bigfoot wrote:garrick wrote:bigfoot wrote:Still a lot of James Jones hate and little recognition for what he has done for the franchise. Remember he was hired under Ryan McD for one year. The following year, McD was fired nine days before the season started and Jones was named "Interim GM" to pick up the pieces. Not counting that first year, he holds a 243-148 record (.622) as the GM of the Suns. At the time, the Suns sported a 10 year playoff drought and during his tenure the Suns have been to the playoffs 4 out of 5 years.
Important moves we forget that turned around the team:
Trevor Ariza for Kelly Oubre
Firing Kokoskov and hiring Monty
Signing Rubio as a free agent
Unloading human trash in Josh Jackson
Trading Oubre and Rubio for Chris Paul
Also ...
Third NBA championship appearance
Almost certainly helped the league get rid of Sarver
Ryan McD, Sarver, Josh Jackson, and Ayton were ugly problems Jones inherited. He has helped immensely in the clean up of those messes. He is the right guy until this team is ready for a complete teardown in three years or more. Even then he deserves a shot at a rebuild.
He deserves some credit for turning things around but he still deserves blame for sitting on his hands and not making moves to improve the roster after our finals run.
Some things he did very poorly are,
1. Gutting the scouting team because he thought scouting was overrated
2. Making a horrible pick with Jalen Smith.
3. Refusing to upgrade the PF and backup C position when it was clear Jae was not the long term answer at PF
4. Not getting a decent backup for CP3
5. Telling Jae to stay away from the team, then refusing trade offers for Rui or Grayson.
Simply put he got way too complacent and thought the roster didn't need any upgrading.
1. Really hard to fairly judge anything Jones did under Sarver in regards to scouting. Sarver was a cheap ass who disbanded the G-League team. That leads me to believe Sarver would be too cheap to pay for international and national scouts and probably expected evaluations to be done via video, at the combine, and bringing in players for workouts.
2. Jalen Smith is still in the league and just bagged a 3 year $27M/year contract. Cam Johnson and Toumani Camara were also Jones draft picks. He seems to pick solid rotational-to-starter level players. Contrast that with the picks he has given up in Culver and Day'Ron Sharpe. Certainly he overlooked Haliburton but so did 1/3 of the GMs in the league.
3 & 5. Crowder and Cam Johnson were the long term power forwards for the Suns. Ayton and Smith were meant to be the center rotation. Crowder holding out hurt the Suns who were already struggling with cap space. Not a lot could be done to replace Jae and honestly he hurt his career trajectory with that stupid move. Again all this happened under a cheap owner who didn't want to extend Crowder. Bottom line, Crowder and Sarver where the problems not Jones.
4. Cam Payne was an adequate backup. The real problem was repeated CP3 injuries during the playoffs.
https://www.brightsideofthesun.com/2019/2/27/18242951/woj-suns-are-concern-for-nba-barely-scouting-draft-prospects
Also, Woj relayed that Jones seems to not be a fan of scouting draft prospects. Jones’ indifference toward it has led to him not being on the road a lot checking out possible top-5 picks. There’s barely any sort of this going on in Phoenix, even though almost every other team in the lottery has pivoted towards draft preparation.
“Right now, James Jones is his interim general manager just a couple years retired from the NBA,” Wojnarowski said. “Jones has had a rather unorthodox view towards the NBA draft. There’s not a lot of scouting going on in Phoenix. He’s not on the road a lot.”
You might have a point except that James Jones from the beginning did not like to scout prospects which might explain how he ended up skipping Maxey and Hali and settled on Jalen.
Yes Sarver was an idiot but he did not shy away from investing in draft picks until JJ came along and who knows why Sarver sold the G league team.
I would guess that JJ had a big hand in that because why invest in a G league team if your GM is not going to scout any players or put any effort into it?