 Bob Myers. I understand not rewarding that repeatedly. But when players an executive drafted continue to progress, I think the executives deserve to be awarded for that vision. No one knew Vincent or Strus would be key contributors in the Finals when they were signed. If you want me to walk a line where those count but some of the other players do not, alright, but then we have already compromised on this idea of what it means to act as an executive for a single season.

Thank you for the edit.

Re: cannot factor in the potential relevance...in the future. I certainly didn't mean to imply that you shouldn't factor in your assessment of future value/cost of current moves. I absolutely do factor that in. The time boundary concerns about when the GM made each move, not about how the value of the move is distributed across time.

Re: continued vision deserves credit. Absolutely and if you're super impressed because of role player moves this year because of the context it's in, then by all means, vote that way.

I do think that some consideration of the weirdness of the Denver situation is informative for us to discuss here:

Who is the EOY candidate for Denver this year?

Is it the man primarily responsible for building the team? (Tim Connolly)
or
The man doing the job this year? (Calvin Booth)

If the EOY were about which executive's body of work had the greatest crescendo this year, Connolly would be a very strong candidate.

As is, Booth is the Denver Nuggets' EOY candidate, and while Connolly is technically a candidate too, it's solely based on the work he did for Minnesota.

Given this, what I'd say is that if you're looking to give Riley the award primarily because of Connolly-analogue work from previous years and you're not actually that impressed with his Booth-analogue work, but when you look at Denver's EOY landscape you're ignoring Connolly and focusing only on Booth, that's something weird about that that I think you should tread carefully with.

And again, that's not me saying that Riley's performance this season wasn't EOY-level impressive. That's up to each voter to decide.

[Doctor MJ]

They can, and if you personally think that Pelinka is now the smartest GM in the game, then it certainly makes sense to see him as an EOY candidate. I, as a voter, am more skeptical than that.

As stated before, none of this has to do with Pelinka for me. I'm simply talking about the process. Do I believe a GM can make a mistake one year, and then pivot to something much better the next? Absolutely.

Take the Nelsons in Dallas. In 03 Dallas goes to the WCF and maybe if Dirk doesn't get hurt they even steal a title. We'll never know. Then they trade for the dueling Antoine/Antawn and 04 is a mess. Then Nash walks. But the Mavs go on to immediately have the best 3 year stretch in NBA history, come within 5 quarters of a title, followed by a 67 win team. The Nelsons(especially Donnie as Don quits) should get some credit for this despite the mistakes made right leading into it.

Or look at Boston and how many missteps they have made in recent years and yet, they keep figuring out how to plug in new guys and keep going on deep playoff runs. Their front office shouldn't be excluded because say they gambled on Kyrie and that didn't work. They pivoted, and smartly.

I don't care about any specific guy. I disagree with a process that says if you made a bad move before that you smartly cleaned up, you should be out of consideration for that year. Pelinka aside as clearly you have strong feelings there.

I'm not fixating on Pelinka because I have strong feelings about him, but because your concern only makes sense to me within the grounding of the specific example in which it came up, because I've literally never said anything remotely like "GM's can't improve over time".

So if your only concern is the general, we can stop now because we've always been in agreement there, and I'd only ask you to consider how you came to think I thought anything otherwise.

[AEnigma]

If Connolly had not done that Gobert trade (or managed a less deleterious version of it… or incorporated Towns into it, perhaps with Ainge sending a bunch of picks back in return…) or otherwise had seen immediate returns on the Gobert/Towns pairing, he would absolutely be on my ballot.

I said as much early on.

[Texas Chuck]

So if your only concern is the general, we can stop now because we've always been in agreement there, and I'd only ask you to consider how you came to think I thought anything otherwise.

Pretty sure you explicitly stated it previously? But if we agree then my bad completely lol. IF this is just Westbrook specific then okay, I think its a tad overblown, but I'm not voting for Pelinka either way so I don't really have a dog in that fight.

[HeartBreakKid]

Just jumping in without fully reading. Is Pelinka an actual candidate or just an example?

[Doctor MJ]

EOY is such a difficult award to properly assess in the present. There is a good chance Trey Murphy becomes one of the best 5-6 players from the 2021 draft.

Did anyone even vote for Jeff Weltman in 2021?

Traded Vuc for a kings random, including the pick that became the player below, #11 in this years draft and Wendell Carter Jr
Drafted a perennial all-star talent in Franz Wagner at #5
Moved on from Aaron Gordon as he was never going to be a 3rd/4th option on a tanking team

Indeed. It's a problem for COY too, but EOY is even worse because we fully expect it to take years before we know whether a particular move was good or not.

Fundamentally this means that there's no reason to think that adding up EOY shares is going to give us a sense of who the most accomplished exec is.

For this reason, I honestly try to be really flexible about people's perspectives on EOY, and I've never rejected an EOY vote before. But we have an EOY award because the NBA has a long tradition of it, and the way they do EOY makes clear that they don't treat it like a title belt, continuing to vote for a guy year after year until someone smarter shows up, but rather that it's treated based on the specific moves the exec makes in the span being considered.

[Doctor MJ]

If Connolly had not done that Gobert trade (or managed a less deleterious version of it… or incorporated Towns into it, perhaps with Ainge sending a bunch of picks back in return…) or otherwise had seen immediate returns on the Gobert/Towns pairing, he would absolutely be on my ballot.

I said as much early on.

Okay. I missed this before and my instinct is to say that would have been inappropriate.

If you can find historical context of a guy getting serious EOY advocation based on what he did for a team different from the one he's employed by, please let me know as that would imply a precedence in the award's history I was not familiar with.

[Doctor MJ]

So if your only concern is the general, we can stop now because we've always been in agreement there, and I'd only ask you to consider how you came to think I thought anything otherwise.

Pretty sure you explicitly stated it previously? But if we agree then my bad completely lol. IF this is just Westbrook specific then okay, I think its a tad overblown, but I'm not voting for Pelinka either way so I don't really have a dog in that fight.

I'm pretty dang sure I never said that GM's can't get better at their job, because I don't think I'd say that any one in any job.

Re: just Westbrook specific? That's the context I recall this coming up. If there's some other example that this came up, feel free to remind me.

[Doctor MJ]

Just jumping in without fully reading. Is Pelinka an actual candidate or just an example?

He's a working GM so he's absolutely a candidate.

But so far as I know, we're on this topic because the unusual, but not unique, nature of the Westbrook trade.

[AEnigma]

If Connolly had not done that Gobert trade (or managed a less deleterious version of it… or incorporated Towns into it, perhaps with Ainge sending a bunch of picks back in return…) or otherwise had seen immediate returns on the Gobert/Towns pairing, he would absolutely be on my ballot.

I said as much early on.

Okay. I missed this before and my instinct is to say that would have been inappropriate.

If you can find historical context of a guy getting serious EOY advocation based on what he did for a team different from the one he's employed by, please let me know as that would imply a precedence in the award's history I was not familiar with.

How about you find me historical context for an executive building a title core and then voluntarily jumping ship to another franchise in the same year that core breaks through and wins a title.

Ainge comes close here, but he was not especially relevant in any transactions he made last year, and there is a big gap between a core winning a championship and not winning one.

[Doctor MJ]

If Connolly had not done that Gobert trade (or managed a less deleterious version of it… or incorporated Towns into it, perhaps with Ainge sending a bunch of picks back in return…) or otherwise had seen immediate returns on the Gobert/Towns pairing, he would absolutely be on my ballot.

I said as much early on.

Okay. I missed this before and my instinct is to say that would have been inappropriate.

If you can find historical context of a guy getting serious EOY advocation based on what he did for a team different from the one he's employed by, please let me know as that would imply a precedence in the award's history I was not familiar with.

How about you find me historical context for an executive building a title core and then voluntarily jumping ship to another franchise in the same year that core breaks through and wins a title.

Ainge comes close here, but he was not especially relevant in any transactions he made last year, and there is a big gap between a core winning a championship and not winning one.

I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm running a project. I'm explaining to you the criteria as I've defined it, but am also acknowledging that I am trying to fit with historical precedent, and so if you can find a precedent that doesn't fit with how I've laid things out, then I should re-consider.

[AEnigma]

Okay. I missed this before and my instinct is to say that would have been inappropriate.

If you can find historical context of a guy getting serious EOY advocation based on what he did for a team different from the one he's employed by, please let me know as that would imply a precedence in the award's history I was not familiar with.

How about you find me historical context for an executive building a title core and then voluntarily jumping ship to another franchise in the same year that core breaks through and wins a title.

Ainge comes close here, but he was not especially relevant in any transactions he made last year, and there is a big gap between a core winning a championship and not winning one.

I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm running a project. I'm explaining to you the criteria as I've defined it, but am also acknowledging that I am trying to fit with historical precedent, and so if you can find a precedent that doesn't fit with how I've laid things out, then I should re-consider.

And I am saying it is an unprecedented hypothetical. If a player misses the entire regular season, but comes back for the play-in and carries (in that 2003 Duncan / 1994 Hakeem sense) his team to the title from there, the idea of voting for someone who played no regular season games would certainly be unprecedented, but I do not see much cause to question it on that basis.

[Doctor MJ]

How about you find me historical context for an executive building a title core and then voluntarily jumping ship to another franchise in the same year that core breaks through and wins a title.

Ainge comes close here, but he was not especially relevant in any transactions he made last year, and there is a big gap between a core winning a championship and not winning one.

I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm running a project. I'm explaining to you the criteria as I've defined it, but am also acknowledging that I am trying to fit with historical precedent, and so if you can find a precedent that doesn't fit with how I've laid things out, then I should re-consider.

And I am saying it is an unprecedented hypothetical. If a player misses the entire regular season, but comes back for the play-in and carries (in that 2003 Duncan / 1994 Hakeem sense) his team to the title from there, the idea of voting for someone who played no regular season games would certainly be unprecedented, but I do not see much cause to question it on that basis.

This is not the first time a GM has switched teams, and so I'm saying that if you can find a previous example that fits, you can reference it and possibly get me to change the criteria.

Short of that, the criteria are as I've defined them.

[AEnigma]

I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm running a project. I'm explaining to you the criteria as I've defined it, but am also acknowledging that I am trying to fit with historical precedent, and so if you can find a precedent that doesn't fit with how I've laid things out, then I should re-consider.

And I am saying it is an unprecedented hypothetical. If a player misses the entire regular season, but comes back for the play-in and carries (in that 2003 Duncan / 1994 Hakeem sense) his team to the title from there, the idea of voting for someone who played no regular season games would certainly be unprecedented, but I do not see much cause to question it on that basis.

This is not the first time a GM has switched teams, and so I'm saying that if you can find a previous example that fits, you can reference it and possibly get me to change the criteria.

Short of that, the criteria are as I've defined them.

“This is not the first time that a player has missed the entire regular season, so I am saying if you can find a previous example of a player missing the entire regular season and still getting PotY votes, you can reference it.”