A General Mess
Listed in: OtherSo I was perusing Deadspin today, as I am wont to do, and the final post of the day definitely caught my eye. Apparently, Forbes.com had compiled a ranking of all the GMs in the four major sports. Now, I tend to think that most rankings are basically meaningless, but I was curious to see who Forbes had on top, and what methodology they had used to arrive at their conclusions. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised by what I found.
According to Forbes.com, the best active GM in sports was none other than Minnesota Timberwolves general manager Kevin McHale, a man I had recently dubbed "the Worst GM in Basketball." In third place was another guy who's often considered one of the worst in basketball, 76ers GM Billy King. Conversely, the bottom of the list included Toronto Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo, who's widely regarded as among the best in the business (besides leading the Raptors back to respectability this year, he was the architect of the Phoenix Suns).
So why did the results Forbes generated conflict with conventional wisdom (or more importantly, why didn't I agree with them). I have a few theories:
The Apples to Oranges Problem: The study started with a flawed premise: that you can somehow compare general managers in the four major sports and generate an objective list of who's the best. Why is this a flawed premise? Because GMs have wildly different roles in different sports. Football and basketball general managers are constrained by a salary cap (football GMs more than basketball ones). Since teams in those sports tend to spend similar amounts of money, on-field results should be a fair indicator of competency. Baseball has no salary cap (which means GMs can have vastly different sums of money to work with), while hockey only recently implemented one. Even within the same sport, some general managers have far more responsibility than others: the GM who ranked dead last, Michael Lombardi of the Oakland Raiders, has limited control over personnel decisions because Al Davis takes a hands-on approach to the team. Other GMs like, say, Billy Beane, basically run the entire franchise. Since their duties are so vastly different, it's next to impossible to compare the two.
The Criteria Problem: My bigger beef with the Forbes piece involves the measures they devised to compare general managers. They used just two categories: the team's won-loss record under the GM as compared to the previous three years before he took over, and how his team's payroll compared to the median payroll in the league. Thus, GMs whose teams showed improvement over the previous regime and who did so in a cost-effective manner would rank highly. On the surface, this seems fair enough: good GMs should be able to generate a better record than the guy they replaced, and hopefully they can keep payroll in line at the same time. However, there are several flaws in this approach. Just look at McHale. He took over the team a few years after it had entered the NBA. Thus, his supposed vast improvement basically amounts to a slightly above-.500 record which happened to follow five or so years of the team being a typically pathetic expansion franchise. His teams have advanced past the first round of the playoffs just once in a dozen years, and he seems determined to squander the entire career of one of the finest players of this generation, Kevin Garnett.
I'm not sure there is a way to fairly evaluate general managers within a single sport. I'm almost certain that there's no way to do it across baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. And I'm utterly convinced that if a legitimate mechanism were devised, Kevin McHale would be nowhere near the top of the list.
Editor's Note: Peter J. Schwartz, one of the writers credited on the list, is a college buddy of mine. I hope he'll be able to offer some sort of defense of his rankings, and if he does I'll of course share it with you.
