2016 Executive of the Year
Jul 23, 2016 13:31:10 GMT
Walt Frazier, Mike Krzyzewski, and 8 more like this
Post by Ian Noble on Jul 23, 2016 13:31:10 GMT
2016 Executive of the Year
Introduction: Commissioner's 2016 Address to the League
2016 Executive of the Year
CHRIS MULLIN
Golden State Warriors
Second Place
Charlotte Hornets - James Kay
Third Place
Brooklyn Nets - Josh Barber
Fourth Place
Chicago Bulls - Shane Battier
Each candidate will be announced from last to first over the next few days to see who has won the most prestigious award in the league!
Introduction: Commissioner's 2016 Address to the League
Dynasty Five; Season Five is in the books! How old were you when you first took over your team? The League continues onward much as it has done since 2012, continually improving and evolving, as we watch the dynasty's throughout the years rise and fall and rise again over time. Continuity and enthusiasm reached new levels this year, the countdown started 77 days before the season even began and was ended by the only GM who left his team this season, former D5 Champion Clyde Drexler. In the ensuing scramble to claim his vacant seat Brandon Roy was appointed making him the only new team owner to start at D5 this season which is a D5 Record and speaks volumes for our popularity!
Season Five was the season in which we ditched the old boxscores for new, said goodbye to the screenshots of the past in favour of BBCode Standings, Statistics and Player Ratings and even introduced refined Playoff Boxscores! The improvements that have come from teaching myself Python during last year's off season should continue to pay off even more next season, I have a lot of plans and should soon have the time to put them in place!
2015/16 was the Year of the Shoe and will be remembered for Hanamichi Sakuragi's Miracle Cavs team who pushed towards the top of the East, eventually finishing as 6th Seed despite the player ratings making us expect otherwise! 2015/16's Trade of the Year saw long time Nuggets Paul George and Kyrie Irving shipped to Portland in exchange for Lamarcus Aldridge and John Wall! Lebron James left Miami to form the terrifying Warriors team that was somehow beaten by Kevin Durant's Thunder in the Western Conference Finals! Russell Westbrook joined the Hornets instead of the Celtics, the Hornets went on to win the Championship and the Celtics finally got lucky and added Ben Simmons to their roster! Rockets GM Charles Barkley was outraged by everything, including himself, Chris Mullin drew from five years of the league's history as he assessed the D5 All Time Regular Season Records, and perhaps the most impressive contribution came from Bulls GM Shane Battier who gave us his 132 page thesis on Dynasty Five; A Fantasy Grounded in Reality! We're still waiting on James Kay though...
With all that being said the Executive of the Year race this year was relatively quiet during the regular season at least, not many teams made many big changes and I began to wonder whether we had all reached a trading stalemate and it would take a newbie GM like Brandon Roy to shake things up for a really big trade to happen. However during the off season there have actually been half as many trades as there were throughout the entire regular season, free agency and the rookie draft have hugely altered teams situations, it is just a huge shame we have to wait all the way until December to re-start the regular season!
The first runner up for Dynasty Five Executive of the Year 2016 will soon be announced! Who do you think will win D5's most prestigious award this year? Stay tuned to find out!
2016 Executive of the Year
CHRIS MULLIN
Golden State Warriors
For the first time in the history of Dynasty Five we now have a double-award-winner of Executive of the Year: Congratulations to the Golden State Warriors and General Manager Chris Mullin!Hopefully Mr Mullin doesn't mind me re-posting that excerpt from our private conversation from earlier in the year! I think it speaks volumes about the level of dedication he has shown to his team and to the league to put together what is clearly the most-feared roster in Dynasty Five!Jun 15, 2016 13:32:01 GMT r2323 said:I actually do think a lot about D5 as Im lying in bed about to fall asleep! Im always thinking about potential lineup adjustments, trades, etc. I will mentally go down the league roster database alphabetically analyzing potential scenarios as Im trying fall asleep haha.
But here's how I know I spend to much time on D5: I'm watching the Toronto-Cleveland series from this season and Im wondering why Al Horford and Kyle Korver aren't in the game for the Raptors. This happens to me all the time as Im watching actual NBA games lol.
This year it should be obvious why Chris Mullin wins the award - he out manoeuvred all the other teams competing for the services of Miami's Lebron James and put together the best trade of the season to form what has been dubbed the Titanic Duo alongside Steph Curry! Chris Mullin was able to bring the current two best players in the league together, on the same team, and he didn't have to mortgage his future to get there! Central to the outgoing pieces in the deal was Dwight Howard despite him having been decreased from 89 to 84 less than a month earlier! Trevor Ariza, Stephen Adams, Terrence Jones, Jamal Crawford and Rodney Stuckey are all serviceable players also, but why trade a generational talent like Lebron James for six serviceable players?! This year Lebron took a step up the ladder to basketball immortality as he brought home the NBA Championship to Cleveland, he's reaching into that rarefied Shaq, Jordan territory now, and Chris Mullin picked him up and paired him with the real-life league MVP. If it was not already, the 2015/16 Season then became a matter of Golden State versus the rest of the league, the Warriors clinched the Pacific Division and Western Conference with a 65W - 17L record, steamrolled through the first two rounds of the Playoffs in five-game series and then somehow fell to the Thunder in the Conference Finals to everyone's surprise! What matters though was that in the long run, after re-signing Lebron, the Warriors were able to secure a pairing that had to be engineered in real life by Kevin Durant to look anywhere near as good! The Titanic Duo is akin to pairing Wilt with Russell, Bird with Magic, Jordan with Shaq or Duncan with Kobe! This kind of achievement is what D5 is all about really - an effort to secure absolute domination of the league - a Dynasty! Chris Mullin doesn't have to lift a finger until Lebron retires and he's a championship contender every year from now on!
Not content, Chris Mullin set about solidifying his team in the off season. Re-signing Lebron was made possible by replacing Boris Diaw with Zaza Pachulia which netted the Warriors two extra draft picks along the way, and Klay Thompson returned to be the Pippen to the Steph/Lebron hybrid-Jordan! NBA Champions Richard Jefferson and Patty Mills were also added to the bench.
When Chris Mullin won Executive of the Year first time around the only question mark was his trading skill. If there were any questions left to ask after this season then they have surely now all been answered.
It really might now be the case that Chris Mullin has separated himself from the rest of the pack, just like Lebron did this year as a player, we all know his team is the standard to which we have to raise our games to compete, Chris Mullin is General Manager of the most feared team in the league! Congratulations, for the second time in his career, to your 2016 Executive of the Year, Mr Chris Mullin!
Trading:
Signing:
Drafting:
Planning:2015 Team
Dwight Howard
Pau Gasol
Trevor Ariza
Klay Thompson
Steph Curry
2016 Team
Zaza Pachulia
Pau Gasol
Lebron James
Klay Thompson
Steph Curry
Second Place
Charlotte Hornets - James Kay
If there was an award for effort alone then James Kay would likely be taking this award home with him tonight! Never have the player agents and myself been inundated with so much effort in free agent offers than we have by the Hornets James Kay. In an off season characterised by spectacular efforts from so many GMs, Mr Kay always seemed to give a little bit extra and even if it went unrewarded it did not go unnoticed! James was second in the running for Kawhi Leonard but lost out to the Bulls and second in the running for Kevin Durant but lost out to the Thunder - Executive of the Year would've been a one-horse-race if either of those deals swayed towards Charlotte, North Carolina.
After being shortlisted for the prize last year James ensured his name was in the running this year as soon as he acquired Russell Westbrook from the now rebuilding Sacramento Kings. The Hornets added Westbrook to their lineup and, to cut a long story short, won the 2016 Dynasty Five Championship as a result, there's just no way they get that far without Westbrook on the team. James Kay 's season starts and ends with that trade.
However before 2016 even began the plans for this off season were already being expertly drawn up as Mike Conley left town in exchange for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope which was expertly explained by James himself in the trade thread: a point-guard jam was cleared which, a month later, paved the way for Westbrook to join the Hornets and for there to be ample cap space in the off season.
The one criticism that many levelled at James Kay was his trade of the more established youngster Andrew Wiggins, contracts and a future pick for Brandon Ingram and yet more cap space. This was a "what-if" deal that would've gone down in history if it paid off this Summer - as I wrote above: if Kawhi or Durant ended up joining forces with Westbrook, Ingram and the rest of that team then this year's Executive of the Year Award is all over before it begins! It was a gamble which didn't work, but it was a gamble designed to catapult the Charlotte Hornets beyond the Championship team which was already taking the court into a higher realm, a higher tier, distanced even from the other emergent Eastern contenders amongst whose company Charlotte finds themselves. This was a deal with an aim for immortality and it shows the mindset and the work ethic which James Kay gives every day. After re-signing Finals MVP Westbrook the Hornets are now set up nicely for next season, and who's to say the one-dimensional Wiggins all by himself doesn't turn out to be as good an investment as Durant-esqe Brandon Ingram?
James Kay finishes second in the Executive of the Year race, he finished second in the race for Kawhi Leonard, he also finished second in the race for Kevin Durant, but the one place he didn't finish second was where it absolutely mattered - in the 2016 Dynasty Five Finals! This year's historic Finals win is actually the result of only two years of brutal dedication to excellence by Mr Kay, it's amazing he's achieved so much in such little space of time, heaven help the Eastern Conference in the future as he guides this juggernaut, which still possesses enough cap space for a max contract, into Finals contention for the foreseeable future!
Trading:
Signing:
Drafting:
Planning:2015 Team
Robin Lopez
Serge Ibaka
Andrew Wiggins
Khris Middleton
Reggie Jackson
2016 Team
Nerlens Noel
Serge Ibaka
Brandon Ingram
Khris Middleton
Russell Westbrook
Third Place
Brooklyn Nets - Josh Barber
Barber's a dark horse this year, I didn't see him coming even after he acquired Blake Griffin from the Clippers, but on paper there's no other GM who has turned their team around more this year than the Nets - going from a team of bloated contracts and low-upside talent to one of the most exciting young teams in the league!
The Nets season centres entirely around two sets of two trades that work in tandem with one another; the first was the Blake Griffin trade. The trade in itself was impressive but what really cements Josh's place here at the end of the season is what he then did with Blake Griffin afterwards. The centrepiece of the Griffin deal was Greg Monroe who is now seen as an weight around the necks of the Bucks in real life. Nicolas Batum is a good but not great player who led the lacklustre real-life Hornets to nowhere this year. Andrea Bargnani is Andrea Bargnani and Brooklyn's 1st ended up being the walking question mark that is Georgios Papagiannis. These four unheralded assets were turned into Griffin, but then five months later Griffin was turned into the basis for an entirely rebuilt team comprised of potential all-star youngsters Jahlil Okafor, Willie Cauley-Stein, Devin Booker and Domantas Sabonis! Walt's Timberwolves look like a great team now, but Josh has put in place the foundations of a team that could challenge in the East for the next decade!
The other set of two trades centre around Jrue Holiday. Jrue was acquired in a three-team deal with Indiana and Orlando which jettisoned one of the weakest rookies of the year in memory, Michael Carter-Williams, and ageing sharp-shooter Kevin Martin for a future 1st and Holiday. Like Griffin though, Holiday was then shipped out a month later for $20 million in cap space, the underrated USA call-up Rodney Hood, and the chance to land a point guard on the open market this Summer - which then Andrei Kirilenko promptly did by signing Reggie Jackson!
These two sets of trades, with the signing thrown into the mix as a result, are the consequence of meticulous planning by Mr Barber, which also involves gaining $11 million in cap space by moving Timofey Mozgov back in March. The planning has paid off and Brooklyn are now looking very interesting for the future, a completely rejuvinated squad from the team that took the court last year, Josh earns his place for the most sweeping turnaround in the league this year.
Trading:
Signing:
Drafting:
Planning:2015 Team
Greg Monroe
Marreese Speights
Nicolas Batum
Kevin Martin
Michael Carter-Williams
2016 Team
Willie Cauley-Stein
Jahlil Okafor
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist
Devin Booker
Reggie Jackson
Fourth Place
Chicago Bulls - Shane Battier
In fourth place this year we have a team that looked set to have an underwhelming off season but, with thanks to this year's most controversial decision, managed to completely turn things around for the Bulls and boosted them back into championship contention!
Chicago this year looked like a shell of their former self. Chris Paul was doing all he could to will the Bulls into contention, finishing fifth in the MVP race as a result, but after battling the Heat every year for the first four seasons it was looking like the sun was setting on both teams as the Bulls finished as fifth seed in the East. Unable to compete even against a Bucks team absolutely decimated by injuries, it took all of Shane Battier's effort on Kawhi Leonard to earn him a place in the running, and he squeaked past the Hornets in the race for Kawhi's services after the Suns lack of effort showed through during negotiations!
Kawhi Leonard was obviously the tipping point. The likelihood of Chris Paul and the rest of the Bulls re-signing after Kawhi joined them was a huge factor in the signing and it obviously proved to be true as the rest of the team took heart and re-joined the revamped roster! CP3, Jimmy Butler and Joakim Noah have all declared they are returning on Bird Rights.
If that wasn't enough free agency luck for Shane Battier he added a cherry on top by somehow signing Marvin Williams for the cheapest contract in the league this year! Half of what it could have been!
None of this would have been possible if Shane hadn't planned well in advance and, regardless of how you feel about the signings, the Bulls have been transformed and it's all down to a GM that never scrimps on effort! Shane submitted some of the most impressive offers this year and, unlike some of his fellow dedicated GMs, the luck has flowed freely for him in off season free agency! After writing his thesis on the league Shane Battier can take a good rest as his Bulls no doubt ride their luck deep into the playoffs next year, the Bulls are now part of the resurgent Eastern Conference's top teams! In terms of team turnaround there's not many who can compete with signing Kawhi Leonard, the only reason Shane Battier finishes behind three others this year is because more recognition is given to trading skill than anything else.
Trading:
Signing:
Drafting:
Planning:2015 Team
Joakim Noah
David Lee
Jimmy Butler
Arron Afflalo
Chris Paul
2016 Team
Joakim Noah
Marvin Williams
Kawhi Leonard
Jimmy Butler
Chris Paul