From : lapdoggy < lapdoggy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >
On Sunday, February 2, 2003, at 12:41 PM, bird wrote:Yeah, but I don't care. I mean that Baylor, or Wallace, or whoever is pissed. It's his job to deal with the players. If he wants to bitch he can go home to his wife, or his best friend or his dog or his bartender, but doing it in public in print is inviting the players to get pissed at him, ruining the "chemistry" of the team. Whether they deserve it or not.
Are you going to answer the original question, which was "What is the benefit to having a GM who tells 'the truth'?"
I guess telling it "how it is" may have it's drawbacks but Baylor was responding to some player's who have yet to make the kind of decisions expected of highly paid professionals. Cotton Kandi had a few good weeks last year and now all of the sudden he believes he's a max player. He obviously is not. Remember Cotton Kandi beat the crap out of his girlfriend last year. Again not the kind of payback a gm would expect of a #1 pick.
Odom has all of the gifts, and has been coddled by Baylor since day one. Still, he makes stupid decisions in his personal life that gets him suspended.
Baylor gave these guy's a great chance to succeed and they've let him down. I don't blame him for being pissed.
Whether or not it's a benefit for a gm to tell the truth, I can't say. I just know that it's refreshing to hear a HOF player stick it to young guys who spend more time looking at their stats than the standings.Yeah, I don't have that particular axe to grind, so I don't want the GM of my team to start running down the players, no matter how much he might want to. Seems to have little benefit other than making some fans feel better. Again, no amount of feeling refreshed by fans is really going to help the team, so expecting a GM to start telling the "truth" in order to gain that "feature" seems foolish to me. No real gain in it.
Now a question for you. Do you think Baylor would have pulled off that trade for Baker if he was in Wallace's shoes?I'll answer your question because you answered mine, but honestly, I don't see the profit in it. Who cares what Baylor (or anyone else) would have done? They weren't there and they didn't do anything. If your point is that the Baker trade is a bad one, I think you'd want to take a number because that's not a new one. But, I'd say I don't know what Baylor would have done because I don't know him very well, but the chances of anybody trading for Vin Baker out of Seattle in this scenario are very, very slim. I said it at the time, I'll say it now: The Baker trade is a huge gamble that has more chance of going wrong than right, but the benefits of it going right are very good. Me, I'm not much of a gambler, so I wouldn't have done it. But then again, I would have actually brought back the team that made it to the ECF.