Rating NBA General Managers — Fairly
Retroactively giving proper evaluation to NBA front offices
From endless trade grades and draft rankings, we, as the basketball community love to play GM. We love to say how each front office should construct their roster and we judge them harshly on the job we all wish we had. But, lets set aside the instant grades and adequately access the job performance of the leagues’ teams and general managers — an assessment we would hope our bosses would make of us.
We cannot possibly know how well a draft selection is — who is a steal and who is a bust — or who won or lost a trade within moments of the ink drying. We have over a half-century of basketball history at our fingertips, so lets critique the past and let the present play out.
As I explained in the my previous analysis of individual draftees from 2000–2011, we should give draft picks give or take 5 years to fully develop before we critique their merits. Rookies are rarely able to keep their heads above water and the five-year time frame is a little longer than the typical rookie contract, allowing us to analyze how well they actually perform.
My study of the players, and now the individual front offices, is based on draftees from this century, and their win shares added[i] in their first five seasons of play. One concession about the data is that it does not take into account players who were traded within those first five years — simply giving all of their value to whichever team they landed on at the end of draft night. However, a not so reasonable assumption is that teams made a “fair” trade and earned back equal value. Yet, as basketball contemporaries we know this is not always the case, but we should likely expect that, for general managers who maintain some competency, trades will ultimately even out over time.
My regression analysis[ii] reveals what value we would predict each pick (1 through 60) to have over that five year time period and allows us to compare how much more, or less, value teams are sucking out of their respective picks. From this we see the age-old, it seems, success of San Antonio at finding the diamond amongst a host of international players, and some surprises. Surprises, such as Philadelphia and Indiana who appear to have picked well in the early 2000s. It is now easy to visualize how teams have turned draft success into production on the scoreboard:
There is a vivid contrast, illustrated by the plot, between organizational strategies. Some organizations, with money to float around and attractive bigger markets, do not need successful drafting to lead them to a higher win percentage — the Lakers and Mavericks. Yet, others, like San Antonio and Oklahoma City, rely heavily on talent-enriched youth, garnished from the draft to build the foundation of their franchises because they lack the allure of big city lights and dollar signs (that is, before the recent cap explosion).
For each of these successful strategies there are the organizations that put stock in similar ideas but saw them flounder for one reason or another. And also, I must admit, there are a select few whose strategy for building their team seems unbeknownst to everyone — stand up, Sacramento.
But trends over a dozen years are often too long in evaluating job performance of an individual or organization. Would we really want to wait over a decade to truly access our general manager as on par with the guy in our fantasy draft who somehow always has a lineup that looks like a typical Knicks team — a group of overpaid, washed-up superstars?[iii]
I analyzed the current general managers who, within this century, have picked at least 8 players through the draft during their tenure and how these picks faired once in the NBA. Some GM’s like the Golden State’s Bob Myers, Portland’s Neil Olshey (formerly with the Clippers), and Chicago’s Gar Forman appear to be quite successful in the draft, stealing all-stars later than expected, but do not have the draft volume to make fair assumptions just yet. Even Sam Hinkie wasn’t given enough time to have players reach the 5-year window for evaluation.
Thus, there remains 10 current GMs with the resume to truly be given just judgment. Each GM is ranked based on their Win Shares above the regression on average and their rank for this value added compared to the rest of the league in the same time period. And, finally, 94x50’s General Manager Ratings:
The varying styles of the different general managers are apparent. Pat Riley, Mitch Kupchak, and Donnie Nelson have organized successful teams by laying their rings and wallets on the table in free agency, not particularly through grooming youngsters. Sam Presti, R.C. Buford, and Daryl Morey have constructed successful, smaller market teams through player development and the draft. John Hammond, who just received a contract extension with the Bucks, has faired well in the draft but is waiting for that young talent to mature into a successful on the court product.
To note is that, in essence, only the good general managers should be allowed by owners to continue to operate after a certain number of picks have been evaluated — but this evaluation takes time. A difficult give and take for both fan bases and anxious owners. It is no surprise that 8 of the 10 GMs rank in either the top 10 in draft value or win percentage during their tenure because these are the savants who are given contract extensions because they build championship contenders — they hold 14 of the last 17 titles. General Managers like Washington’s Ernie Grunfeld and Memphis’ Chris Wallace, however, have shown ill fate in the draft, and particularly Grunfeld, has failed to produce talent in other ways. Washington, it may just be time to reevaluate, especially since Kevin Durant did not even entertain the thought of coming home.
Further analysis might be spent on deciphering exactly why some of these guys are just so good at their job. The top tier all appears to lean heavily on analytics — likely no coincidence, Charles Barkley. As always it seems the Spurs way prevails as R.C. Buford and his protégé, Sam Presti, have squeezed the most value out of their draft picks. We waited patiently to do a proper and thorough draft analysis, so as you watch the league’s next generation of players, pay attention to the decisions that brought them to their teams, even if it was several years in the making.
Stats from basketball-reference.com
[i] As I stated in the previous article using Win Shares and draft data, I am not a proponent of top-down metrics like Win Shares but in a top-down analysis such as this one, it will suffice.
[iii] Speaking of fantasy drafts: If you’ve read this far, or read this at all, you must really appreciate basketball — or are quite bored. But, nonetheless, I have been interested for some time in starting a fantasy salary-cap league through 94x50, but have yet to find enough basketball head cases to take me up on it. If you’d be even the slightest bit interested shoot me an email: aepowell95@gmail.com
