<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Too much television really does rot the brain. And the Knicks. And soon, the Bobcats. The New York Knicks are owned by James Dolan, who runs Cablevision. The Charlotte Bobcats are owned by Bob Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television. These are the men who turned over their basketball operations to two of the worst basketball executives in America, Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan. Great players, yes, but terrible executives. Horrible. Yet there they are, Thomas running the Knicks and Jordan running the Bobcats. Clearly, television is to blame. Too much Teletubbies and Rap City for Dolan and Johnson, who ignored mountains of anecdotal evidence when they installed Thomas and Jordan as their heads of basketball. Thomas was one of the great point guards of his generation, but as a basketball executive he's been less Midas and more small intestine -- everything he touches turns to feces. There was that disaster with the Continental Basketball Association, a 55-year-old league that went bankrupt 16 months after Thomas bought it. There were those four years in Toronto, when he was the expansion Raptors' executive vice president and the team was atrocious. Since December 2003 Thomas has been president of the Knicks, constructing a team with one of the highest payrolls and worst records in the NBA. Dolan's brainstorm last month was to replace Larry Brown, a good coach but a lousy employee, with Thomas, a lousy employee and a worse coach. Thomas' only previous coaching experience came with the Indiana Pacers from 2000-02, and it was bad. How bad? This bad: In the nine seasons from 1997-2005, the Pacers failed to get past the first round of the NBA playoffs just three times -- Thomas' three seasons as coach. Now, Thomas must coach the worst possible team, i.e., a team put together by Isiah Thomas. That includes first-round pick Renaldo Balkman, whom Thomas drafted No. 20 overall to preempt a bidding war with the Sioux Falls Skyforce of the NBDL. Whatever lousy results Thomas produces this season, he'll deserve. He was the guy -- and this is the Knicks' president, remember -- who allowed mutinous Stephon Marbury to complain ad nauseam about Larry Brown. Marbury has admitted asking Thomas step in as Brown's replacement. A few months later, Thomas (via Dolan) did just that. Thomas still has that cutie-pie face, but he's got fangs. When he's not biting Brown, though, Thomas mainly bites himself. Jordan? He just bites. As a player he was the greatest, but as an executive he's the worst. His missteps as Washington's president of basketball operations were numerous, led by his selection of Kwame Brown with the No. 1 pick of the 2001 NBA Draft and his trading of rising star Richard Hamilton for fading UNC homey Jerry Stackhouse. Jordan's cluelessness as an executive was confirmed five months into his tenure -- before the Kwame Brown pick, before the Stackhouse trade -- when he hired Leonard Hamilton as coach. Hamilton couldn't have drawn up an NBA-quality play unless someone gave him a Crayon. He went 19-63, and how he won 19 games I'll never know. The Wizards were over .500 two years before Jordan got there, and they were over .500 two years after he left. For Jordan's 3? seasons in town? They were 110-179. Even bottom-line businessmen like Dolan and Johnson fall for the aura of icons like Isiah and M.J. But Dolan and Johnson showed their lack of sports expertise by confusing basketball ability with acumen, competitiveness with competence. It doesn't take the gaudy playing stats or competitive fire of a Hall of Famer to run a winning sports franchise. Two of the best GMs in the NBA are non-players, R.C. Buford of San Antonio and Bryan Colangelo of Toronto. Hall of Famer Jerry West (Memphis), longtime Pistons star Joe Dumars (Detroit) and solid ex-pro Rod Thorn (New Jersey) are also exceptional, but Chris Mullin (Golden State) and Elgin Baylor (Clippers) are general managers because they combined for more than 41,000 career NBA points, not because they're good at their job. It's not just basketball. Some of the best executives in baseball are the young and the geeky -- Boston's Theo Epstein and the Yankees' Brian Cashman -- not the famous and the athletic. The NFL is the same. Two of the best GMs in that league are a former small-college lineman (the Patriots' Scott Pioli) and a former attorney (the Falcons' Rich McKay). The worst? Possibly the Lions' Matt Millen, a former Pro Bowl linebacker. Dolan and Johnson will find out the hard way. A great player isn't always going to be a great executive. But incompetent executives -- as Thomas and Jordan have been -- will always be incompetent. In television, Mr. Dolan and Mr. Johnson, it's called a "repeat." And it often leads to what you might call a "cancellation." </div> http://www.sportsline.com/nba/story/9567151 "Too much Teletubbies and Rap City for Dolan and Johnson."
Chris Mullin needs to be mentioned even though the Warriors owner is no TV Media exec. The Warriors owner, Chris Cohan, is just an idiot that doesn't know basketball enough to hire the right guys who really know basketball. I guess the success of a franchise is really determined by the decisions the ownership makes in order to install the right people that know how to build a winning roster.
Not sure you can completely right off Jordan, as he hasn't really done anything with Charlotte yet. At least with Isiah, we've all seen how bad he is.
<div class="quote_poster">Quoting custodianrules2:</div><div class="quote_post">Chris Mullin needs to be mentioned even though the Warriors owner is no TV Media exec. The Warriors owner, Chris Cohan, is just an idiot that doesn't know basketball enough to hire the right guys who really know basketball. I guess the success of a franchise is really determined by the decisions the ownership makes in order to install the right people that know how to build a winning roster.</div> The article does mention Mullin, and with good reason. We're still yet to see if guys like my boy Danny in the Beantown or Paxson or Ferry are the real deal, but early indications point squarely to maybe.
<div class="quote_poster">Quoting Squishface:</div><div class="quote_post">The article does mention Mullin, and with good reason. We're still yet to see if guys like my boy Danny in the Beantown or Paxson or Ferry are the real deal, but early indications point squarely to maybe.</div> Okay, I'm an idiot. I think I skipped that part. Thanks.
