When last we unveiled The Danny Ainge System, we expanded it from its original version, which rated every draft pick of every NBA team’s lead executive, to also include every trade and free-agent signing.
In other words: Here we will be analyzing every move of every shot-calling executive in the league.
The Danny Ainge System was inspired by the short-lived professional baseball career of the Utah Jazz’s president of basketball operations as well as comparisons between the NBA’s Daryl Morey and baseball’s Billy Beane, a pair of analytics-driven executives who have both been profiled by author Michael Lewis.
It uses baseball’s Sabermetrics to categorize every trade, draft pick or free-agent acquisition as a home run, triple, double, single, walk or strikeout. From there we can determine each executive’s “on-base percentage” and “slugging percentage” from every move, adding them together to calculate OPS. That number represents a rating for an executive, accounting for each shot-caller’s accuracy and excellence.
Still don’t get it? It will make sense as we go along. Trust me. This is going to be fun. I promise.
The higher the OPS, the better the decision-making. Putting up numbers over a longer period of time is more impressive, obviously, than a brief run of success or failure. Keep that in mind as we delve into this.
This exercise is meant to remove some of the subjectivity from our opinions on executives. From looking at the scope of an executive’s work, we can determine whether each decision was a success — and how much of a success any of them were. And by breaking down every move individually, we can dictate a fairly unbiased statistical analysis of an executive’s work. I had no idea what anyone’s OPS would be as I sorted through his every move, much less did I know where he would rank in comparison to the others.
All that mattered was whether a decision was a successful one, and in that sense this exercise is entirely subjective, because one person (me) categorized every move. It is, frankly, quite an undertaking.
I challenge you to challenge my work. I have been challenged before when we did this two years ago, and it went OK for me. One beat writer checked my calculations on the executive he covered and determined a single second-round pick was more of a walk than a strikeout. And he was right. Believe it or not, that adjustment was enough to up the executive’s ranking. Which means: This is a living, breathing document.
I am happy to admit when I am wrong, if only you can convince me. Which is precisely what I told an executive’s agent when he took issue with his client’s ranking on our last publication of The Danny Ainge System. Tell me which move is marked wrong. Convince me a free-agent acquisition should be ruled a triple and not a double. Show me the trade I have missed. (Shoutout Basketball Reference and Spotrac.)
When you have done the work, you can live with the results. This is what I will tell myself when this is aggregated and picked apart. So with some further ado: The Danny Ainge System: Trade History. (We will cover every executive’s draft and free-agency decisions, plus the overall rankings, in the coming days.)
We should note: Newcomers Jeff Peterson (Charlotte Hornets), Trajan Langdon (Detroit Pistons), Ben Tenzer (Denver Nuggets), Onsi Saleh (Atlanta Hawks), Scott Perry (Sacramento Kings), Brian Gregory (Phoenix Suns) and Bobby Webster (Toronto Raptors) do not have sample sizes big enough to evaluate.
Likewise, Golden State Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy, who was hired two years ago, has made only two trades — dealing for Chris Paul in the 2023 offseason and acquiring Jimmy Butler in February — making his contributions on that front an outlier. We will still list him here, so that we can include him in the overall rankings at the end, but it would not be right to include him in these particular rankings.
