A conversation with David Griffin about what makes a great GM

This week, on NBA TV, was the premiere of SAP GM School which features four NBA fans trying to prove their team building mettle to a number of basketball luminaries. Among the judges is David Griffin, an executive with many years of front office experience who played a vital role in building the Cavaliers who made four consecutive Finals runs from 2015 to 2018, and won Northeast Ohio’s first title in 52 years.

In light of GM School’s premiere, I spoke with Griffin about the show as well as what it’s like to watch a high stakes game knowing the result is out of your hands, what decisions he’s most proud of, and what he looks for in a potential front office position.

Micah Wimmer: To start off, I’m from Akron, Ohio so I have a special place in my heart for the job you did with the Cavs the last few years.

David Griffin: I appreciate that. My mother’s from Akron, Ohio so so does she. I appreciate that very much.

Wimmer: Talking about GM School, what do you think the average fan misses about what makes a great general manager?

Griffin: Well, I think one of the great things that SAP did with GM School and NBA TV putting together the group that we did, Ros Gold-Onwude, and Kevin McHale and Evan Wasch from the NBA analytics department. I think SAP did a great job of getting four contestants that are really from diverse backgrounds that really brought different strengths to the process. It was a lot of fun to be part of that. And I felt like as judges, and as the host that Ros does such a great job with, we all came it from different angles. And I think what fans maybe don’t understand or take for granted is that the analytics, even with SAP giving you as much data as they do, are just a really small part of the process. They’re just one bit of information and I think too often people rely on data and numbers as the answer themselves and they’re not an answer in and of themselves and I think that’s one thing people get confused on.

Wimmer: Yeah, because you spend a lot of time in the show looking at the ability to explain things — what kind of importance do you think communication has in an executive role?

Griffin: Oh, I think it’s a huge huge part of the process. If you can’t get people to both see your vision and to march towards it, you’re not going to get very far no matter what you’re able to do in terms of analyzing information. Being the leader of a franchise is far more than identifying talent and far more than identifying which lineups play the best together or identifying which coach runs the best things out of time outs. It’s really about building a family and getting everybody moving in the right direction. From a leadership standpoint, as simple a word as that is, I think it’s the most underrated and underappreciated aspect of the job. Leadership is critical and obviously, communication is a big part of that.

Wimmer: And talking about the diverse backgrounds people come from, while you started with the Suns, you were at Arizona State where you got a degree in political science — has that degree or any poli-sci knowledge been of use to you as an executive?

Griffin: That’s a great question. I suppose everything that I went through from an academic perspective helped me prepare for an opportunity in the front office. I think the sum total of all these experiences lead you, hopefully, to continue to get better. If you come at this with an open heart and with a curious mind I think you continue to get better over time. There were certainly things academically that I experienced that I’ve applied along the way but I can’t say political science in and of itself gave me a bigger leg up than the theology classes I was taking in school as well.

Wimmer: I went to seminary and now I write about basketball, so I get it.

Griffin: I mean, we understand each other. That’s awesome.

Wimmer: And while you were with the Suns, the team helped initiate the 3-point revolution — do you see any end in sight for that trend or what do you think could bring an end to it?

Griffin: Wow, that’s a great question. I feel like the most likely thing to bring an end to it is just allowing people to play defense again. At some point, we’re going to have to feel like defense matters enough so that coaches are forced to teach the nuances of defense again. Right now, I see everybody being so concerned with closing out to the 3-point line and charging people off the 3-point line that we’re losing sight of the fact that a good closeout is still a good close-out and it’s not a blow by. And I think there’s a lot of things we’ve done because of our fear of the 3-point line that it’s taken us away, as a league, from some of the fundamentals defensively. And that, coupled with the fact that rule changes have made it so you absolutely can’t even look at someone hard, has really changed the game.

I think eventually because these things are cyclical, we’ll get to the point where some team, much like the Miami Heat did at one time, is going to get hip to the fact that if you foul every single possession and dare them to call it, they won’t. And we’re going to get to the point where somebody reins it back to the defensive side of things. Three-point shooting is always going to be critical but I don’t think it’s always going to be as central to victory as it is right now because people are going to zig when everybody else zags and there’s going to be a big player who comes into the league who can punish you in the paint in much the same way that Giannis is right now. I think what Milwaukee does is open the paint up with the threat of 3-point shooting to make Giannis the most efficient ball dominant driver we’ve had in the league in quite some time and I think to some degree that’s Bud’s way of exploiting the fear people have of the 3-point shot and taking advantage of the open lane.

Wimmer: It definitely seems that while 3-point shots are rising across the league as a whole, there’s still a greater diversity in style of offensive play than the general narrative would lead one to think.

Griffin: Well, Golden State shoots more mid-range jump shots than any team in the league. They just happen to have guys who can shoot it at a really efficient clip so it’s natural when teams are blowing by in rotation and you have players who are as adept as Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant at taking one dribble pull-ups, they’re gonna torture defenses that way so it’s not a surprise that the best, most efficient offense in the league has basketball players first, that are about basketball IQ and skill set. It’s so funny — I think about this relative to when I was in the video room once upon a time and I think we talk about this on the show, but I was in the video room one time for Scott Skiles. He was my head coach and I was cutting up tape for him. And Scott said, this would’ve been 21 years ago maybe, “give me five guys that are 6-foot-9 who can all dribble, pass, and shoot and I’ll beat anybody.” And I think that’s where we’re headed, I think that’s where we’ve gotten to and I think really at the end of the day being a basketball player first is the most important thing.

Wimmer: Moving back to your time with the Cavs, some of your first moves there in the summer of 2014 were hiring David Blatt and drafting Andrew Wiggins. Of course a few weeks later, LeBron announced that he would be rejoining the Cavs — would knowing that have changed your decision-making process regarding the draft or head coach?

Griffin: Relative to the draft, probably not. We went into the draft really interested in several players and a couple of them were injury concerns for us. I think with the Andrew Wiggins piece, to a large degree, we ended up taking the asset we felt had the most value so if LeBron came, he wasn’t going to be as a great fit for us, but he had incredible asset value away from there. So it was almost like drafting Andrew was like buying optionality. Whereas had we felt Joel [Embiid] was the right pick from an injury standpoint, we wouldn’t have done anything differently. We would’ve stuck with Joel. So I think relative to the draft, no.

Relative to David Blatt, I do think David got caught up in the LeBron coming back situation in large part because David was hired to coach a young team that he was going to grow in the NBA with. His first few practices at Summer League in Vegas had everyone in the franchise giddy excited. This is a great, great basketball coach and I really feel badly that David wasn’t allowed to enter the NBA as a head coach with the team we had the day we hired him because it was tailor made for him — young kids that were going to listen, that were going to be more pliable. When you have to flip the switch and win a championship immediately, and you trade for Kevin Love and you sign LeBron James and you end up with the veterans we had, winning became much more focal than growth and development. And David got caught up in that. David’s a great basketball coach and when we moved on from him it was not a statement about him as a coach, it was more about the fit with David.

Wimmer: What’s it like as an executive watching one of the high stakes Finals games you oversaw, knowing that you’ve done all you can to put the team together and that things are out of your hands at that point?

Griffin: It’s very challenging. And the crowd you sit in makes it more or less so. I stayed in the back room an awful lot of the time, I stayed in the locker room an awful lot of the time and watched it on the big screen in the locker room. When the only thing that’s going to mark success is a championship and your margin for error is that small, you never feel like you’ve done enough and at some point, you really do have to get comfortable in the fact that you’re never going to be comfortable. And I think the best leaders in all sports, and frankly, in all endeavors, the best leaders are comfortable in their lack of comfort. And it took me a while to find that and once I did sort of find that space, I feel like I became infinitely better at my job.

Wimmer: Your name has been attached to a lot of front office positions since parting ways with the Cavs — when looking at potential managerial positions, what are you looking for?

Griffin: I think just the ability to be in lockstep with ownership and the head coach. You want to be in a situation where everyone can be marching to the same beat, and you want to be moving in the same direction and believe blindly in one another. If you can find a situation like that, from a leadership standpoint where you can be empowered to raise a family that loves each other enough to tell them what they need to hear, that would be attractive.

Wimmer: Are there any moves, looking back where you think “I absolutely nailed that one” or maybe “I blew it.”

Griffin: It’s a great question actually. Relative to nailing it, I think just the way we raised our staff and empowered and grew our staff is the thing I’m most proud of. Culturally, I felt like we got to the point where we were a flamethrower internally. And watching Koby Altman who was our second in command be as deft as he has been from a dealmaking standpoint and watching him take over the mantle of leadership has been a lot of fun. I think that was a tremendous gift on our part as a franchise. Trent Redden, who grew and evolved into the role that he’s in now — he’s assistant GM to the Clippers and he’s going to be a tremendous general manager in this league someday. Getting to be part of that and watching people grow and evolve in that way is probably the most gratifying thing to me that I look back on.

In terms of things that I look back and say, “man we absolutely blew that,” it would probably be anything that I did that I did more on my own than really involving everybody else. And probably be something back in my Phoenix days and I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. I made a lot more mistakes than I got things right at one point.