2021 nba offseason draft free agency etc

The Athletic’s Shams Charania adds Becky Hammon, Dawn Staley and Brent Barry to a list of candidates for Portland's open coaching gig which already includes Chauncey Billups and Mike D’Antoni.

would be so cool

In February, Luka snapped at Mavs exec Haralabos Voulgaris: "Don’t f—ing tell me to calm down."

It's not the only example of a tense relationship.

Sources say Voulgaris is Dallas' most influential exec. Will he impact Luka's desire to stay long-term?

📚 https://t.co/q7TKUVnHdZ pic.twitter.com/jDEGbq4BCK

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 14, 2021

wild story on the mavs. i will just put it in the C&P thread

bob!

In an ESPN feature from 2013, Voulgaris is quoted as saying, “The whole process (of becoming a highly successful gambler) has led me to believe that I’d be able to put together a better team than almost any general manager in the league. If not maybe all.”

beautiful

Cuban added: “Bob has a great grasp of AI and the opportunities it create for gaining an advantage. Which is important to me. But he isn’t any more influential than any other data source on the team.”

i am savoring this

otm, this is the good stuff

Why is voulgaris talking to luka ever

didnt bob admit that he made most of his money off one simple plus minus hack not off of the analytics that he hired people to produce

dont get me wrong beating the house is very impressive regardless and maybe he did well with the analytics too idk BUT thinking that qualifies you to run a team is pretty funny, and thinking that it makes you automatically in line to be the best gm in the game is some clown shit lol

also i dont think i ever heard him talk about AI on twitter need to know more about what hes gotten up to, cuban is the perfect mark for someone just saying the words artificial intelligence to him

even thought you know you shouldnt it would be just irresistible to pitch AI to him then hire some programmers like please AI basketball now

mavs mustve already had a big data guy

feel like this story is good gossip about ppl disliking haralabob that is straining to be something more. they write that he has “near total control over the roster” but also that donnie nelson “spearheaded” every major move the mavs have made, it doesn’t seem like the writers really understand how much power he has. working with an obscenely rich gambler guy who he thinks he could be better than any GM in the NBA sounds awful tho

this is amazing lol

yeah, much of what made bob entertaining when he would go on pods was his complete confidence in his opinions and complete disdain for anything he thought was dumb. not nearly as fun when you have to work with someone like that.

the mavs had bad seeding luck this year, ended up taking one of the best teams in the NBA down to the final quarter of a 7 game series, and now everyone is losing their minds

jordan otm

the only notable thing in there to me is that doncic doesn’t like voulgaris. the rest of the stuff — bob’s influence in the front office in particular and his butting heads with colleagues, seems run of the mill for an NBA franchise

― k3vin k., Monday, June 14, 2021 1:56 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean it's pretty funny that a famous sports gambler and twitter personality is now one of the three most powerful people in an nba front office, i guess it depends on your definition of "notable"

the stuff about his belief he can do it better than anyone else is hilarious. also his pairing w cuban.

the mavs lost two years straight in the first round the specifics dont matter imo. their roster is in a worse place it was cos now they have to pay luka a ton more, and he doesnt like very high up in the org, and didnt like the coach (maybe still doesnt?) and doesnt like his untradable sidekick.

didn’t we know bob was pretty influential in the front office already? I had assumed he had a hand in all the moves. front office personnel directing rotations and such is pretty standard to afaia, and I’m sure the article overstates the extent to which it’s true

also they cite his influence in acquiring seth curry but not in trading him for josh richardson despite the allegation that he has "near total control" of the franchise

curry and wright are long gone. did he change his mind on them?

the mavs lost two years straight in the first round the specifics dont matter imo. their roster is in a worse place it was cos now they have to pay luka a ton more, and he doesnt like very high up in the org, and didnt like the coach (maybe still doesnt?) and doesnt like his untradable sidekick.

― Spottie, Monday, June 14, 2021 2:12 PM (twenty-one minutes ago)

i do think the specifics matter. if the issue is simply them losing in the first round in back to back years it needs to be acknowledged who they played in those years, that's important context. if they had drawn the nuggets and won and then taken the suns to 6 games would the level of hysteria be the same? if the issue is that the mavs haven't won the western conference in the last 2 years then the specifics matter less bcuz then you need to beat the clippers one way or another, but that doesn't seem to be the issue here. we know that the mavs aren't better than the clippers but i'm not sure how that's some huge indictment on them given the respective contention timelines of those two franchises

mavs need to find a path to further improvement for next year but i don't think 14th -> 7th -> 5th is behind schedule thus far

right, exactly

pels will have more to answer for if they don't make a leap next year

didn’t we know bob was pretty influential in the front office already? I had assumed he had a hand in all the moves.

i had not really assumed this!

i had not assumed, for example, that he had power to make draft picks over the objections of the scouting dept.

noted haralabos voulgaris reply guy kevin keller here to assure us this is all no big deal and not a hilarious tale of hubris

he thought he was better than every gm and now that he got a shot the franchise player cant stand to see him move his hand LMAO

hes telling rick carlisle what to do, rick carlisle!

hes convinced noted billionaire dipshit mark cuban that hes using artificial intelligence to solve basketball problems

LOL

I'm not a gambler at all, but I don't see the skills making you a good GM (talent evaluation, salary cap, player analytics, roster fit) necessarily are the same as those analyzing whether team x will beat team y in a given game by z points.

idk maybe they are

also... people skills lol

I hear that's important.

one thing we know about cuban is that he's very very bad at the "human" part of running a franchise so that he would hire and empower someone who treats his coworkers poorly can't be considered surprising in any way shape or form. i liked this thing hollinger wrote on the athletic recently about GMing:

Running a team also is about keeping 20 different balls in the air at the same time — keeping tabs on your own team, yes, but also watching 29 other NBA teams, talking to their front offices and understanding their cap situations, scouting college players, keeping tabs on the G League, trying to work in some overseas trips to see talent, yammering on the phone with the owner, dealing with agents and hiring staff for positions you barely knew existed (What do you mean the team chef took another job? How do I get a new one?)

a guy like haralabob -- or sam hinkie -- thinks that GMing is just using computers to identify market inefficiencies in player acquisition but that's actually a fairly small part of the job

in fairness to bob i do think he has some pretty good ideas about basketball and i think his analytics work was more wide-ranging than one might think. i did not object at all to the mavs bringing him on to be a key analytics guy but giving him any power over decisionmaking is....dumb.

analytics guys belong in the basement

all that said for what amounts to a hit piece on haralabob for having "near total control" of the franchise there aren't moves attributed to him in the article that turned out to be bad, except the acquisition of delon wright? josh green and tyrell terry were reasonable picks based on where ppl had them ranked pre-draft

are they... good?

they have had a lot of good process bad outcome moves

green and terry were both rated as mid-round picks, terry they got in the second round. the mavs backcourt was pretty crowded so it's not crazy that neither of them played that much. saadiq bey could've helped them but not hitting on the no 18 pick is pretty mild on the list of NBA front office sins

the article completely eliding the decision making process that led to seth curry for josh richardson is a red flag to me

luka seems like a diva btw, not that it should be unexpected given how good he is/has been at such a young age. but he gets mad at rick carlisle for his use of timeouts and for calling plays?

regardless pissing off the franchise player when you are a nerd suit is an oops

thinking that someone who is their own boss in a situation thats 100% one channel results driven can just fit into a big role in a high pressure corporate org w lots of big personalities is a poor assumption

cuban prob appreciated him for "telling it like it is" but that sort of bluntness and arrogance is prob not going to play that well for a bigger audience