Dave Feschuk has crawled out from summer hibernation and written an article suggesting that Bryan Colangelo is very much loved by MLSE, and that he’s not far away from earning himself a contract extension. Feschuk believes that losing Chris Bosh along with the steady dip in team performances over the last three years has little bearing on MLSE, and that they’re very much happy with Colangelo at the helm. As an outsider, I have no idea if that is true, but if Feschuk is to be believed, he’s insinuating that even though Colangelo might not have produced much on the court for the last little while, he’s been good for MLSE in a business sense. Even though that might boil your blood, as a pragmatist, I can’t hold that against Richard Peddie.
There are 30 GM jobs in the league and one would think that every current assistant GM would love to have a shot at running things. If it ever came to that, the candidates for replacing Colangelo could be plentiful, and the pack would be led by David Griffin, the Suns VP who declined the Nuggets job before Masai Ujiri got it. My instinct is influenced by the frustration of the last three years which often gets me thinking that a change is in order, but as disappointing as the seasons have been, and as badly as the off-season signings have backfired, one point must be considered before any talk of replacing the Raptors GM comes up: Who would want the Raptors GM job?
We blindly support the team and look towards players like DeRozan and Weems as major cogs for the future, but would an outsider see them as those? Would this core that we feature in advertising campaigns going head-to-head against the Miami Heat, be even remotely as attractive to a GM trying to build an NBA team worthy of contention? Should we simply be thankful that Colangelo is sticking around and trying to clean up the mess that he’s made? The answer to these questions varies on an individual basis, likely influenced in some measure by your loyalty to a player or the GM. A potential GM could look at the Raptors situation in two different ways:
- A young core of players, although unproven have a lot of potential and are signed to deals that will allow them to stick together for a few years and realize that potential. The team will be under the cap starting next season again, and has the a big TPE at it’s disposal with which it can use to accelerate its rebuilding.
- A team with no star power and a franchise with a history of not being able to retain its major players. A frozen wasteland for overpaid players who never live up to the hype, resulting in poor seasonal records and NBA players shying away from playing in the city.
Both perspectives are technically correct, it’s which one you prefer that will either make you want to accept the challenge of what a franchise like Toronto presents, or run away from it wanting nothing to do with it. If a potential GM believes in #1, the job is attractive, but if a GM believes the franchise is better described by #2, then the Raptors might have to overpay for an executive, something they already did with Colangelo in 2006. At the time it made sense to offer Colangelo the extra cash, the Raptors might have had some flexibility in terms of the cap and the draft, but the franchise was close to an all-time low and needed an executive face-lift.
Now, four years later, we find ourselves in a very similar position. To Colangelo’s credit, he hasn’t bailed on the franchise the way Isiah Thomas did in 1998, but at the same time he’s lost a lot of the allure that he was originally hired for. The departures and ensuring verbal battles with Chris Bosh and Hedo Turkoglu might have pulled the fans to his side, but it didn’t do the franchise any favors in terms of public perception, especially in the eyes of players. One has to at least ask the question whether Colangelo is doing more harm than good to the Raptors.
At the same time, you have to give Colangelo his due, he’s won two Executive of the Year awards, is an aggressive player in the trade market, and doesn’t sit on his hands when things aren’t going right. He’s the guy you want to have on your side in any fight, not because he’ll necessarily win it for you, but at least he’ll go down trying. I can appreciate that quality of him and am glad that the GM of the team we collectively love is a proactive character. In fact, he’s a nice and casual interview from yesterday with him.
Just like any other human being, he’s got a good and bad side, we just happened to see a whole lot of good his first year, and a fair spread of bad ever since. Assuming all things even, the decision of whether to fire or extend Colangelo should have been made the day after the Chris Bosh trade. Since the Raptors didn’t fire him after that transaction went south (after he led fans to believe for the previous year that he was making good impressions on Bosh), it meant that they were expecting Bosh to depart and that Colangelo had done a good job of managing expectations at MLSE. I can only presume that they saw it as Colangelo making the best of a bad situation, but the fact that they haven’t extended him yet hints to a level of skepticism amongst the board.
Peddie is quoted in the above linked article as saying:
“I will make a recommendation to the board (on Colangelo’s future) at some point during the season. I’m not going to leave Bryan hanging out. He’s got kids in school here.”
I’m going to ignore the absolute ridiculousness of considering whether his kids are in school or not when it comes to making the decision, the Raptors are running an NBA team, not a daycare. I would like MLSE to do absolutely nothing about Colangelo’s contract till the end of the season. There is no reason or pressure to extend Colangelo before the grade on the coming season is ascertained. Let MLSE see whether Colangelo’s latest brainchild, YGZ®, is an exercise worth investing in before committing to another long-term contract. Let him earn it based on something other than the success of the 2006-07 campaign.
