Anyone who’s read our VM basketball previews in the last few years knows that the Timberwolves are in terrible shape, and it’s due to the incompetent dealings of its general manager, Kevin McHale, who can also be faulted for being part of the Joe Smith debacle that ruined Kevin Garnett’s career.
So that’s why it’s really funny that when Forbes.com came up with a system of metrics to evaluate general managers across the major sports, they ended up with Kevin McHale as #1.
Given the failure of that system, I’m going to have to take any of their other rankings with a grain of salt. I think this is an instance where the metrics sounded good, but when they were applied and led to this Bizarro world where McHale’s #1 and Billy Beane is #26, someone should have said, “Maybe we need to re-weight or add some other factors.”
And ranking Billy King of the Sixers at #3 was also pretty mind-boggling.