For the past 23 years, the NBA has polled all 30 of its general managers at the beginning of every season to take their temperature on a number of league matters. Some of them are straightforward, like picks for the championship and MVP. Others are a bit more esoteric, like who the best international player not currently in the NBA is.
The answers are generally predictable. Of course the Boston Celtics are their championship favorites. They’re coming off of a season in which they won 64 games and posted the fourth-best net rating in league history. Few would argue that Nikola Jokic is the NBA’s best passer or that Erik Spoelstra is its best coach.
But every year, there are a few answers or voting margins that stand out. So let’s dig into the 2024 NBA GM survey and see what we can learn from the league’s roster-builders.
Boston’s overwhelming favorite status
Again, Boston’s status as the championship was never in question. What we’re interested in here is the margin of their victory in this vote. The Celtics won 83% of the votes in this poll. That is the third-highest mark any team has ever earned in this poll, trailing only the Stephen Curry-Kevin Durant-led Warriors of the 2017-18 (93%) and 2018-19 (87%) seasons. This means that more general managers are picking Boston this season than have ever picked a LeBron James, Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan-led team, for instance. Most sports books have Boston at around +320 to win the championship. Those represent implied odds of 23.81%, far lower than the 83% vote share they earned here.
Now, obviously, we need a bit of context. The general managers were not asked to assign a percentage likelihood that Boston or any other team would win the championship. They were given one pick, and most made the easy choice. This is how they tend to vote. The NBA has conducted 23 of these polls and the defending champion has been the pick in 13 of them if you include last season’s tie between Boston and Denver. But 83% is significant enough for us to take notice. A consensus as strong as this one is rare. The basketball world doesn’t just view Boston as a reigning champion. The Celtics have dynasty potential.
The Wemby era is coming faster than we could have imagined
Victor Wembanyama was a candidate to be the player most general managers would start a franchise with before he even played an NBA game. In last season’s vote, he finished second at 23% behind only reigning Finals MVP Nikola Jokic. This obviously set expectations sky high, but Wembanyama managed to exceed them. After a year on the court, he won this race at an astonishing 77% of the vote.
Now, that isn’t the all-time record here. Anthony Davis and Giannis Antetokounmpo both did so. LeBron James has on three separate occasions. But James didn’t reach such an enormous vote share until his seventh NBA season, after he’d already won an MVP award. Antetokounmpo also got there after his first MVP season, and while Davis hasn’t won MVP, he didn’t crack the 77% mark until his fourth season. We’ve had a second-year player win this vote before. Karl-Anthony Towns did so in 2016… but at just 48%. This combination of youth and certainty is unparalleled in league history. Wembanyama has played 71 games and he’s already considered more desirable than every active MVP and champion.
So what makes Wembanyama such a slam dunk here? Well, here’s a starting point: the GMs already voted him the best defensive player in the NBA, albeit at a lower vote share of 40%. As a point of reference, the Spurs legend that Wembanyama is succeeding, Duncan, never won this vote. Wembanyama is by far the youngest player ever to do so at 20. The previous standard-bearers, both at age-24, were Kawhi Leonard and Dwight Howard.
It’s not hard to put all of this together from here. Wembanyama can’t legally drink yet and he’s already the NBA’s best defender. He averaged 23.5 points, 12 rebounds and 5.3 assists after the All-Star break. Oh, and in the tightest cap crunch in league history, he’s cost-controlled by a rookie deal for the next three seasons. The question here isn’t how he reached 77%. It’s why 23% of the voters denied the obvious. This category will belong to Wembanyama in perpetuity so long as he remains healthy enough to claim it.
Front offices want rule changes in an unsurprising area
The story of the 2024 offseason has been the new restrictions to roster-building imposed by the aprons. Unsurprisingly, when asked which rule they’d want to change if they could, 20% of GMs pointed to the CBA. The vote itself was somewhat broad. Technically, they did not vote for a specific rule, but under the “Roster construction – Apron rules/trade math too restrictive or should be indexed to team’s market” umbrella. Nothing in the vote pointed to a single rule that executives are specifically frustrated with. The entire system seems to be bothering teams.
Now, that doesn’t make the new CBA impenetrable. The Knicks just sidestepped it deftly—and reportedly bothered the league office in doing so—in the Karl-Anthony Towns trade. Minimum salaries can no longer be aggregated, so the Knicks gave the three players they signed-and-traded to Charlotte $1 above the minimum to make the deal legal. There are still loopholes to be found here for teams that look hard enough.
But there is no denying the newfound difficulties this CBA has created. The only reason Charlotte needed to participate in that trade in the first place was because the Knicks and Timberwolves literally could not make a legal trade with one another by apron rules. Any team that absorbs more money than it sends out in a trade is automatically hard-capped at the first apron, and both teams were already above that threshold, so the only way they could have dodged that restriction in a two-team trade would have been by matching the dollars exactly, which they didn’t have the contracts to do. Charlotte was looped in to deal with a hard cap the Knicks and Timberwolves couldn’t afford to.
This seems like one rule that’s probably ripe for an adjustment. Even if the NBA wants to make it harder for expensive teams to trade with one another, requiring either a third team or a dollar-for-dollar match is a bit extreme. Perhaps a 5% allowance could be eventually be added, or maybe a set dollar figure. The NBA wants to encourage trading overall. It’s good for business. It drives interest in the sport, and front offices can’t always be relied upon to find workarounds like the Knicks did. Fans have wanted changes all summer. Now, it seems as though the league’s top basketball minds do as well.
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