This isn’t to say that what the Hawks are doing can’t work. We’ve just seen a similar arrangement bring an Atlanta franchise within an eyelash of a championship. (More about that later.) But this is to say there’s a risk.
On Friday, the Hawks introduced Travis Schlenk as head of basketball operations and general manager. The first of those responsibilities was held by the man with whom Schlenk will need to work most closely, Mike Budenholzer still being the coach. (Defrocked GM Wes Wilcox, technically still in the organization, mightn’t be around much longer.) Tony Ressler, who owns the team and made this hire, described Schlenk as “an extraordinary collaborator” who “will leverage our assets,” coaching among them.
Schlenk offered a vision of a team “that can compete every year for a championship. That’s going to be our end goal.”
Then, referencing how long it took Golden State, his previous employer, to win it all: “That doesn’t mean we’ll get there in seven years. We’re in a good place to start building for the future.”
And there we saw what could be the great divide between newly minted GM and inherited coach. It would be a surprise — nay, an utter shock — if Schlenk’s first major move would be to re-up Paul Millsap for maximum money over a maximum number of years. If Millsap leaves, the Hawks of 2017-18 surely won’t be as good, not that the Hawks of 2016-17 were any great shakes. That would be the proverbial step back to go forward, which in this case would seem the essence of prudence. But …
Budenholzer is a coach. The next coach to say, “Hey, I’ll be happy to see my won-lost record take a dive if it benefits the franchise in the long term” will be the first — because coaches figure they won’t be around to see the long term if they start and keep losing. It’s widely believed that the impetus for this managerial shuffle came from a disagreement between Budenholzer and Wilcox over whether Millsap should be traded and the Hawks embark on a radical redo. (Guess which guy is thought to have rejected that course.)
Budenholzer is technically just a coach, but he can never be just a coach in this organization. He has been an outsize presence since his arrival in 2013. His dark aura — sorry to get all David Lynch-ian — had permeated the premises even when Danny Ferry was still in place, and he wangled a promotion from Ferry’s leave of absence. It will intriguing to see how the dour Bud fits into a department run by Schlenk, who comes from the most collegial franchise there is.
Budenholzer wasn’t in attendance Friday, being otherwise occupied with his son’s high school graduation. Here’s how Schlenk described the new GM/coach dynamic: “Bud and I were acquaintances. We’ve been spending four or five hours a day together. There’s no reason to believe there’ll be any issues with coach and (me). He’s one of best coaches in league, in my opinion. We’re a partnership. We’re in this together. I know he feels the same way. I think we’re going to have a real strong working relationship.”
(Well, what did you expect? “Can’t stand the guy; get him outta here”?)
The Golden State Ethos is a bit different from the San Antonio Way. A slew of smart people have worked for the Spurs — from Budenholzer to Ferry to Sam Presti to Dell Demps to Avery Johnson to Kevin Pitchard to Mike Brown — but there’s only one voice that matters. Gregg Popovich has always been the king. (Albeit ably assisted by R.C. Buford.) Budenholzer has taken his every basketball cue from the gruff Pop. Will that fly if he has to answer to Schlenk?
Lest we forget, the Warriors started to win before Steve Kerr took hold of them. Under Mark Jackson, who was hired away from ABC, Golden State rose from 23-43 to 51-31, twice making the playoffs. Jackson was then fired, an ouster owner Joe Lacob would justify by saying: "Part of it was that he couldn't get along with anybody else in the organization."
For four years, spanning radically different ownership, Budenholzer was the Hawks’ BMOC. That just changed. Schenk’s is the voice that will resonate. (That’s where the weighty “head of basketball operations” tag comes in.) On Friday, Schlenk said he had “to get with coach Bud and his staff and my front-office staff and hammer out a plan for the future.” It’s a given that the broad strokes of that design won’t be Bud’s. Otherwise he’d still be in charge.
From Schlenk’s measured statements, that plan didn’t sound as if it would be “Win Now.” More than once he spoke of “flexibility,” saying, “When a trade or an acquisition of a superstar becomes available, we want to make sure we’re in a position to do that.”
As we know, the Falcons took a coach — who, like Budenholzer, had been a career assistant — and made him czar of football. Two years on, Dan Quinn's team nearly won the Super Bowl. The forced marriage of Quinn and Thomas Dimitroff could have gone either way; the two made it go the right way. But the ceaselessly cheerful DQ is hard not to like, and the Falcons weren't embarking on any sort of a rebuild. He never had to absorb L's while his team sought to stockpile draft picks. DQ got whatever he wanted.
I’m not sure Budenholzer will. I’m not sure he’ll like what’s coming. Me, I put the over/under on the Schlenk/Bud pairing at two years.
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