Bickley Blast: How Phoenix Suns’ Mat Ishbia broke 2 rules naming Brian Gregory as new GM

Bickley Blast: How Phoenix Suns’ Mat Ishbia broke 2 rules naming Brian Gregory as new GM

and Marada Mornings. Arizona sports, the local sports leader, Bigley Blast. After Baxter Holmes and ESPN’s investigative team swooped into Phoenix after Robert Sarver relented and sold the team and exited stage left, I truly believed we were gifted one of the greatest reprieves in basketball history. Today it feels just a bit different. Matt Ishbia has promoted Brian Gregory to be his next GM, a college lifer, and an assistant coach on that Michigan State team Ishbia played for. And it feels like something straight out of the Jerry Jones playbook. Hire an underqualified candidate who will be beaming with gratitude and easily controllable. It’s the kind of hire that allows an owner the freedom to pull strings whenever he wants. and the kind of hire that feels like cronyism. So much wrong with this on the surface. You cannot hire from the same pool responsible for a train wreck basketball season we endured last year. You cannot task somebody with so little NBA experience with the trading of Kevin Durant. Ishbia said in a press release that Gregory has a brilliant basketball mind. But where is the evidence? What about last season screams brilliant to anybody? because he helped draft a couple of decent rookies. Please, this is incredibly disappointing and alarming on a lot of levels because unlike Sarver, we know Ishbia will pay the cost necessary to win. We know how badly he wants to win. But the Suns are a national punchline once again, just like they were under Sarver. And the new guy still cannot see the path that leads out of darkness. hiring a proven GM and getting out of the way. Instead, Ishpppia is doing exactly the opposite. All right, today’s Vickley Blast brought to you by my great friends at Chapman BMW. Make luxury attainable. Find them online at chapman BMW.com. All right, away we go with the second half of the show. the news of the week, the news of the day, obviously the the rumors and the speculation that became official yesterday. Uh with the promotion of Brian Gregory, we’ve talked about it a few different times this morning. We’re both trying to wrap our heads around how this is going to work and where the brilliant is in Brian Gregory’s resume. Yeah. And the and the weird sort of needle in the hay stack like hitting the bullseye moment here for me is I’m never someone normally Dan who is going to be overly critical of a front office hire or a head coaching hire because ultimately all of the factors that go into that a lot of them are so far beyond their control and you can bring in a GM who like let’s say was an assistant GM in this place for six years and then was like the vice president of basketball operations over here for 5 years. That’s even the type of thing where it’s like, okay, what did they really do? What trades were theirs? What signings were theirs? That sort of difficulty in getting that done. Head coaching hires, similar kind of thing where the dynamics that are out of their control don’t necessarily get attributed. Like guess what, Mike Benhoer is a very good basketball coach. Uh Frank Vogle is a very good basketball coach. Those are two sort of recent examples right there. But this is one that we undeniably just have to be harsh on because there are the two separate factors here that we’re going to continue to bring up. One of them is that just there is no way that you can look at what Brian Gregory has done and believe that he is qualified for this job. And secondly, it is impossible to ignore the Michigan State and Matt Ishbia thing. But to start on the first point again, if the core part of his resume that we’re building on that makes him qualified for this job is what he has done over the last nine months or so. One of them at the top, even in the press release, is getting attributed to some of the drafting and the scouting they’ve done, namely Ryan Dunn, namely Osgar. I’m gonna keep bringing it up because I can’t freaking believe it, is that he gets hired in June as vice president of player programming. And apparently, this is the guy who led the charge, was one of the guys leading the charge in drafting Ryan Dunn Ry drafting Oso Igadaro within less than a month of being permanently in the front office. I’m sure that he was part of conversations before that, part of scouting before that in his consultant role that Gerald Borg on Pation Sports pointed out. But all of this just produces an extreme amount of skepticism where it feels like I’m about to overdose and pass out on my skepticism that I have about the Suns right now. It’s like it’s overbearing in time at times. I really I totally agree. I listen, I totally agree with you and and it’s it’s hard because as we have all experienced being a Suns fan over the past couple of decades, there’s been a lot of trauma. There’s been a lot of embarrassment. There’s been a couple of teams that had a real shot at it and and were still searching for that elusive championship. And and we we become quite a civic study in in how uh in affinity to our favorite sports team in the market and getting no results, what it does to the fan base, what it does to the temperature online, uh how divided some of this fan base has gotten. We saw it last year when fans of Devin Booker and fans of KD would go back and forth at one another and and and all of it kind of flows from the same uh place. What what what bothers me really is that um Matt Ishbia wants a championship so bad that he is prom that he promises multiple championships and yet he he can’t bring himself to relinquish control to people who actually know how to get it done. And and that’s my only issue. When Joe Lacob, the owner of the Golden State Warriors, came out and said, “We are light years ahead of the competition.” Joe Lacob got rad over the coals for saying something that arrogant, even though he had rings. And this is this is what I think Mattishbia probably doesn’t fully see is that how preposterous some of this stuff sounds with the with the results he’s produced. So far, another part of some worry that I have here, it’s it’s not major to be clear. I don’t necessarily believe this to be fully the case, but I have to bring it up and wonder a little bit is was this necessary? And and what I mean by that was did the Suns go out and talk to Bob Myers? Did they go out and talk to some of the leading candidates for open GM jobs? And they got skepticism back in their own regard because candidates were unsure of how much control they would have in the front office. like that sort of thing has to come up when you have someone as underqualified as Brian Gregory is for this position to ultimately get this job. You wonder how the search went. Who did they interview? Who did they talk to? How did those because you’ll remember Mike Benhoer initially did interview for the Sun’s job way back in 2019 or 2018, excuse me, before Monty Williams sort of started to come in. That was Igor Kakoskov year. He looked at the rebuild that was sort of coming and instead went to Milwaukee. But that was the thing where I believe it was Sarver who like traveled to go speak with Benhoer as well. And you wonder how much that interaction just demotivated him from being interested in the job. And that’s a type of similar thing here that you have concerns about. This is just one of those things, Dan, where I can’t wait to be wrong if I’m wrong about it. I hope I hope to everything that I can hope to that we are wrong about this. We’re not We don’t know. We don’t know this guy. We don’t know him. All we’re basing this on is his resume. That’s all we can do. Yeah. So, so if it sounds like we’re being unfair to him, we’re trying to be as fair as we possibly can. There’s just nothing for us to really go off of that would produce any sort of optimism at all and him being qualified for this job and doing a good job. So again, I want to preface like with all due respect with everything that we are saying, we’re not trying to bash this dude before we even see what he is doing. But again, with everything that he is going to be doing, we wonder if he is really the guy ultimately making those decisions because of the extra layers. And on uh who did they else did they talk to kind of thing, Gambo yesterday tweeted, “Yes, there were other candidates. My understanding is that five were considered not all formal. Player development was the most important aspect in making the hire.” Player development in a GM position. Yeah, I think I think it makes sense to some extent to target that skill set, especially with what the Suns are going to need, but something Gerald pointed out in his story as well, is that this is not necessarily the team we’re expecting to be building through the draft over the next couple of years. The return for Kevin Dre is going to include some level of draft picks, but from everything that we’ve heard and everything that’s been reported, the whole pivot and reload thing, the whole like a draft pick quotes that Matt is had to ESPN’s Tim McMahon back in March. We’re not expecting this to be a situation where they’re building up all of this young talent, but you hired a guy to do exactly that. And I think that’s the right move to be clear, but this has to match what they do. Like if they trade for Kevin Durant and they don’t even get a first round pick back, it’s like why did you hire the player development guy when you didn’t even get more draft pick capital back? They still have some left to be clear. But what they do this off season and acquiring again like let’s say it’s the Knicks trade that you do and you get OG and Anobi, Mitchell Robinson, Deuce McBride, whatever. All of those are players that are already far established in the league right now. But if you do the Rockets trade and you get Reed Shepard or you get Tari E or you get Jaylen Green, those are guys that you can develop. And again, we’re going to have to see the moves match sort of what they’ve been looking for. And if you go back again just a couple of weeks ago to the press conference and what we were told, like the massive changes that were coming and what was going to be in store, this just doesn’t feel like much of a change.

Dan Bickley tries to make sense of Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia choosing Brian Gregory as the team’s new general manager while moving James Jones to a senior advisor role in Friday’s Bickley Blast.

Suns promote Brian Gregory to GM, James Jones reassigned: https://arizonasports.com/nba/phoenix-suns/gm-brian-gregory/3582392/

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