It's the the fourth of July, and my family and I are sitting in the den watching TV because there is a torrential downpour outside. The weather was nice that morning for the 10k race downtown, but over the last 8 hours it has turned menacing as lightning and thunder boom over head. My brother remarks that the weather was pretty dumb for predicting that there was a 40% chance of rain earlier in the day. Its raining outside as he says this, so obviously the weather was wrong in his prediction right? Wrong.
When the weatherman went to work that day he looked at all the available data he had from both the past and compared it to what the present situation was. He likely found that are days such as the 4th it rains approximately 40% of the time. Since it rained, does that make his prediction foolish since his odds of water falling from the sky were less than 50%? The answer for any good statistician is, of course, no. Even if he had said there was a 10% chance of rain that day and it did rain it would not have meant he was necessarily wrong. By giving a number above or below 50% the weather is not attempting to make an absolute ruling on whether it will rain, he is just giving percentage odds not much different that Vegas gives out every day on sporting events. It is going to rain on about 10% of those 10% chance to rain days. If it didn't then the weatherman really has a problem. What the weatherman does is very similar to what many other professions do, only they are not required to go on TV each day to be give out their newest odds. In our case, the job of the NBA GM is much like that of the weatherman.
An NBA GM's job can be very difficult, but it all boils down to the one singular goal that any worthwhile franchise has, win a championship. Every single move he makes should be move towards that goal with the exception of some extremely extenuating circumstances (Ron Artest or Lattrell Sprewell incident for instance); however, with every single move a GM takes there is an inherent risk/reward that must be evaluated by the GM. Are the possible gains and the likelihood of those gains greater in weight than the potential losses? If the gains are greater then it is his duty to accept that deal. If all that is weighed properly then the decision should not be judged as foolish if it ends up failing in the end. The GM for the Orlando Magic was forced to make a decision about trading for Darko Milicic during the '05-'06 NBA basketball season, and undeniably he made the right call even if looking back now with Darko likely gone it does not seem that way.
Before the trade to Darko to the Magic from the Pistons he was regarded as the worst move of Joe Dumars GM career, and Milicic was not thought of too highly among the average fan either. Sandwiched between Lebron James and Carmelo Anthony (who was then followed by Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade) Dumars passed on 4 now all-star players one of whom had just lead his team as a freshman to the national title. The wisdom of that move even at the time was questionable, but what Otis Smith did is not. He was staring at an excellent offer to take on that player who up until now had produced not even 1% of what any of his fellow Top 5 draft class mates had. Give up Kelvin Cato and a 1st round pick (the Magic were not a horrible team at the time, so it was never likely to be a top 5 or even top 10 pick. It would eventually becoming the #15 pick in this year's draft Rodney Stuckey) to pick up Darko along with a still promising point guard, Carlos Arroyo. Neither player had proven their worth much in the NBA yet, but they were both very promising. Accepting the trade was a very educated gamble. Give up a single first round pick and an average at best center (9.27 PER for Kevlin Cato that season) for a young unproven big man who was so highly regarded he was taken above all the stars named above along with a Arroyo who could at least be a serviceable back-up point guard for the team that season. It was a no-brainer.Flash forward to this week. The Orlando Magic have rescinded their restricted free agent right to Darko (they can still sign him and go over the cap to do so) in order to clear room to sign Rashard Lewis. As it looks today, the gamble flopped. Darko provided decent help as a back-up center playing 24 minutes a game while producing 1.75 blocks during his time on the floor in his first full year with the team (offensively his PER's was 13.88 for the year, slightly below average for the league). Arroyo established himself at what we will probably remain as for the rest of his career, an average point guard (14.48 PER). Now with Darko set to depart the team though it appears the Magic's move did not result in them actually moving any closer to their goal, an NBA title, but that does not mean that what Otis Smith did was still wrong.
Any good poker player knows that you can't judge the validity of the moves you make in a game based entirely on what the end result is. If you go all in with 3 of a kind, and the man your heads up against happens to luck out and hit an inside straight that does not mean your move was wrong. It just means you had some bad luck. The smarter you work the more lucky you seem to get, but in complicated real worlds, there is always a chance of things going wrong. That does not mean you avoid taking those chances if the rewards are large enough. If you remove the names from the equations and just look at what the deal was why wouldn't you make the deal?Detriot Pistons receive old below average center and decent team's first round pick.
Orlando Magic receive promising young, athletic, highly regarded big man who has not played much behind a veteran championship front line and a young point guard.
So with Darko leaving it is not that the GM failed or was wrong. It is simply that in this case he lost out on the odds. There was always a measurable chance that Darko would continue to develop slowly like he did and put the Magic in the uncomfortable situation of either paying vastly for potential or letting him leave, but that chance never outweighed the possibility that he would become what he was thought to originally be. Whether Otis Smith may be wrong now letting Darko leave with nothing to show for it (a highly debatable subject involving many different moving parts for another day), the move he made to obtain Darko, despite the results, remains unquestionably intelligent.He is like the weatherman in that he looked at the entirety of the current situation and evaluated the possibilities to understand whether the move was intelligent. Now that it is raining/Darko is leaving does not change the fact that the decision made at that moment in time was the right one based on everything that could possibly be known. There is always an element of luck in the odds that can never be quantified. Jerry West benefited from Shaquille O'Neal always wanting to play on the Los Angeles Lakers. Greg Popavich is a 4 time champion today because some ping pong balls fall the right direction for him. Today, Kevin Pritchard can't wipe the smile off of his face because every time he looks at his roster he sees Greg Oden. All of those men are extremely smart, but if certain odds did not fall in their favor where would they and how would they be regarded for the job they did today? When it comes to being an NBA GM there are percents to play. The smart one plays them as best he can and lets the chips falls where they may always knowing that is not one iota dumber or less worthy of his job because lady luck did not shine down upon him.
