AJC > Sports Thrashers > Blog > Archives > 2007 > March > 05
Monday, March 5, 2007
Cancel my subscription to Forbes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When I heard on the radio this morning that Don Waddell had been named the sixth-best GM in hockey, I did a classic Danny Thomas spit take with my morning coffee.
When I then realized that, no, in fact, Don Waddell had been named the sixth-best GM in all of sports, I accidentally swallowed my coffee mug whole, getting it lodged halfway down my throat in a horizontal position, so that you could clearly see the outline of the handle framing my Adam’s apple. It took paramedics 45 minutes to remove the coffee mug and another 45 minutes to restrain me after I lunged at the radio with an oversized BBQ fork in an attempt to expel the demons that had obviously possessed its frequencies.
Before I go on, let me just say that I like and respect Don Waddell. When I covered the NHL for SI.com, I found him to be accomodating and honest and humane. I always felt the decisions he made were always with franchise AND player in mind. He’s the kind of GM a player could trust and the kind of GM who wasn’t going to undercut his superiors or abandon his underlings.
The thing that Waddell has done the best in his time with the Thrashers is keep the team moving forward. There is something to be said for that. He didn’t trip over his biggest draft picks — Kovalchuk, Heatley, Lehtonen — and he made the most of some pretty bad and unusual situations. Folks, getting Marian Hossa for an unhappy Dany Heatley was as brilliant of a move by a GM that you’ll ever see in your lives. Getting Bob Hartley in the wake of Curt Fraser was part-luck, part-coup.
That said …
What ancient spell of the dark arts did Forbes invoke to name him the sixth-best GM in all of sports?
Oh, I read the criteria. That didn’t help.
I don’t know much, but I know this much: This is a franchise that has never played a postseason game, a franchise that would need to win its next 82 regular-season games (that’s an undefeated season to you and me) just to break even. This is a GM who has drafted exactly two players — Garnet Exelby and Pasi Nurminen — outside of the first round who have made any kind of impact on the team. This is a GM who just traded two his past four No. 1 picks just to get his team into the playoffs just so he wouldn’t lose his job.
Now, OK, next to somebody like Hawks GM Billy Knight, Don Waddell looks like Red Auerbach. Of course, next to Pete Babcock, Billy Knight looks like Moses (son of Amram, not Malone). But next to somebody like John Schuerholz (14 straight division titles, on WS title), Waddell looks like a crab scuttling across the ocean floor. You might say, well, Waddell took over an expansion team and had to start from scratch. Ahem, do you remember the ‘90 Braves? An expansion team would have been preferable. And Schuerholz ends up 42 or some such thing on the Forbes list.
Let’s face it, formulas are for schmucks. And this is coming from a guy currently enrolled in a mathematical modeling class and who knows how to plot the points of two linear equations. Formulas suck, OK? That’s why you can take all your Bill James disciples and your SABRmetric D&D dorks in baseball, with their VORP and their OBP+OPP=TNT nonsense, and send them adrift into the ocean of obsolete. You can make numbers prove almost anything if you bend them the right way. My friend Rob Neyer at ESPN.com could take Nino Espinosa’s stats in 1977 and ‘prove’ him to be a superior pitcher to Tom Seaver.
So, Forbes magazine, may I offer you this piece of advice: Stick to money, would you? Don’t try to outsmart yourself, don’t try to revolutionize the way we assess our sports GMs. We like our shiny trophies and our champagne celebrations, not ‘salary cap manipulation in relation to the previous GM.’ It’s nonsense.
Even Don Waddell knows it, bless his heart. Nice man, pretty average GM.
OK, I’ve teed it up … swing away at the poor guy.
P.S. nice win on Sunday, eh?
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