The Nine Nobody Likes

The least-admired NBA front offices

The Athletic recently ran a line to find the NBA’s best general manager.

We canvassed 40 executives across the league — presidents, general managers, VPs and assistant GMs — to rank the NBA’s top front offices. Each executive ranked their top five, and points were allotted the same way they are in NBA MVP voting: 10 points for first place, seven points for second place, five points for third, three points for fourth and one point for fifth. The only rule: Execs could not vote for their own team.

I don’t remember which team won the Athletic’s poll, it doesn’t interest me, it may have been Stan Kasten’s Hawks, I don’t care. Ooooh, somebody acquired seventy second-round picks, yawn.

What I am interested in are the front offices who did not receive five points for a third-place vote, let alone three or one point.

Nine teams didn’t receive a vote and would, you, look at what they’ve done.

LOS ANGELES LAKERS

(Zero votes.)

Nobody respects the Lakers, which is strange for a team which will be someday owned by Jay Mohr’s descendants.

Forty out of forty NBA executives long-ago concluded LeBron didn’t go to Los Angeles because of Lonzo Ball and Brandon Ingram and Kyle Kuzma. Consensus is James wasn’t compelled by Luke Walton’s coaching or Magic Johnson’s posts or Magic Johnson’s posts about Luke Walton’s coaching.

Now that’s a coach who’s gonna be around, forever.