Woj: Nets have four serious candidates for General Manager
When the Brooklyn Nets fired Lionel Hollins and reassigned Billy King, the team was put in an odd position, left without a general manager and legitimate head coach for the team. After two weeks of searching for King’s successor as GM, Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski reported that the Nets have narrowed down their search to four “serious” candidates for the position.
Two Western Conference executives have moved into prominent consideration with Bryan Colangelo and Danny Ferry for the Brooklyn Nets’ general manager job, league sources told Yahoo Sports.
Denver Nuggets assistant GM Arturas Karnisovas and Houston Rockets executive VP of basketball operations Gersson Rosas have emerged as serious candidates in the process, league sources told Yahoo Sports.
The Nets have expressed a desire to have a GM in place prior to the Feb. 18 trade deadline, league sources told Yahoo Sports. Formal interviews are expected to begin in early February.
Former Toronto Raptors and Phoenix Suns general manager Bryan Colangelo, the two-time executive of the year, has emerged as one of the top candidates for the Nets. If the Nets are looking for an experienced General Manager to be King’s successor, there aren’t many candidates that have as much experience and success as Colangelo.
Danny Ferry, a long-time friend of Billy King with a proven track record as a GM for the Atlanta Hawks, stepped down as GM in 2014 in the wake of a racial controversy. With Billy King helping the Nets find the team’s next successor as General Manager, Danny Ferry’s chances to be the team’s next GM are high.
Denver Nuggets assistant GM Artiras Karnisovas reportedly has some ties with Prokhorov’s inner circle.
Karnisovas and Rosas fit the Nets’ desire to have a more global scouting focus, something ownership believes was lacking under the previous regime. The Nets are severely limited in draft picks over the next several years, and will need to be creative in reshaping a floundering roster.
Karnisovas, a native of Lithuania, speaks several languages, including Russian, and has strong relationships with the members of owner Mikhail Prokhorov’s extended sporting inner-circle. Karnisovas was a college star at Seton Hall University, and has polished a strong global basketball résumé that includes jobs in the NBA’s league office, director of scouting with the Rockets’ front office, and currently as assistant GM with the Nuggets. Karnisovas spent two years as USA Basketball’s global basketball scout.
The final candidate listed is Gersson Rosas, Houston Rockets Executive VP of Basketball Operations. He reportedly has close ties with two potential head coach candidates, Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau.
Each candidate brings something unique to the table and it should be interesting to see who the Nets go with for the General Manager position.
What readers said at the time
2 replies came in under this piece in 2016, and they are kept here as they were written — the readers’ words, not ours, spelling and all. The thread is closed; the desk does not take new comments.
jerry2526 January 2016
Colangelo and Ferry are the only proven candidates. The Nets deserve a proven candidate who was a former player, knows everyone and has proven good negotiating skills. He also will have to name a coach and will have to have the respect of that coach.
Ferry should be easier to negotiate with – that is Prokhorov should be able to get Ferry to agree to terms, more so that Colangelo. I haven’t heard of any other team interested in Ferry, and for his own benefit he could put the bad press behind quickly if he accepted the B’klyn position. We haven’t heard of how interested Ferry is in the position, but it could be a negotiating tactic. We know King is pushing it, for obvious reasons.
The knock of some fans about Ferry is that it means Billy King would stay around past the end of his contract.
However, everyone agrees that King is a good judge of talent, but the knock is that he was just too generous in deals (giving unprotected picks, and too many, etc. because he was too inpatient).
If Ferry is the choice, I don’t see King all of a sudden making Ferry a bad negotiator (Ferry built up ATL in 2 years). And doesn’t concern me that King might stay around. Two brains is better than one and Ferry would be the one doing the deal making and the final decision maker.The other knock against Ferry, I don’t have enough time to go into full details here, except to say it is mostly exaggerated political correctness, something that people like Net Income subscribe to. After all Net Income is literally a NBC/MSNBC liberal and therefore the allowed commentary at NetsDaily is skewed to political correctness.
I won’t argue for Colangelo here (plenty of that at NetsDaily) even if it means giving more concessions that could hurt the Nets and Proky long term.
Re Ferry: he was sabotaged by one of the minority owners who didn’t want him to be GM in the 1st place. The owner, Levenson, of the Hawks likes Ferry to this day. And the minority owner was trying to force a sale of the team, so that he could “cash out”.
What Ferry did was reading a scout’s report that included an “ethnic (inside Africa)” not a “racial” insult and it was based on fact (the scout likely was from Chicago and knew Deng well). It was at a private meeting that should never have been recorded. It was a joke with no negative intent other than to suggest via the scout that baby Deng wasn’t as perfect as his image presented. It wasn’t much different from saying that Italians are mobsters, Jews are cheap or Indians run 7 Elevens or are in Tech Support. The Atlanta Constitution reported the detail of the likely scam that the minority owner perpetrated (and succeeded at) but the Politically Correct media wouldn’t report. And Billy King (was like a brother since High School) stating that Ferry doesn’t have a Racist bone in his body and was barely reported. And LeBron James already shrugged off the issue.
NetsDaily mentioned that this would be an issue beginning with the opening press conference. I disagree.
They would just say that this issue is history, Billy King is like his brother, and that Prokhorov and the Nets have a great history of tolerance (Jason Collins, etc) and that is that.With that said, it wouldn’t surprise be if Colangelo is their 1st choice, but wouldn’t come to terms.
jerry2526 January 2016
correction: I meant to say “maybe Deng wasn’t as perfect” not “baby Deng…..”