The Sixers made news yesterday by sacking their Team President and GM Billy King and hiring Ed Stefanski (former Nets Asst. GM) in his place. David Aldridge summed it up by saying, "Somebody had to pay for the decline of the Sixers."
You can't say King didn't try everything, unless you're forgetting the four-team deal that would have sent Iverson to Detroit in 2000 if Matt Geiger had agreed to waive his trade kicker or how close King came to getting now-dominant forward Carlos Boozer and young guard Randy Foye in one fell swoop on draft night 2006.
But those deals fell through, and King didn't have a BFF and former teammate with a franchise player like Celtics GM Danny Ainge did in his Minnesota counterpart, Kevin McHale. So King got the ax, and Ainge got Garnett, and Ainge will be executive of the year next spring. That's life in the big city.
Jon Burkett from Passion and Pride has been busy getting his blog-house in order.
I don’t know about Sean and AG, but I didn’t go to bed. I worked straight through the night. Like preparing your house for important guests, I cleaned up the look of the site so that the landing page looked more concise, posts were interlinked and contact information with references was provided as a footer.
Jon is also impressed with Stefanski:
Ed Stefanski was directly responsible for helping to build the Nets Eastern Conference title teams of 2002 and 2003. In more recent memory, he drafted Sean Williams over Jason Smith and selected UConn teammates Marcus Williams and Josh Boone. He had a hand in drafting Nenad Krstic and Richard Jefferson, as well as trading for and resigning Vince Carter. And he signed Cliff Robinson about 13 times, give or take 10-12…Since he also has history with the Big5 schools and played for Penn. I wonder if he would be interested in trying to bring in another former Penn guy, Dave Wohl, who was with Boston last year under Doc Rivers?…Here’s another simple comparison for you. In the 2001 draft, Stefanski (director of scouting under Thorn) helped engineer the trade of the 7th pick (Seton Hall and Roman Catholic’s Eddie Griffin) to the Rockets in exchange for the 13th pick (Richard Jefferson), 19th pick (Jason Collins), and 24th pick (Brandon Armstrong). Gee, wasn’t Billy King trying to do the opposite with the 12th, 21st and 30th picks this year? Difference is that Stefanski gets what he wants accomplished, where Billy is left consoling himself that he did the best he could. In the end, the best wasn’t good enough…