Why there's more to NBA decision making than you think
Having recently watched Grantland's behind-the-scenes look inside the Kings' Draft War Room - Draft 3.0 - I can say it was a fascinating look both into Sacramento's draft process and into their experimenting with crowd sourcing amateur analytics experts.
But one thing that really stuck out to me was how involved in the process Kings owner Vivek Ranadive was. Ranadive was high on Nik Stauskas, who the Kings eventually selected with the eighth overall pick, his opinion was heard throughout the short documentary, and my favorite subtle portion of the mini-doc was Ranadive's reaction to a Philadelphia trade offer.
Obviously none of us were present in that war room and it's impossible to know all of the recorded conversations that went on simply by watching the edited, finished documentary. Plus, it seemed as though Ranadive and General Manager Pete D’Alessandro were in agreement on most Kings-related decisions (although they differed on the popular Wiggins vs. Parker debate). We also don't know how involved Ranadive is in the day-to-day player personnel decisions in Sacramento. Again, this was one 20-minute documentary on one draft.
Nevertheless, seeing how involved Ranadive was on this occasion - as he has every right to be - was a good reminder of the role ownership can play in those personnel decisions.
It's easy for us to sit here and say that owners should spend money on hiring the right basketball decision makers and then stay out of the way, but when you have hundreds of millions of dollars invested, I assume it's tough to resist the temptation of getting your hands in there.
Furthermore, seeing Ranadive and D'Alessandro in action was a good reminder of the relationships that exist, both good and bad, between owners and GMs. In this case, the pair seemed to agree on selecting Stauskas, but what if D'Alessandro had followed up Ranadive's Stauskas opinion by saying he thought Elfrid Payton or Noah Vonleh was the right guy at No. 8?
Now that would have been something to capture on camera (though teams would probably never let us see that). Would the GM have gotten his way, or would the owner put his foot down and demand the selection of the player he seemed enamored with despite the General Manager's opinion and advice?
It's something to keep in mind the next time you're lamenting a GM's short-sighted trade decision or puzzling free agent acquisition. It wouldn't be fair to pin every mistake a GM makes on a meddling owner, but it's also not fair to assume every General Manager has full autonomy and that he actually believes in all of the bad decisions he might be making.
A great example would be the Brooklyn Nets under Mikhail Prokhorov's ownership and Billy King's management. Prokhorov's intention to build an instant contender has been no secret since the day he took over. While King's decision making has put the Nets in a spot where they've mortgaged their future to top out as a middle-of-the-pack team, the likelihood is that he was under a directive from Prokhorov and co. to do whatever was possible to improve the team immediately.
The same questions can be asked of Knicks management under James Dolan, Cavs management under Dan Gilbert (especially post-Decision and pre-Decision 2.0) and countless other NBA teams.
Going back to the Kings, given how numbers-driven and prudent D'Allesandro is reputed to be, one has to wonder how badly he really wanted Rudy Gay in Sacramento, and how much of that trade - plus reported interest in Josh Smith - might have been ownership's directive.
Take this snippet from Zach Lowe's Kings piece on Tuesday, for example:
“We have an arena coming in two years,” D’Alessandro says. “The clock is ticking. We are going to do everything we can to be a competitive team when we get there. The fans have waited too long. They need to see something now. To put a bad product inside a gorgeous package doesn’t make sense.”
Are those really D'Alessandro's thoughts, or is he simply following a win-now directive that flows down from Ranadive's ownership? If Ranadive preached patience and a necessary rebuild, for example, would D'Alessandro still feel the same way about rushing to build a contender over the next two years?
That's not a knock on D'Alessandro or Ranadive. It's just a reminder that while we, as fans and pundits, criticize teams' decisions based on our own timelines for our favorite teams and our own definitions of prudence, owners and therefore General Managers operate in a different world.
Owners who've invested unfathomable amounts of money have their own timelines of when to compete and turn profits, and GMs who hold one of just 30 such jobs in the world have bosses' orders to follow and answer to.