3 NBA GMs who should enter the 2024-25 season on the hot seat

NBA training camps and preseason are right around the corner and it won't be long before we are finding out which teams' approach to the offseason worked and which didn't. Every team entered the draft and free agency with different goals but even teams for whom the posteason is a pipe dream want to demonstrate development and improvement and show that the new players they acquired are actually helping them move forward.

These three GMs all made significant offseason moves but history and past results put those moves in a different light. If their teams aren't much better and with their new additions paying off, they could find themselves out of a job before the end of next year.

3. Rafael Stone

Rafael Stone has been general manager of the Houston Rockets for almost four years and in that time he's amassed an impressive array of talented young players — Jalen Green, Amen Thompson, Cam Whitemore, Jabari Smith Jr., Reed Sheppard, Tari Eason and Alperen Sengun. But simply drafting well isn't enough if it doesn't eventually turn into a competitive team.

The Rockets have been steadily improving and did finish 0.500 last season but that came after spending slightly more than $200 million on Dillon Brooks and Fred VanVleet. And even those enormous investments weren't enough to get the Rockets to the playoffs. They've explored trades and signings looking for the right veterans to put around their young core but haven't been able to find the big one to push them over the top.

At the same time, other young teams like the Thunder and Timberwolves have taken the leap to becoming legitimate contenders. Looking at the state of the Western Conference, it's not clear that the Rockets are any better off than they were last year and fighting their way into the postseason through the Play-In Tournament seems like the absolute best-case scenario. If that falls through, like it did last year, the Rockets could be looking for a new decision-maker.

2. Marc Eversley

Chicago Bulls fans were thrilled when front office team Gar Forman (GM) and John Paxson (VP of Basketball Operations) were removed at the end of the 2019-20 NBA season. After years of suffering through shaky decision-making and relentless blame-deflecting, their replacements, Marc Eversley (GM) and Artūras Karnišovas (EVP of Basketball Operations), were greeted with enthusiasm and optimism. Unfortunately for Bulls' fans, it's been more of the same.

The Bulls briefly looked like a contender during the 2021-22 season but otherwise it's been a mess. They've finished above 0.500 just once in the past four seasons and their win percentage has been trending downward in the past two. They've won a single playoff game, thrown good money after bad re-signing Nikola Vucevic, whiffed on opportunities to trade Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso for reasonable returns, used a top-4 pick on Patrick Williams and taken Dalen Terry with their only other first-round pick.

Matas Buzelis is an interesting young piece as are Coby White, Josh Giddey and Ayo Dosunmu. But Williams is not a star, they're still hamstrung by the contracts of LaVine, Ball and Vucevic and there's nothing to indicate that this is a team on the rise. Granted, GarPax survived years of terrible job performance so maybe Eversley and Karnišovas have a longer runway than we'd expect. But unless this team unexpectedly captures lightning in a bottle this year, the Bulls absolutely should be exploring a change of direction in their front office.

1. Rob Pelinka

Pelinka has bought himself tremendous goodwill by keeping LeBron James around and helping deliver the Los Angeles Lakers a title during the 2020 season. But for every step forward he's helped the team take — like fueling a 2023 Western Conference Finals run with a flurry of deadline trades — he's missed another opportunity.

Other than re-signing LeBron which, in retrospect, was never really in doubt, the Pelinka made no significant additions to the Lakers depth chart this offseason. Their championship hopes are still indelibly tied up in the supporting cast that was acquired at the 2023 trade deadline — Jarred Vanderbilt, D'Angelo Russell and Rui Hachimura. Those players have all gotten new contracts from Pelinka despite obvious holes in their game and the fact that this group, collectively, hasn't been nearly good enough.

And then there is the Russell Westbrook trade which, in and of itself, should have been a deal-breaker. Not only was Westbrook a disaster that everyone besides the Lakers saw coming a mile away, the players they traded away in that deal — Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Kyle Kuzma — are exactly the kind of players this current roster desperately need. Pelinka may have job security for reasons that don't have anything to do with job performance and it's possible he can pull off a miraculous mid-season trade with Russell and a future first-round pick that saves the season. But this Lakers roster is not as good as it should be or could be and Pelinka has to hold some responsibility for that.