Simmons: While we're on the subject of the Knicks, please enlighten the readers on your convoluted theory about why Isiah Thomas is a terrible GM, because he's one of my favorites.

Gladwell: Here's the real question. If I was GM of the Knicks, would I be doing a better job of managing the team than Thomas? I believe, somewhat immodestly, that the answer is yes. And I say this even though it is abundantly clear that Thomas knows several thousand times more about basketball than I do. I've never picked up a basketball. I couldn't diagram a play to save my life. I would put my level of basketball knowledge, among hard core fans, in the 25th percentile.

So why do I think I would be better? There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

I'd be the equivalent of the German student. I know nothing about basketball, so I'd make only the safest, most obvious decisions. I'd read John Hollinger and Chad Ford and I'd print out your mid-season NBA roundup and post it on my blackboard. I'd look at the box scores every morning, and watch Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith on TNT. Would I have made the disastrous Marbury trade? Of course not. I'd wonder why Jerry Colangelo -- who I know is a lot smarter than I am -- was so willing to part with him.

Would I have traded for Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball -- and about Eddy Curry -- than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player's potential. But I'd look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that's he's been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I'd tell his agent to take a hike.

Now would I be as good as GM as Jerry West or Joe Dumars? Of course not. But just by sitting on my hands, and being scared of looking like a fool, and taking only the safest, most conservative steps, and drafting only solid players that everybody agrees are a can't miss, I could make the Knicks a vastly better team than they are today -- as could any reasonably cautious and uninformed fan. (The big exception, of course, would be you. You would draft the starting point guard from Holy Cross, a handful of short Irish guys from the South End, and various members of Larry Bird's extended family -- and then try to package them to Milwaukee for Bobby Simmons). The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement. That's Thomas in a nutshell: He knows so much about basketball that he believes that he knows more than anyone else about the potential of previously undistinguished players. He thinks he can see into the true basketball soul of Jerome James. The truth is, of course, that James doesn't have a basketball soul.

By the way, while we're on this topic, let's play a real world application of this. Let's say I'm so dumb about basketball that all I know is that the best college programs in the country are Duke and UConn, and so as a GM my rule is only draft and/or trade for the first and second team players, in any given year, from those two schools. So I fire all my scouts. I disband my front office, and basically say that I cede my basketball judgment to Jim Calhoun and Mike K. What's my team? It's some combination of Elton Brand, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, Jay Williams, Caron Butler, Donyell Marshall and Grant Hill -- which is a really wonderful team. Now, of course, in the real world I couldn't get all those people, because lots of them were really high draft picks. But let's say I got Brand in a trade, after Chicago soured on him, and I was lucky enough to be in the lottery for Okafor. Maggette was a 13; Hamilton and Deng were 7s; and Butler was a 10 -- so at least some of them are doable, particularly since in off-years for Duke and UConn I can trade down and stockpile picks. Battier I wine and dine in the free agent market, because who wants to be stuck in Memphis? Ditto for Gordon, who, it seems, Chicago is thinking of moving anyway. Is that the best team in the league? No. It is better than the Knicks? Absolutely. The point is that clinging to a very simple rule of thumb here -- that doesn't require knowing much about basketball -- can leave you looking pretty smart.

Simmons: I'm just glad that you passed me on Isiah's "smug writers whose asses I want to kick" list. My biggest problem with NBA GMs (and I go crazy about this every June) is how they ignore hardcore results and get seduced by potential; it's like they out-think themselves. Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade are the ultimate examples why this league is so screwed up: Wade was incredible in the 2003 NCAA Tournament, and Paul was so talented at Wake Forest, his teammates almost couldn't handle playing with him because they weren't on his level, but scouts discounted them because they were 2-3 inches shorter than the prototypical heights for their respective positions. Wade ended up falling to fifth (three spots behind Darko) and Paul to fourth (two spots behind Marvin Williams, one behind Deron Williams).

In retrospect, two things were amazing about this:

1. In the past three decades alone, guys like Ben Wallace, Dave Cowens, Paul Silas, Tim Hardaway, Dennis Rodman, Charles Barkley, Adrian Dantley, John Stockton, Isiah and others have proven that you should never, ever, ever, ever, EVER use somebody's height as a determining factor for whether you should draft someone. If you're good, you're good. And yet, three teams passed on Paul (four if you include Portland) when he was the most talented, NBA-ready product with the best chance to succeed.

2. Using your college analogy, someone drafting Darko over Carmelo/Wade or Williams over Paul would be like Yale accepting a kid with 1500 SATs, a 3.1 GPA at a subpar public school and no extracurricular activites whatsoever, over a kid with 1350 SATs and a 3.9 GPA at a competitive private school who captained three sports teams, served as class president and ran the school newspaper. How can you justify taking the first kid over the second kid? There's no way.

And the same goes with the NBA draft. I think it's more fun for GMs to hit a home run with a risky pick over a safe pick. For instance, Portland could have taken Paul and traded Sebastian Telfair, since Telfair could best be described as "someone with the potential to be as good as Chris Paul." Instead, they traded DOWN three spots, then rolled the dice with another high schooler (Martell Webster). But Blazers GM John Nash didn't care about the risks -- if that Webster-Telfair backcourt emerges into something special, he becomes the Red Auerbach of this decade, right? So he swung for the fences. And within the next two years, he will be unemployed.

Here's the ironic thing: Fans complain about this mentality, then we pull the same crap in fantasy leagues, where guys with potential always go higher than proven guys. Just look at last year's draft: It was much more seductive to take someone like Nate Burleson in the third round over someone like Hines Ward; you know what you're getting with Ward, but Burleson was replacing Moss in Minnesota, and there was a decent chance that he could have exploded for 1500 yards and 15 TDs. That made him more appealing. So what happened? Burleson stunk and Ward had another typically good season. (And by the way, I was one of the idiots who took Burleson over Ward.) Which brings me to my next question: What do you think of the fantasy sports boom? Do you participate in any leagues? Did you ever think that fans would care just as much about their fake teams as their real teams? Are you amused by the whole thing? Delighted? Confused? Disgusted?

Gladwell: You're right. It is profoundly weird that GMs take such incredible chances with their draft picks. The biggest complaint or observation that is made of executives of large organizations is that they tend to be overly conservative when it comes to high-stakes decisions like that. General Motors would never draft Darko. The effect of working for a bureaucratic organization is to enforce a level of accountability in decision making, and the need for accountability generally biases decisions in an conservative direction. Are professional sports franchises not bureaucratic enough, then? Perhaps. I think both of us are of the mind that GMs would do better if they simply played it safer, so maybe what's needed in the NBA and the NFL is the introduction of more traditional corporate organizational structure. That's why I'm such a fan of the "Moneyball" generation of baseball GMs: It's not so much that their analytical tools are brilliant ways of predicting baseball success (and I have my doubts, sometimes), it's simply that they have an analytical tool. And when it comes to personnel evaluation, any tool is better than no tool, especially if your last name is Thomas.

Speaking of Thomases, I loved your recent Atrocious GM Summit column, although I think that you flatter Isiah Thomas far too much by suggesting that he is merely one of a number of atrocious GMs. The truth is that Rob Babcock and Billy King are Einstein next to him. The mess he is creating right now in New York will be studied by business school students 50 years from now alongside Enron and pets.com. But wait, is it enough to say that GMs behave this way because it's more fun? An economist would say that people pursue high-risk strategies when they are protected against the consequences of failure. The technical term for this is "moral hazard": When the federal government agreed to guarantee the safety of deposits in savings and loans, the savings and loan industry in the 1980's went crazy and made tens of billions of dollars in ridiculous loans. Their thinking was: If we score, we score big. If we lose, the government bails us out. That's the moral hazard of insurance. Don't general managers have the same kind of moral hazard problem? If you hit a home run, you're a genius. If you screw up, the dumb owner you worked for prior to the dumb owner you work for now will always give you another chance. So why not just always swing for the fences? It's the old boys club in the front offices that causes the problem. Somebody out there is going to give Thomas and Babcock another chance, and so long as that's true there's no incentive for any GM to behave better.

Fantasy leagues? I used to do rotisserie baseball for a few years, and loved it -- until I had my baseball meltdown and gave up on the sport. I worried, though, that it began to erode my sense of team. I mean, the great appeal of watching sports is that you have a commitment to a team, and the players become secondary players in that love affair. I fell for the Buffalo Bills when they had Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas and went to four Super Bowls, and I'm still in love with the Buffalo Bills even though not a single vestige of that original team remains; even though, in fact, the very thing that attracted me to the Bills in the first place -- that thrilling offense -- has completely disappeared. Sports team loyalty is really an extraordinary act of unconditional love. Suppose, for instance, that I love BMWs and have loved them all my life. There is a meaningful connection between the three series car I might be driving now and the 2002 I first drove 25 years ago -- not just in the feel of the cars and the engineering and the look, but also, I'm quite sure some of the same people helped to build both cars.

Sports teams demand the same loyalty from us. But where's the continuity? The uniforms change. The stadiums change. The owners and players and coaches and styles of play change. All that's constant is some ineffable and fragile sense of the team as a meaningful psychological entity. Now fantasy leagues come along and allow us to junk that concept as well. So I worry. Of course, it's conceivable I've over-thought this. I've been known to do that in the past.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/blog/index?entryDate=20060117&name=simmons

Well, now I have a new career highlight: During a New York radio interview Monday, Isiah Thomas threatened to make trouble for me. Talking to Stephen A. Smith he said, "I'm gonna tell ya ... if I see this guy Bill Simmons, oh, it's gonna be a problem with me and him ..." I thought it was ironic he threatened me on Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- I'm sure MLK would have been proud. Given that this was the same guy who sucker-punched his best friend on the Pistons (Bill Laimbeer) during the 1992 season, I am thinking about travelling with a full-time bodyguard, or at the very least a can of mace or one of those tasers that you can get in a stalker catalog.

This guy cites three examples of why Isiah Thomas is so bad.

1. Jerome James (Ok, that was awful, but lets be honest 5 million a year isnt exactly huge money in the nba. We signed a bad player for an average salary.)

2. Curry for sweetney and two picks. Sweetney will be out the league in four years. Hes too heavy. The two picks look bad because they were so high, but at the time few thought this was a bad trade. It could still end up working out okay. Honestly, if you asked me if i would rather have curry or ty thomas and a mid 1st pick... i still think i might do it. But this is not the AWFUL thing that brought the knicks down.

3. Davis for Rose. Bad trade, but how bad? What did it cost us? 30 mil? What does that mean? I didnt pay it. You didnt pay it, so whatever.

This guy sounds like an idiot and is just jumping on the bash the knicks bandwagon. He knows nothing.

I actually thought this was an excellent article. Very well thought of. And I'm not just talking about the Isiah bashing.

I'd make only the safest, most obvious decisions. I'd read John Hollinger and Chad Ford and I'd print out your mid-season NBA roundup and post it on my blackboard. I'd look at the box scores every morning, and watch Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith on TNT. Would I have made the disastrous Marbury trade? Of course not. I'd wonder why Jerry Colangelo -- who I know is a lot smarter than I am -- was so willing to part with him.

Would I have traded for Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball -- and about Eddy Curry -- than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player's potential. But I'd look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that's he's been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I'd tell his agent to take a hike.

Now would I be as good as GM as Jerry West or Joe Dumars? Of course not. But just by sitting on my hands, and being scared of looking like a fool, and taking only the safest, most conservative steps, and drafting only solid players that everybody agrees are a can't miss, I could make the Knicks a vastly better team than they are today -- as could any reasonably cautious and uninformed fan. (The big exception, of course, would be you. You would draft the starting point guard from Holy Cross, a handful of short Irish guys from the South End, and various members of Larry Bird's extended family -- and then try to package them to Milwaukee for Bobby Simmons). The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement. That's Thomas in a nutshell: He knows so much about basketball that he believes that he knows more than anyone else about the potential of previously undistinguished players. He thinks he can see into the true basketball soul of Jerome James. The truth is, of course, that James doesn't have a basketball soul.

what an IDIOT!!!! Couldnt they see we NEEDED a center?

if you follow his plan, which is very simple, but it has it's merit, and draft or acquire nothing but players from elite college programs like duke, uconn, arizona, unc, kansas, and kentucky, our last 3 drafts should've yielded deng/iguodala in 2004, frye in 2005, and rudy gay in 2006. so it does work.

also, Simmons is one to talk about about GMs draft records - go back and read some of his draft diaries, the guys he loves read like a history of busts. Joe Forte. Nice call, Bill.

You can dump on IT about alot of things but his draft record is fairly solid. I think in retrospect, people might say we should have taken Williams first. However, if your GM makes one questionable decision in the draft in three years, you have to be happy with that. IT has drafted players that have outperformed their draft position for the past three years. The only exception may be Collins (I think Balkman will prove to be someone that should have been taken in the teens), but as someone else stated, it is still too early to judge Collins and it is clear he can play NBA level defense. I enjoyed reading the article but I think it is real easy to be a GM in hindsight. These journalist just come in after the fact and start proclaiming what they would have done differently after knowing how the situation turned out. If Curry had dropped 20 and 10 last year, would Simmons be claiming how he knew Curry would not have panned out? No, he would not have said s**t. Interesting article but I think it is just media fluff that has no real substance.

i remember reading that article awhile back, and it hits home even harder this time around.


how any of you can straight-faced defend any of the decisions the management has made in the past 3-6 years is beyond me.


layden was bad. he inherited good, solid players, and milked them dry. he did nothing to make the team better, but didn't actually HURT us negatively until the end of his reign.


isiah hurt us right from the start. the marbury trade I remember being excited about, but not b/c of stephon, just b/c things were getting done. moves were being made.

CHANGE.


see isiah took the job as most men would, but there were strings attached. you can blame that on dolan.

the marbury trade had the thumbs up before zeke ever got there. so you can blame that on jimmy.

everything else was on isiah. houstons injury definitely bit hard. but you know what? you can always NOT make the crawford deal, sink into the lottery, and pull out a ben gordon or shaun livingston or luol deng and make the whole crawford deal MOOT in the first place. There's ALWAYS ways to sell mediocrity anyway........that's one of isiah's strengths.


the thomas/nazr trade i liked.........alot. for one we traded an average center and a starting SF for an above average Center and a starting SF. Talent-wise it was a no-brainer and didnt really hurt our cap any more than it was already hurt.

pretty much every other trade since then has been crap. and dont you dare try blaming larry brown.

who has the better track record?

brown was doing wat thomas wouldnt, and thats cut right to the chase. the knicks were badly constructed, the owner wouldnt listen, a message needed to be sent across, and brown wasnt being directly malicious. he was using tough love when we needed it in the worst way. we had no direction, and still don't.

larry is like red auerbach in alot of ways. likes controlling things from all angles, and doesnt like owners or management telling him no. we made a BIG mistake firing him.


Had we kept onto Nazr, Thomas, and Penny, that would've amounted to HUGE expiring deals. With hometown "hero" Marbury at the garden, we could still sell mediocrity like during the Layden years. Isiah's strengths is PR, THATS 1 of the reasons dolan probly hired him in the first place, along with his drafting skill.


If Dolan hired me I would've done this:


STEP 1 -- Trade for Marbury.

STEP 2 -- Do the Nazr/TT trade.

STEP 3 -- Houston gets injured, get high '04 lottery pick. Spin job.

STEP 4 -- Start next season with Nazr, Kurt, TT, Marbs, & Draftee.

STEP 5 -- Try and make the playoffs in 05. Make minor trade if nec.

STEP 6 -- Let Kurt expire, start Sweetney.

STEP 7 -- Shoot for signing big FA in summer 06. Try Resign Nazr.

STEP 7 -- Let Houston expire; shoot for big FA in summer 07.


That sure as hell ain't a bad way to rebuild. Would only take 2-3 years, instead of the bottomless pit we're in now.

Certainly not as bland as Layden, nor as risky and chaotic as Isiah. Not realy concrete plan, simply b/c Dolan's not the type of guy to let a GM tell HIM what to do.

Working under Dolan is all about good PR. He said so much himself.

Isiah could have been a wild success with his PR spin jobs to mask tanking, and good draft record.

Unfortunately there was no moral hazard with the job, and he took advantage of it bigtime...