The new Hawks owners are making a good move by jettisoning Danny Ferry while keeping Mike Budenholzer to run the basketball operations with Wes Wilcox as his right hand.
The usual suspects will whine about how political correctness prompted the Hawks to make a bad decision for the sake of image. Most of those cries are from people who have no real interest in the NBA, anyway. The Hawks can safely ignore them.
Other protests will come from panicky Hawks supporters worried that the franchise could never hope to get another general manager as good as Ferry. They carry the heavy burden of Atlanta’s pro sports failures, which tends to create an inferiority complex.
Those are emotional, misguided reactions. Ferry isn’t gone because of political correctness, nor is he irreplaceable as GM.
It was infighting among Hawks owners and Ferry’s inability to navigate those internal politics, not outside pressure, that led to his demise. And while Ferry has a good track record as GM, let’s not make him out to be Pat Riley, even in the wake of the best season the Atlanta team ever had.
By repeating those infamous racially charged words in the Luol Deng scouting report, Ferry made an unforced error. It reflected poorly on the Hawks once it got out. Whether he’s paid the proper penance for that mistake should really be beside the point for new owner Tony Ressler and his partners.
This is about business. The new Hawks owners decided keeping Ferry would hurt their goal to make money. They determined Budenholzer can run the basketball operations successfully, the Hawks will continue to win and the cash will continue to flow.
They are right. I’m betting Budenholzer and Wilcox will continue to make smart basketball decisions without the man who hired them. Ironically, Ferry’s success at creating a collaborative basketball culture means there should be a smooth transition once he’s gone.
Budenholzer can at least be Ferry’s equal as personnel chief, if only because the bar is not set impossibly high.
Consider that in his previous stint as GM, Ferry inherited a superstar player, something essentially required for winning a championship. Actually Ferry had the superstar, LeBron James, for his five years as Cleveland's GM.
During that time, the Cavaliers could do no better than one NBA Finals appearance, in which they were swept. That’s not to say Ferry alone is responsible for the Cavs coming up short, but it’s on his record. The best general managers with the best players have the rings.
Budenholzer will have a tougher job than Ferry did in Cleveland. The Hawks are squarely in the NBA’s middle class. They lack the MVP candidate needed to contend for a title and are not so bad they have a chance to draft a superstar.
The stars-vs.-team story line may be tiresome but it’s relevant. The Warriors just became the 60th champion of the 65 since 1950 to have at least one player voted first- or second-team All-NBA. Most champs have at least two.
This is a hard history for the Hawks to overcome. There are always many more teams than superstars and this reality means those players will always be difficult to acquire.
To that end, perhaps the biggest challenge for Budenholzer will be building relationships with his peers in other front offices. Let us not forget that the best transaction Ferry made as Hawks GM was persuading his good buddy Billy King, the Nets GM, to take Joe Johnson and his onerous contract.
All the good things Ferry did for the Hawks flowed from that trade because there was no way to start over without first unloading that deal. Ferry pulled it off near the beginning of his tenure with the Hawks. It will end with him fired for reasons that have nothing to do with basketball, and so soon after the best postseason run in franchise history.
It’s the final chapter for the dysfunctional group that sold the franchise to Ressler. He’s the latest to be caught in that wake of their incompetence but he did his best to escape it by parting ways with Ferry. It’s the right move for the Hawks.
