An effective owner is just as important as anything else to NBA success

After having a superstar on your team, being run by a good owner is perhaps the most important thing for any franchise. If you’re trying to figure out why certain franchises are mired in mediocrity, or worse, year after year, it makes sense to look at the lone unifying link throughout those years of losing and it’s usually the owner. They may be unwilling to spend, unable to stop meddling in basketball operations, or merely repellent personally — driving away people who could help turns things around — but any one of those things is enough to doom a franchise.

It does not strike me as coincidental that the Warriors’ recent dominance only came about in the immediate aftermath of an ownership change that saw new leadership waste no time in undoing much of what had come before in the previous regime. Yes, having Stephen Curry helps immensely, but I don’t feel fully confident in saying that he would have been able to become the player he is today under the stewardship of Chris Cohan. Similarly, it was not mere bad luck that led to the Clippers being so consistently abysmal during Donald Sterling’s time as owner nor does it seem wise to expect the Knicks to ever really prosper as long as James Dolan remains in charge.

Following a period of relative peace a few years back — the 2016-17 season featured no in-season firings for the first time in nearly fifty years — coaches are being dispatched of quickly in this still young season. After just six games, the Cavaliers fired Tyronn Lue while the Bulls gave Fred Hoiberg a mere 24 games to right the ship in Chicago before parting ways. Neither move is necessarily bad as I’m a bit more skeptical than most regarding Lue’s and Hoiberg’s abilities as NBA coaches, but both moves are nevertheless a bit confounding, revealing more of a misapprehension of who these teams are than a failure of coaching.

While the Cavaliers foolishly expected to contend for the playoffs this year, such hopes were quickly shown to be misplaced and rather than management realizing that they had put Lue in an untenable situation, they opted to fire him instead in the misguided belief that doing so would be a quick fix. Similarly, the Bulls have made a number of questionable moves in recent years and somehow expected the team to coalesce into a viable playoff contender despite the absence of two starters due to injury and the fact that only three players on the roster are over the age of 25. Maybe the ghost of Red Auerbach could have turned these teams into winners, but even that seems like a spurious proposition regardless of your thoughts on the paranormal.

The list of blunders by the two-headed monster of Gar Forman and John Paxson is long and dispiriting. To stick to the last few years, there was the 2014 Draft when they traded the rights to both Jusuf Nurkic and Gary Harris to the Nuggets for Doug McDermott. The Bulls would not keep McDermott for long, though, as they traded him alongside Taj Gibson in February 2017 for a handful of Oklahoma City bench players, somehow believing Cameron Payne to be the trade’s centerpiece. Nurkic and Harris now are both starters on playoff teams while McDermott is on his fifth team in five seasons. There was also the odd decision to sell their second-round pick in 2017, which became Jordan Bell, to the Warriors. The team seems to somehow want to rebuild while also being a playoff team, making moves to rebuild then immediately undercutting them with a short-sighted signing or firing. However, in spite of their numerous failings, they have been protected by ownership to a degree that one is forced to wonder what sort of dirt they must seemingly have on Jerry Reinsdorf considering the lack of justification for his keeping them on.

It’s not merely coaches who take the heat for managerial shortcomings, but players as well. There’s a tendency to chastise players for not winning enough as if the fate of every single game rests in their hands. Unsurprisingly, since he is the best and most heavily analyzed player of his generation, no player has experienced this sort of criticism more than LeBron James. Many believed it was a failure on his part that the Cavaliers were never able to win a title during his first tenure with the team from 2003 to 2010, discounting that the best teammate he had in that period was either Mo Williams, Zydrunas Ilgauskas or maybe a rookie Carlos Boozer. It was not James who drafted Luke Jackson 10th overall in 2004 or James who traded away the entirety of the team’s draft picks in both 2005 and 2007, but James was forced to shoulder the blame regardless.

This is seen historically as well as we see players criticized for not winning championships, or enough championships in some cases, not taking into account the weak teams they played for or the other great teams they were forced to compete against. It is not Wilt Chamberlain’s fault that his prime coincided with that of the Celtics’ dynasty nor is it any inherent lack of ability that kept Dominique Wilkins or Charles Barkley or Elgin Baylor from ever winning a title. Bad luck and questionable personnel moves by management bear more responsibility than shortcomings in talent or will.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the San Antonio Spurs have been able to be one of the more consistently successful franchises over the last few decades is due to their owners having extremely low profiles while refusing to meddle in basketball operations, allowing R.C. Buford and Gregg Popovich to have full control. While the Warriors’ Joe Lacob has taken a much more hands-on approach than Peter and Julianna Holt have with the Spurs, he has made a number of wise moves — most notably hiring Bob Myers as general manager and Jerry West as an adviser — that allowed the team to make the most of already having Curry on the roster. The best owners realize their lack of expertise and find smart and capable people to fill out the front office as opposed to those who believe they know better than those who have spent their whole lives working in basketball. Success and knowledge are not often easily transferable commodities.

NBA owners often like to believe that the proverbial buck stops with them, yet are just as often unwilling to accept the concrete consequences of such a belief. The failure of their team’s coaches, executives, and players to win consistently ultimately rests with them and is as often a sign of mismanagement as it is simply poor play. It seems certain that no owner is nearly self-aware to realize this, but if they truly want to build a winner, they would be wise to realize that the job starts with them and that if things aren’t working as planned, there’s probably a concrete reason for it and that they may very well be that reason.