With a record of 24-58 the Minnesota Timberlwolves of the NBA finished with a losing record for the 4th straight year and missed the playoffs for the 5th straight year. Due to the poor performance of the team the General Manager Jim Stack was fired. With no true "star players" and a core of young but unproven stars the Timberwolves are slipping further and further into irrelevancy.
Enter Bill Simmons.
Bill Simmons is far and away the most popular sports journalist in North America right now and he even has his own box on the ESPN website which is a big deal. On Twitter he has over 117,000+ followers and he has the 4th ranked sports podcast on iTunes.
Simmons is a die hard basketball fan and is an encyclopedia of knowledge. During his podcasts he routinely rhymes off the length of numerous NBA player contracts and the dollar amount with alarming accuracy. He also just finished writing a 720 page book entitled "The Book of Basketball" which has been critically acclaimed by a number of established authors including Malcolm Gladwell.
The reason I bring up Simmons is because after it was discovered that the Timberwolves had fired their GM he threw his name in the hat for the job. He started an online website to campaign for the job and gathered hundreds of thousands of supporters for his cause. He did numerous radio interviews with a number of media outlets and tried to ensure that everyone knew he was being serious.
In the end the Timberwolves went a different direction and opted to hire David Khan a front office guy from the Indiana Pacers.
To me this is a terrible decision and I will tell you why:
If you are the Minnesota Timberwolves what are you doing to get your fans excited for next year? The team isn't very good and ever since Kevin Garnett left you have done nothing to get fans excited. Why not take a chance and hire Simmons?
He offered to work for free meaning the team could save money on his salary and put it towards signing players.
He is friends with numerous GMs in the league so therefore he would have an existing relationship with them making them easier to deal with when trying to make trades and other types of deals.
The amount of publicity that this would create would be invaluable as everyone would always keep an eye on the Tiumberwolves to see how their experiment was going. For instance the hiring of Simmons as the GM would be the story that would lead off PTI. Any story that leads PTI and isn't negative is a good thing.
Finally the turnover rate on GMs in the league is so high because all these guys are morons and get fired. They make bad decisions that cost the owners millions of dollars so they get fired. Why not take a chance on a sports writer?
It was reported that after the Timberwolves Khan that he wasn't their first, second, or even third choice. He spent 5 years in Indiana as the GM where his Pacers made the playoffs only 2 times making it out of the 1st round only once.
Khan is just another front office guy who is a "safe pick." He isn't going to do anything to turn the franchise around and more than likely the Timberwolves will remain irrelevant for many years to come.
One of the main reasons that many of the GMs in the league fail is because they are afraid to take chances. They are too scared of being fired because if they do get fired they have nothing to fall back on. the thing with Simmons is that if he does do a bad job and get fired he can always go back to writing. Therefore he will be willing to take chances to help the team improve.
Now it may be unfair to say that Khan is going to do a terrible job and that Simmons would have done an amazing job but in the end that is not the point. When things are going wrong and they aren't working changes need to be made and that doesn't mean replacing GM #1 with GM #2. It means rethinking the way that you operate your business and rethinking the types of decisions that you are making. Failing to evolve and change is a business killer.
The situation can be broken down into best and worst case scenarios. If you hire Simmons the best case scenario is that he does an amazing job, your team gets national attention, and you look like a genius for hiring him. Not to mention all the money you save for not having to pay him. if he does terribly you still saved money, get national attention, and your team is probably just as crappy as before.
With Khan the best case scenario is he does a good job. The worst case scenario is he sucks, makes the team worse, and you lose millions of dollars from the salary you would have to pay him.
If you don't want to hire a sports writer that is fine. But as an organization you need to do more to create interest in your team than just talking about who you will draft with your lottery pick. I mean the most amount of attention the team will recieve all season is because of this campaign by Simmons.
Random Youtube Video
No comments:
Post a Comment