Ernie Grunfeld receives award

[willbcocks]

I've always thought he's a decent, not top shelf GM. I still think he is. We've already seen his idea through to the end so why not role the dice looking for a top shelf GM at the same time we reshuffle our team's deck?

[nate33]

Milwaukee Bucks general manager John Hammond has been named the recipient of the 2009-10 NBA Executive of the Year award, the NBA announced Saturday.

Milwaukee totaled 46 wins in 2009-10, a 12-game improvement from last season, and earned the franchise's first playoff berth since 2005-06.

Hammond's decision to select Brandon Jennings with the 10th overall pick in the 2009 NBA Draft paid immediate dividends, as the guard earned a starting spot in training camp and went on to average 15.5 points during his rookie campaign.

Hammond received 12 of a possible 30 votes from a panel of his fellow team executives throughout the NBA.

Oklahoma City's Sam Presti finished second with nine votes and Cleveland's Danny Ferry finished third with two votes. Charlotte's Rod Higgins, Dallas' Mark Cuban, Memphis' Chris Wallace, New Orleans' Jeff Bower, Portland's Kevin Pritchard, Sacramento's Geoff Petrie and Utah's Kevin O'Connor each received one vote.

What an outrage!! Ernie Grunfeld did not receive a single vote for executive of the year.

Strange selection. I don't think Hammond has done much other than choose Scott Skiles to run his team. Milwaukee's improvement wasn't due to an influx of talent; it was more from improvement within.

I'd give it to Presti.

[closg00]

^^^^^^
It was a close vote Nate, 12-9. Considering the injuries, you could say that the Bucks did more with less. The Jennings pick was a huge gamble at the time.

[LyricalRico]

To me, Presti hasn't done as much THIS YEAR to make the Thunder better. Drafting Harden, a consensus #3 pick IMO, was the only thing he did that has directly contributed to their success this year. If you want to claim "improvement from within", I'd say OKC is more guilty of that than MIL.

Hammond, OTOH, has done the following since the end of last year:

- rolled the dice on Jennings
- unloaded Jefferson's contract
- signed Delfino and Stackhouse
- traded for Salmons at the deadline (able to do that because they unloaded Jefferson)

All of that led to them making the playoffs without the services of their best player (Redd). I have no problems with Presti being a close second, but Hammond definitely has the edge IMO.

[AceDegenerate]

See, this is where your point breaks down. The Caron Butler/Kwame Brown was one of the biggest non-salary-dump heists in the recent NBA. He traded a bum for a player entering his prime who would go on to 2 All-star appearances.

It's also safe to say that Grunfeld won the Jamison for Devin Harris and some bad contracts trade, as Jamison went on to 2 all-star appearances himself.

While I'll likely chalk up the Miller/Foye trade as a loss, it seems that Grunfeld "won" at least 2 of the 3 major trades in his Wizards tenure.

So when you rant that he's lost every trade he's made as GM you are stretching the bounds of reason.

It's always nice to argue that he won the Butler for Kwame trade while ignoring that he had to give up Haywood (an ASSET) just to get rid of BUTLER while gaining 0 in return.

The Jamison for #5 trade was another colossal failure. I said it at the time and will say it again, Luol Deng would have done just as much if not MORE for this team than Jamison did. He would have COST LESS, and Stackhouse (another ASSET) could have been traded elsewhere.

He's a LOSER and has LOST every trade he's made.

[montestewart]

^
Another way to look at it would be to assess the sum total of the additions and subtractions, rather than the individual trades. Even taking into account the cost of dumping Butler's salary, Butler for Brown was, for a few years, a clear win for the Wizards. In some ways, so was Jamison for Harris and dead weight, as Jamison was a durable and fairly consistent scorer and rebounder for those same years. But the construction of the team, built around the scoring of Arenas, Jamison, and Butler and the backstop defense of Haywood (when he was on the floor) ultimately was flawed.

The Big-3 focused team was exciting and fun to watch for a few years, at least on offense, but it seemed always to be constructed to do just what it did, which was to get a low playoff seed, an early exit, and middle of the pack draft picks. While I often thought that model might just work, there were always missing elements: team passing, team defense, perimeter defense, defensive stoppers, scorers off the bench, back court rebounding, reliable 3-Pt. specialists, interior toughness, passing from the big man positions, coaching that emphasized defense, and coaching and veteran player leadership.

That's a pretty long list. I don't think I was wrong about Arenas being special, and I think he still is (or can be), but I was wrong to think that trio would go any farther than it actually did. Still, I always thought that more could be done to maximize their strengths and minimize their shortcomings through the acquisition of complementary players and a different approach to coaching. Even though I still thought the team was missing elements (defense, interior toughness), I was not horrified at the time by the trade of the 5th pick for Miller and Foye. I didn't love it, but I could see how it could work, and it did address some immediate needs. Combined with a new coach and the return of Haywood and Arenas, I was ready for some real success. In hindsight, that deal sucked. Passing on Blair, who might have immediately addressed needs at a low risk, seemed pretty bad the moment it happened. This year spelled the end of the Big-3 era and highlighted the shortcomings of the model.

Given that the ownership transition is still up in the air, I'm resigned to Leonsis likely giving EG another year, rather than replace him just before the draft. Maybe EG will pull off something on draft day and pull some BOYD trade that, coupled with Arenas, Blatche, McGee, Young, and FA signings, give the Wizards once again a dynamic and exciting team, without the fundamental flaws. If that happens, I'll pretend I was withholding judgment all along, just like Lyrical Rico. I can dream of a good outcome, but being a Wizards fan is such a bizarre combination of delusion and skepticism, I can never tell if my smile is happy or darkly comic.

[JonathanJoseph]

See, this is where your point breaks down. The Caron Butler/Kwame Brown was one of the biggest non-salary-dump heists in the recent NBA. He traded a bum for a player entering his prime who would go on to 2 All-star appearances.

It's also safe to say that Grunfeld won the Jamison for Devin Harris and some bad contracts trade, as Jamison went on to 2 all-star appearances himself.

While I'll likely chalk up the Miller/Foye trade as a loss, it seems that Grunfeld "won" at least 2 of the 3 major trades in his Wizards tenure.

So when you rant that he's lost every trade he's made as GM you are stretching the bounds of reason.

It's always nice to argue that he won the Butler for Kwame trade while ignoring that he had to give up Haywood (an ASSET) just to get rid of BUTLER while gaining 0 in return.

The Jamison for #5 trade was another colossal failure. I said it at the time and will say it again, Luol Deng would have done just as much if not MORE for this team than Jamison did. He would have COST LESS, and Stackhouse (another ASSET) could have been traded elsewhere.

He's a LOSER and has LOST every trade he's made.

You are flat wrong on the facts of the Butler trade and your opinion that Luol Deng is better than Antawn Jamison seems hard to take seriously (and I'm not big Jamison fan). Also, you fail to take into account that your choices there are Jamison or Deng and some bad contracts.

[AceDegenerate]

See, this is where your point breaks down. The Caron Butler/Kwame Brown was one of the biggest non-salary-dump heists in the recent NBA. He traded a bum for a player entering his prime who would go on to 2 All-star appearances.

It's also safe to say that Grunfeld won the Jamison for Devin Harris and some bad contracts trade, as Jamison went on to 2 all-star appearances himself.

While I'll likely chalk up the Miller/Foye trade as a loss, it seems that Grunfeld "won" at least 2 of the 3 major trades in his Wizards tenure.

So when you rant that he's lost every trade he's made as GM you are stretching the bounds of reason.

It's always nice to argue that he won the Butler for Kwame trade while ignoring that he had to give up Haywood (an ASSET) just to get rid of BUTLER while gaining 0 in return.

The Jamison for #5 trade was another colossal failure. I said it at the time and will say it again, Luol Deng would have done just as much if not MORE for this team than Jamison did. He would have COST LESS, and Stackhouse (another ASSET) could have been traded elsewhere.

He's a LOSER and has LOST every trade he's made.

You are flat wrong on the facts of the Butler trade and your opinion that Luol Deng is better than Antawn Jamison seems hard to take seriously (and I'm not big Jamison fan). Also, you fail to take into account that your choices there are Jamison or Deng and some bad contracts.

No, you are flat wrong. Deng is a better player than Jamison. He plays both sides of the ball. Jamison is one of the worst defenders in all of basketball.

What am I wrong about on the Butler trade? He was traded for Kwame, then Grunfeld overpaid him and didn't feel he was good enough to stick around and as such had to include another ASSET to trade this great player we got for Kwame? What is wrong about that?

[verbal8]

Ernie Grunfeld didn't WIN anything. He is a LOSER, and has LOST every trade he's made as GM of this team.

I think you are exaggerating a little. Even though Butler was not very good at the end of his time with the Wizards, you have to agree that he is more valuable than Kwame Brown. It is strange when EG has to make a deal he seems to do well(Kwame Brown and Jamison trades). It is some how when he doesn't(5th pick and including Haywood in the Butler deal) that he messes up.

[LyricalRico]

^ Wow, you guys are saying that Butler was overpaid by EG now? Does your revisionist history know no bounds? The consensus for the first 4 years that Caron was here was that he was a productive player on a reasonable contract. Heck, the fact that people say that he "regressed" this season means that at some point he was much better than he currently is. Oh but now that he's gone, he was just an overpaid bum? Ridiculous.

But the level of his regression could explain why the market for him was so cool, and why we eventually had to include Haywood. We were asking Cuban to take on over $30M in salary+luxtax for a declining Butler and a useless Stevenson. That's tough to swallow IMO. Heck, we've got guys here who don't even think it's worth taking on a salary like Peja's or AK47's to get a lottery pick. And we were asking Cuban to take on double those salaries with zero sweetener? C'mon.

Somebody found somewhere where Cuban supposedly bragged about being willing to do with deal sans Wood, but I don't believe that. We HAD to include more IMO. And considering that we got more for Jamison than expected (we were only expecting the #30 but also got Thornton), I would say that EG came pretty close to breaking even. Certainly as close as the market apparently allowed.

[nate33]

I don't think a rational person can argue that the Butler for Kwame trade wasn't a win for EG. Butler was excellent for most of his tenure in Washington.

The Jamison for the #5 trade was a wash. Jamison was better over the past 5 years than Devin Harris and Luol Deng (who was injured much of the time) but he wasn't better than Iguadola. Either way, I can live with the notion that the Jamison acquisition was a good fit for a team that needed veteran leadership and a low-usage scorer. A 20-game turnaround followed by 4 consecutive years in the playoff is proof that the trade was pretty successful.

[queridiculo]

Why let reasoning get in the way of an incoherent rant?

[montestewart]

Butler was pretty good for awhile, was an all-star twice (I think), and he was paid a tops of a little more than $10 million. This year, as his offensive game began to look stagnant, he seemed to be turning up the defense. It looked like maybe his decline had begun, but he only had a year left. I wasn't really in a big hurry to see him go, unless the offer was good (especially in light of offers that had come in the past). It now looks like this year was the right time for him to go, but I've got no problem with his contract, which still seems pretty good on average, even accounting for his decline.

[Chocolate City Jordanaire]

Milwaukee Bucks general manager John Hammond has been named the recipient of the 2009-10 NBA Executive of the Year award, the NBA announced Saturday.

Milwaukee totaled 46 wins in 2009-10, a 12-game improvement from last season, and earned the franchise's first playoff berth since 2005-06.

Hammond's decision to select Brandon Jennings with the 10th overall pick in the 2009 NBA Draft paid immediate dividends, as the guard earned a starting spot in training camp and went on to average 15.5 points during his rookie campaign.

Hammond received 12 of a possible 30 votes from a panel of his fellow team executives throughout the NBA.

Oklahoma City's Sam Presti finished second with nine votes and Cleveland's Danny Ferry finished third with two votes. Charlotte's Rod Higgins, Dallas' Mark Cuban, Memphis' Chris Wallace, New Orleans' Jeff Bower, Portland's Kevin Pritchard, Sacramento's Geoff Petrie and Utah's Kevin O'Connor each received one vote.

What an outrage!! Ernie Grunfeld did not receive a single vote for executive of the year.

Strange selection. I don't think Hammond has done much other than choose Scott Skiles to run his team. Milwaukee's improvement wasn't due to an influx of talent; it was more from improvement within.

I'd give it to Presti.

+1

nate, it could be that since the league voted OKC's Brooks coach of the year, they felt compelled to reward the Bucks' organization with executive of the year.

Like you, I think Skiles coach of the year and Presti executive of the year makes sense (too).