In ESPN The Magazine, Bill Simmons has decided to campaign for the upcoming Bucks’ GM opening. To be honest, he’d be a pretty good hire. No better than hiring me, but better than hiring a retread who has already failed as a GM once (looking squarely at Rick Sund) or someone who has been jettisoned from all of his previous NBA positions for being so intense it bordered on mental instability (calling Doug Collins).
There’s no doubt Simmons knows the NBA. He has a good handle on salary cap economics, and seems to understand that anyone who is not going to be a starter isn’t worth a long term contract because cheaper help can always be found elsewhere (he did crack on the Charlie Bell signing right away).
He also proclaims himself to be an A+ judge of talent, mostly basing his I deserve the Bucks job claim on “because I said they should have taken Chris Paul over Bogut”. Well, that’s fine, but he also forgot to mention that he thought Orlando should take Okafor over Dright Howard , Houston should take Jay Williams over Yao Ming, and that when Boston drafted Gerald Green he was looking forward to watching “G-Money for the next 15 years”, and constantly hammered the Yi pick until he actually took the time to watch him play.
He does have some other excellent ideas, though (No more music during play? Sign me up!)
Obviously, just because he writes a well-read column doesn’t mean he’s qualified to be a GM. But he’s making a great point — why should the next GM come from Herb Kohl’s insider circle of associates? To Kohl’s credit, he has spent plenty of money on this team, but has not seen results. Why not try someone with a new perspective on things?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Winks // Mar 3, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Hey man, love the article, love the site. I linked to it as part of the article I wrote up on Simmons over at my blog. Keep up the good work.
2 Gardner // Mar 11, 2008 at 2:43 am
I read your column a few times, still don’t get your over all point, unless it just random basketball thought… either way Bill posted a new article pointing out how the rules change to hand check would have make Jay Williams the better pick (But hind sight it always 20/20). But if you go digging through is archives looking for bad choices, which every GM makes, you find a gluttonous amount of good ones, almost to the point of sin. Which is my point, with a NBA fanatic in the truest sense of the word, why would you not want some one like him running the team. Ask yourself you would rather have a GM who tries in, honest effort, to put out a championship winning team OR a GM who tries to play it safe and is afraid of taking a risk to win?
(On another note - found your site through google/nice gig here.)
-g
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