Michael Jackson wrote:If nothing else, everyone has to say, AKME are way better at actually understanding the cap which I think we are crediting to Polk as that seems his specialty. You hire the right guy who knows how to crunch the numbers and you can get more creative. The old regime seemed to not have anyone that talented, nor the creativity and to boot they weren't likable, dealing with other GM's, Players or Agents. Just guessing but AK may have the creativity and mind for building, ME might be really good at working with the personalities and Polk knows the numbers. That theoretically sounds like a good "team" and when you have good team building at the management level you have a higher success rate of having a good team on the floor. The proof will be in the pudding for sure but I like that there seems to be logic to all of this.
I do love the cap creativity of the new group, but tbh that was definitely a strength previously also. Irwin Mandel basically filled that role and IIRC he basically pioneered a number of cap tricks, such as declining contracts, signing guys at the end of the season to non guaranteed deals to be able to trade them in the summer (or rather just have the flexibility to, as GarPax were conservative on actually exercising the substantial flexibility largely created by Mandel over the years), draft protection, pick swaps, etc. I'm sure I'm wrong and that he didn't invent all these strategies but pretty sure he was well known around the league as highly strategic with the cap.