dougthonus wrote:greenwing wrote:The bottom line is no matter how many mistakes the guy made, he still has won multiple times. Very few GM's have that on their resumes and no other GM in the past thirty years has been as successful.
This argument is a fallacy. It can be applied to anyone who was around during the dynasty. Bill Cartwright and Luc Longley have more rings than Patrick Ewing, I guess they're better players. Ron Harper must be one of the all time elite PGs. The Bulls janitorial staff must be the best in the league.
So just having rings doesn't make you best automatically. You have to decide how much each person contributed to the rings.
The rest of the NBA judged how much Jerry contributed when they refused to offer him a job. I think it stands to reason that a HOF caliber GM wouldn't be so toxic that he was unable to ever find a job again after his first one ended.
Okay here goes...
I don't agree with you at all. That comment is not a fallacy. GM's have
way more control over the success of a team than a role player. Seriously, why are you trying to compare essentially the Ron Harper's of the world to a GM? They're role players who have added to success of teams but did not change the course of a franchise.
You're trying to compare the power of a guy who can add or remove players and/or coaches from a team to a guy who simply contributed to multiple championship teams but without being the focal point of the franchise. Now granted, each GM has varying levels of power based on their relationship to their respective team's owner. But the power of a GM far exceeds any role player.
Also, I never wrote that Krause was the best GM in the past 30 years, I wrote that he was the most successful - which is true based on the fact that he won six championships over his tenure. But you can certainly argue that other GM's were better based on trades they made, draft picks chosen and/or overall length of time the franchise stayed afloat (e.g. San Antonio). That being said, though, being the most successful does not necessarily make you the most liked.
Krause's poor relationship with key members of the Bulls' organization was well publicized. So it's not a surprise that he was ostracized by other organizations after his time with the Bulls had ended. It's very difficult to get a GM job in the NBA. The timing has to be just right and GM jobs are usually given to guys who have either risen up the ranks within a given organization or have special connections to a higher-up within another organization. So it's not surprising in the least that the guy who spent so much time with one organization had a difficult time nabbing another GM position - especially when you consider how much influence guys like Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan have around the league.
No, I think the real problem here is that some people are so willing to throw out the guy's terrific run over the course of a decade because he made some pretty bad mistakes in his final seasons as a GM. Does no one remember that the CBA changed quite a great deal after the Bulls' last championship? Once that changed the GM game was completely different. Krause dominated most of the 90's. When the CBA changed and he threw most of the core out the window he completely failed. It's not that surprising. Sure, he could have handled things a ton better in retrospect, but I find it a bit disheartening that a lot of people want to simply ignore the success he had because of the way things ended.
It is not like I'm completely enamored with Krause's performance because his final years definitely were awful. But I'll take those final awful years in exchange for 6 championships any day. As you've said yourself on occasion, Doug, Jerry Krause during the Bulls' dynasty run was operating at a tremendously high level as a GM. Even if he didn't always make the best pick in the draft, he generally made the right pick to find pieces to help the Bulls win. That really should not be ignored.
When you're talking about great runs as a GM, you have to throw Krause's name out there for the simple fact that he was a deciding factor in the second longest dynasty in league history. Guys like Bill Cartwright and Ron Harper were significant pieces to the puzzle, but they were not there for the entirety of Chicago's run and it was Krause who brought them in. Give the guy credit where credit is due.
