The Melo Backpedal

Only a year after finishing the season with a 24-58 record and having his career as an NBA executive hanging in the air, Boston Celtics General Manager and Executive Director of Basketball Operations, Danny Ainge, was named NBA Executive of the Year for the his part in orchestrating the biggest turnaround in league history.

Ainge received 18 of the 47 votes cast by GMs and executives representing all 30 NBA teams, as tabulated by The Sporting News. Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak was second with 14 votes, while Hornets GM Jeff Bower was third with 12.

The problem I have with Ainge receiving this award, while he may be deserving, is that historically this award has gone to executives who have one spectacular off-season that leads to an overachieving team, but doesn’t necessarily help build for the future. For example, seven years ago Geoff Petrie of the Sacramento Kings won the award for his part in the success of the Sacramento Kings. Three years later, they were rebuilding again. Same goes with Rod Thorn, who won it in six years ago, Jerry West who won it four years ago, and Elgin Baylor who won it two years ago. That one off-season may have led to a year or two of overachieving for each of their respective teams, but sooner rather than later, their team is back to rebuilding. The truly great GMs keep their teams winning consistently, and not just for a year or two, yet those aren’t the ones getting rewarded each year with this award.

The standard has been set so that executives that keep their teams winning despite the retirement of Hall-of-Famers, injuries to superstars, and free agent defections, don’t get the recognition they appropriately deserve. Certainly not all, but many who win this award are being congratulated for an off-season of desperate moves that covers up years of mismanagement. For example, prior to this season, the Celtics, under Ainge’s direction, had compiled a regular season record of 138-190 in four seasons, which was a far cry from the standard in Boston. The San Antonio Spurs, the Utah Jazz, the Houston Rockets, and the Portland Trailblazers have, according to their records, been the most consistent winning teams of the past two decades. However, when was the last time any of them had an executive win this award? Actually it was seventeen long years ago, with Bucky Buckwalter of the Trailblazers winning the award following the 1991 season.

Executives of Fortune 500 companies have to be on the ball at all times, not just for a three month period when their job’s on the line. They may get a pat on the back or a “that a boy” from the President of the company, but they’re not keeping their jobs unless they’re consistently producing results. When Ainge says, “”this wasn’t overnight,” I actually believe him because great deals usually take weeks or months to hammer out the details and young players have to develop. At the same time, I believe there we’re times in the past that Ainge relied too much on what his young players would eventually produce, and the waiting eventually became too much to bare. That’s when he called his buddy, Kevin McHale, who gave him the missing piece to a potential championship puzzle.

Once he made trades for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett, which he certainly deserves credit for, good veteran players came out of the woodwork, willing to play on the cheap. James Posey, Sam Cassell, and P.J. Brown were gifts, but I guess that’s his reward for putting three All-Stars together in the country’s best sports town.

I’d like to see executives who build teams that are consistently winning to start receiving the recognition they deserve, and it starts with this award. As with the Coach of the Year award, which is in the same ugly situation, they need to start recognizing guys who find ways to keep a team winning, rather than someone who orchestrates a flash-in-the pan season. Trading away your future assets for a chance to win now is easy. Anybody can do that — but not everybody does because they also want to stay competitive for the future and not squander their youth for one or two good years. If Ainge can capitalize on his current teams success and still find ways to prepare for the days when the big three will no longer be around, only then will this award actually mean anything, and not be a mockery of what it means to be a top tier executive in the NBA.

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