paulpressey25 wrote:^^^^^I think I wrote those posts on your board over four years ago.
If you guys ever wanted to do a social media website like SaveOurBucks to highlight Ernie's mess, you have a ton of material to do it with. The guy starts season 14 as your GM come July 1st. And now he's dumped another first rounder. He's the intellectual version of Elgin Baylor.
I have I admit, last year I actually thought Ernie might prove me wrong and Wall and Beal would emerge with Otto as a top East team. Then I realized I needn't worry as Grunfeld would find a way to screw it up.
If you guys want help with how to do this, let me know. These are powerful but you need the compelling material. You've got the material.
There's been a site for this, been one for a while now.
http://www.fireerniegrunfeld.com/Granted, not as in depth as some of the ideas your suggesting. But I think it's pretty irrelevant since Ownership refuses to listen to anything outside of their safe space.
This was written by a former beat writer for the Wizards (was discussed earlier in this thread, pretty sure I pieced together the entire article, at least the important bits.)
I hate sports now. It is largely because of these two men, and how they starkly revealed to me why sports is a vile business and one I want no part in. Today is a prime example why, and I refuse to let them off the hook like so many others who are still in the media today, and are in the pocket of Ted Leonsis and Ernie Grunfeld.
I have not watched the Washington Wizards play in three months. Not one stolen inbounds pass, bungled defensive rotation, nor a single image of a team losing by double digits laughing on the bench. It’s been incredibly liberating. Oh I’m aware they’ve won five straight games to end the season. Of course they have, because this is what they always do under Ernie Grunfeld. Ted Leonsis will smile and nod and scold the critics for their lack of empathy. I do have empathy. I have empathy for whoever bought the season tickets I finally gave up this year because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Those who bought into the con-game of Ernie Grunfeld and Ted Leonsis. To be honest though, those seats probably are vacant, because Ted and Ernie have lost far more than games these last four years. They’ve lost the fans.
I have left the media for good, so I have no agenda. These will be the last words I ever write about this team, because they’re dead to me as long as Ernie Grunfeld occupies that office. I have no bosses or sources to protect, no job to worry about losing. In fact, a major part of the reason I left my job is because the staggering sloth and disarray of the Ernie Grunfeld empire down at Verizon Center drove me to the brink of insanity.
It’s not even about his roster moves, although those alone should’ve got him run out on a rail three years ago. It’s the behind the scenes. Remember, he interviews and hires every coach, players, scout, trainer, webmaster, and public relations official – this is his team far more than you know. So when you wonder why the team never seems to take their work seriously, has never has paid any attention to defense, comes into the season entirely out of condition, and ends every year with a litany of players injured, there’s only one place that blame goes.
It’s honestly not that hard to figure out. How does a team hype themselves throughout the offseason to how now is the season they finally get it, then founder completely for the first months of the season, hit a midseason streak, then falter again as players drop off the active list like flies, then magically start winning again just in time to save Grunfeld’s job? Every single year! Because their president has surrounded them with a complete lack of accountability, a zero emphasis on offseason conditioning, so when they arrive for training camp completely unprepared to play in the most competitive league on Earth, the loss column and their bodies take the toll. They have to play their way into game shape, which takes several months owing to the complete ineptitude of their strength and training and conditioning staff (by the way, the same people that oversaw Gilbert Arenas’ spectacularly failed knee rehabilitation that has ruined his career physically after Ernie Grunfeld gave him $100 million? Those people are still running their strength and conditioning program). They blame injuries every year, the entire nine-year stretch of his tenure, as if it’s just bad luck intervening. It’s not. It’s their lack of institutional effort.
That blame game is the most startling thing about this tenure. There are all the behind the scenes stories – how he came into an offseason meeting this year and declared they had to give Nick Young a full mid-level exception, to the bewilderment of his staff. How JaVale McGee came and asked him for a big man coach, and Grunfeld said he could have one if he paid for it himself. The many times Grunfeld went behind Eddie Jordan or Flip Saunders back when they tried to reign in Grunfeld’s pets Arenas and Blatche. The times you’d watch players ****ing around at practice despite lengthy losing streaks, and Grunfeld standing there ****ing around the same way.
But it’s the blaming. When they started losing, first he blamed Eddie Jordan. Then after one of the worst trades in draft day history, he blamed Abe Pollin and the “mandate we were under,” although I guess if you’re that desperate, the recently deceased is a nice person to blame for your failures. Then it was Caron Butler, who rightly thrashed until he was traded away from this abomination of a franchise. Then Gilbert Arenas and the gun incident, which make no mistake, was fostered, aided, and abetted by years of coddling by Ernie Grunfeld himself. Flip Saunders got the finger pointed at him next, and now Andray Blatche is up. Moving these people out isn’t Grunfeld rebuilding the franchise, which is he somehow being given credit for. It’s rifling through more people to blame so he can keep his job with minimal effort...............
There’s no way to convey appropriately the incredible losing culture that Grunfeld has cultivated without being there yourself. As I’ve said, it drove me to such anger to see players and staff fail so miserably yet act with such incredible nonchalance, all with the pleased eye of Grunfeld overseeing this atrocity. There’s no possible reason that any owner within his right mind and trying to win a title would bring back this man who has further defiled a franchise that already was one of the most embarrassing in sports. He gets credit for building a playoff team – but that was years and years ago, and even those teams underachieved because the same culture that has this team a bottom feeder now was pervasive even then. It’s the Grunfeld way.
Ted Leonsis, as we’ve seen very clearly however, has no interest in building a title team. His interest is in proving anyone who ever questions him wrong. It’s why he called me into his office after I gave him a poor midseason grade last year (solely on the basis of allowing Grunfeld to further disembowel this organization – imagine what his grade would be now!). He can talk about wicked pixels and all that garbage all he wants – he had a chance to truly rebuild this franchise with John Wall, and instead he and his staff used John Wall as the reason to continue their sloth and cowardly operations. This is a franchise that is more terrified of winning because of the effort it entails, than it is of losing because they have become masters of blame and excuses.
I bolded the most important bit of the article. As much as Grunfeld is a part of the issue, it's a problem with the entire institution. Ted
hates being told that he is wrong. We're less than a year removed from him declaring war on local radio affiliates for not covering his teams enough. If I had to throw a dart on the board, I would say this is one of the primary motivating factors for him to hold on to personnel for so long. He's trying to sell an image of a team, not the reality of a team.
