Steve Kerr, a former player with five championships to his name, is in his first year as general manager of the Phoenix Suns. And in his first major move, Kerr boggled experts everywhere by trading Shawn Marion, a top-10 player in the league, for an injured, aging and no longer effective Shaquille O'Neal. The trade does not fit with the Suns' up-tempo style and is almost guaranteed to be a disaster.
So this got me thinking. What, exactly, makes a former player qualified to be an executive of a professional sports team?
Former players can succeed as executives (here's looking at you, Jerry West), but most flop hard. Let's take a look at some former player execs:
Isiah Thomas: Thomas is the best example of a former player failing in the front office. The Knicks had salary cap problems before Isiah, but instead of trying to fix the team, Isiah just piled on more troubles. Now, they have bad players with bad contracts (Jerome James, Jared Jeffries, Malik Rose) and incompatible players with terrible contracts (Eddy Curry, Zach Randolph, Stephon Marbury). The Knicks won't get under the cap until the summer of 2010, and despite having the highest payroll in the league, they have one of the worst records. Why does this man still have a job?
Danny Ainge: Ainge was a good player for several years, but was always considered to be a terrible general manager until last summer. Then, he managed to pull off deals for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. Those were tremendous trades, but there's no doubt that Ainge was lucky to get them; with the Seattle Sonics rebuilding and the Minnesota Timberwolves desperate to trade their star player, Ainge simply took advantage of a perfect storm of events. In my mind, those two trades still can't make up for years of incompetence.
Kevin McHale: The Timberwolves' GM is a former legend that played for the Boston Celtics during their championship years, and frankly, you'd have a hard time telling me that Boston didn't get some type of hometown discount when McHale traded KG to Beantown. I don't understand why the Wolves traded Garnett, but even if they felt the need to get rid of him, wouldn't a package revolving around Shawn Marion or Amare Stoudemire have been better? Either way, moving one of the top two players in the league was a dumb move. Everyone knows you can never get fair price when you trade a superstar.
Kiki Vandeweghe: A former player with a couple of All-Star appearances who became GM of the Denver Nuggets in 2001, Vandeweghe was a huge bust. Though he drafted Carmelo and acquired Marcus Camby, his mistakes still outweighed his successes. In 2004 he traded for Kenyon Martin, who has rarely been healthy since, and he infamously drafted Nikoloz Tskitishvili, the poster boy for European busts, with a lottery pick in 2002. In his five years as GM, Vandeweghe never really did enough to build the team, and ownership finally saw the light and fired him in 2006.
Michael Jordan: One of my favorite examples, Jordan became the president of basketball operations for the Washington Wizards in 2000. The highlights of his tenor are none too bright. He selected Kwame Brown with the first pick of the 2001 draft, and he then came back to play with the Wizards the same year. Perhaps the latter was his best move as an executive. Jordan averaged 20 points per game in both years he played, while Brown was a major disappointment and is still a bust to this day. The Wizards never made the playoffs under MJ, leading to his termination in 2003.
Most of these guys were good players, but they failed miserably as executives. Maybe if teams really believe so much in former players, they should make them work their way up through the system. That way, you actually get someone who understands the salary cap.
David Heck is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at David.Heck@tufts.edu.
