10 worst NBA front offices
By John Buhler
Entering the 2016-17 NBA season, these 10 front office regimes have continuously made questionable moves that set their teams back in recent years.
While teams may struggle on the court because they just don’t have the talent of their counterparts, rather than getting on the players or even the coaches, sometimes it’s easiest to blame the men upstairs for why their team is so bad.
Bad NBA front offices have and will always exist. To have great teams in a league, there have to be terrible ones. That’s just the way it works in all professional sports. What makes this so obvious in the NBA is that a front office only has two rounds of draft picks –assuming they weren’t all traded away at some point– a finite salary cap to navigate, and only 15 players that can be on an NBA roster at any given time.
In short, poorly run front offices are the easiest to spot in the NBA because one bad move has a greater impact than in any of the other major sports. Football has a 53-man roster. Baseball has several minor league teams. Hockey has minor league teams.
Regardless of market size, bad front offices can exist anywhere in the NBA. From struggling in small market cities to festering in decadence in a major metropolis, here are the 10 worst NBA front office regimes entering the 2016-17 NBA season.
*Disclosure: Neither the Brooklyn Nets or the Philadelphia 76ers qualify for this list, despite being terrible the last few years. Both have hired new general managers in Sean Marks and Bryan Colangelo respectively within the last few months, so we’ll see if they can right their sinking ships on the Eastern Seaboard.
Next: 10. Phoenix Suns.