One_and_Done wrote:Johnny Bball wrote:One_and_Done wrote:Masai made many good moves early on, many of which you just named. That’s true of a number of GMs though. There was a time a reporter was able to ask Bryan Colangelo with a straight face “when you touch gold, does it turn into super gold?” That’s how well his tenure seemed to start. Dumars also had an incredible start to his GM career, where it seemed he could do no wrong. The thing about that kind of lightning in a bottle start, is that is wears off quick. Kind of like how a batter in baseball with a hole in his game will get exposed after he starts hot, unless he can adjust. Those who don’t adjust end up out of the league quick. Dumars was one such.
Masai of course is better than Dumars, he has a more prolonged period of success than him, across 2 franchises. However, in recent years he been a poor GM. There’s really no getting around that. It’s not so much the individual bad moves that kill him (e.g. the Thaddeus trade, the Poeltl trade, etc). It’s the lack of strategic vision that has been fatal. He has made bad moves and then doubled down on them. He assembled a badly constructed team, then blamed his top tier coach and fired him. That would never happen at truly elite front offices. Can you see Spo or Pop or Kerr getting let go because of a disappointing season that wasn’t the coaches fault? He couldn’t accurately guage the strength of his teams, and this led to all sorts of failures; in particular, hanging on to guys too long and losing them for either nothing (e.g. FVV) or for less than he could have gotten (e.g. Siakam, OG). You look at how OG, Siakam, FVV, etc, are playing elsewhere, and you have to ask why exactly Masai couldn’t build a playoff team around these guys. The answer appears to be the need to double down on his earlier decision that Barnes is a superstar, something I think there’s little evidence for.
The Raptors have been in limbo lately, and if Masai tries to chase the play-in again this year they’re likely to stay there. They need to embrace the rebuild they triggered by moving their vets. I don’t see the pathway for this team to become a contender, or even a 50 win team, without a major talent infusion. That kind of infusion is frankly hard to come by without top lotto picks. In this respect, Masai particularly reminds me of Dumars. Both were lucky enough to build a contender without bottoming out, due to freak circumstances that are not repeatable. They came away from this thinking they didn’t need to tank to rebuild, and that has left Toronto in such a weird place.
If I was a Toronto fan, I would have wanted the team to keep Nurse, be better constructed around existing guys, and just kept trying to win 50 games a year. With better moves on the fringes, that goal was entirely within their reach. Instead they’ve blown up the roster, but are stuck in mediocrity anyway, with seemingly no plan to get out of it. Just terrible.
You're not a Toronto fan or you wouldn't have wanted them to keep Nurse.
I think anyone who blames Nurse is offbase. Nurse will go on to have a long and prestigious coaching career. I'm not sure Masai's GM career will go as well for him moving forward.
Of course you think that because you have zero idea of the very obvious reason to most raptor's fans and have no idea what I'm talking about or you're talking about before you then decided to type a bunch of unrelated text again.'
They fire Masai, and someone else will make him the next highest paid GM.
