Donnellon: Sixers' Bryan Colangelo 'revered' by Cavs GM David Griffin
I don't pretend to know whether Bryan Colangelo is the right man at the right time to pilot the extensive rehabilitation work former 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie started, got wounded through, and eventually abandoned. I do know that, like Hinkie, Colangelo has his supporters and his critics, his career dotted with qualified successes and questionable moves, like the time he traded Jason Kidd for Stephon Marbury.
So I was more than a little interested – intrigued really – when I came across a podcast the other day, a conversation lasting more than an hour, between good friend and Yahoo NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski and Cleveland Cavaliers General Manager David Griffin.
Griffin got his big front office break when Colangelo was the general manager in Phoenix. A couple of years ago, maybe even last year, Griffin had his own set of doubters, his team building, and the January decision to replace David Blatt with Tyron Lue – despite a 30-11 record at the time – raising more than a few eyebrows.
They were lowered six month later when the Cavs raised Cleveland's first championship banner in 52 years.
"Now we're shrewd," Griffin told Wojnarowski. "Before I was an idiot…"
You can hear the entire interview here: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/vertical-pod-with-woj--david-griffin-152852316.html
Some of the highlights as they pertain to Colangelo:
Asked what he learned about team building from Bryan, Griffin said this:
"I'll never really be able to repay all the learning I got to do under him when I probably didn't deserve the opportunity I was given. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The one thing that I absolutely learned was that fit was more important than name recognition. And I think we've applied that throughout our process. When we had the teams we had in Phoenix, we went through a four- year period where we led the league in scoring, three-point shooting, field goal shooting, free throw shooting and assist to turnover ratio. We were transcendentally good in those metrics. It was something I had spent some time on and it was part of how I got my job in the first place. I'm woefully out of my depth now in what the analytics have become. But that was something we were able to apply to the philosophy that existed there which is that you could never have too many shooters. It was something that we learned back then and has carried forward."
Asked about Colangelo's reputation as a shrewd worker of phones, he said:
"Frankly this is a guy I revered as a young kid growing up in the business. And he was growing up too. He was the general manager when he was 29 years old. And he was president of the entire organization on the business side too… We really became a flamethrower as an organization because of Bryan. So to get to sit next to him and be part of all the things that were going on was a lot of fun. But even now when we have conversations, I kind of feel like I'm getting worked once in awhile. (He tells him) `Don't try and Bryan Colangelo me.' So it's fun to be around him."
On why Colangelo did not win a title with the Suns:
"In Phoenix we didn't have the financial resources to get over the top with a team that took four pretty good runs at it. And over six years we made it to the conference finals three times. But we were always trying to get rid of draft picks to sell players because they were going to put us in the tax. You can't enter into it with anything other than a title on your mind in my opinion and win a title. Now that doesn't mean you have to spend bad money. But we were in a situation in Cleveland where the only way to flip the switch and get better with veterans around LeBron was this method. It's not my preferred method. It's not the way you build the most sustainable situation. But it was the one that was going to work. And ownership was willing to invest in that."
And finally, on departed Sixers GM, Sam Hinkie:
"There are GMs of teams in all sports that don't win who are actually advancing what gets done within the sport. And there are things you are emulating. From a contractual standpoint Sam Hinkie did many, many things that we followed (specifically, contract structures)… He hasn't won yet to the level that he is capable of perhaps, but he is someone whom people gained a lot from."