Posted by tomverve:
Looking back and imagining what could have been done is a bad way to assess GMing, because there's so much uncertainty that even the best GM is going to do a suboptimal job in hindsight sooner or later. It's kind of like in the draft, when a team gets slammed for making a pick when it turns out a guy who got picked a bit later wound up being better. There's just lots of guesswork and estimations involved, nothing is an exact science here. The important thing isn't necessarily that you get the best guy available at your pick (because even the best evaluators can't predict everything perfectly), but just that you get a guy who becomes a solid contributor to your team, roughly commensurate with where in the draft you're selecting.
Likewise for our overall team situation. Has Isiah made the best available acquisitions at every step of the way? Probably not, but no one does. That's an unrealistic standard to hold a GM to. The better question to ask is has Isiah improved the team significantly given what he had to work with, and the answer there is a clear yes. Think of it this way, if you're trading on the stock market and you get a 500% return on your investments over a couple of years, are you happy with where you are or are you kicking yourself because, looking back, you could have turned 700% profit? You should be happy with yourself because you did damn well, and besdies, there's no way to have known for sure the way to make a perfect move each time to get 700% return, unless you have a time machine.
I made a similar point a few days back, but you did a much better job of it. I agree you must look at the body of work and realize all gm's will make mistakes on the road to construction of a better team. I do equity portfolio management and we take our lumps form time to time. But we work off a disciplined and methodical process that OVER time has proven itself. That prevents us from making moves with our emotions. The commitment to youth in both assets, and developing those assets with proper leadership is what excites me about this team.
While Lampe could have been kept, the complexity of "What ifs" are too numerous to project.
Regret is a part of the process. Look at the world series, we got 3 ex yankee starters all pitching! Think we could use them this year? There were reasons at the time some decisions are made.
Lampe was still few years away and at the time, Isiah was not thinking of rebuilding with youth. He was doing the retread thing.
Maybe now it would be nice to have Lampe on the team given our current make up. But I am happy with David Lee and Frye.
10/21/2005 12:12 PM
