What is success?

Being a general manager is often a fruitless task, with countless hours of thinking and acting not boiling down to a whole lot. The GM role in the NSL comes with a variety of tenants, and just as our personal life-philosophies differ incredibly, so do those of the head of thirty NSL teams/organisations. Sometimes you scrape wins and find gold, but it’s a constant process of communication and positioning.

The question at the core of these philosophies has to be what does one constitute as success? I genuinely cannot escape the thought that every single element of this game is subjective, besides the rules and regulations of our league and the absolute wins, like winning a title.



Everything else, and I mean everything, is skewed via the perception of each individual manager, their traits, beliefs and ultimately, their view of what success is. This can lead to plenty of frustration between managers, of dumbfounded onlookers, but this subjectivity is the reason a league like this survives and thrives. In the most concrete terms, only a championship is the ultimate successful season. However, progression, posturing, selling assets, buying assets – heck, even not winning games, or just having a player you really like - can leave managers feeling great about the state of their teams.

This ambiguity is the lifeblood of the NSL.


You’re being successful, you’re being successful – you’re all being successful!

Scanning the landscape of current managers, I see managers that are

*All in (think Sacramento, or Phoenix – I never saved anything for the swim back)

*Contending (think Portland, or San Antonio or New Orleans, who are winning and still have valuable, moveable assets)

*Pre-contending (teams like New York, Charlotte who are new on the playoff scene and could make another leap)

*Building (teams that are on an upward trajectory, like Orlando, Golden State)

*Biding time (typically teams with injuries or whose talent hasn’t translated to success, like Miami, or Memphis)

*Content (the teams that just enjoy their players, taking a gamble on a pick each season, like the Rockets)

*Sellers (Lakers, clearly, The Cavaliers post-Lillard and the Hawks with Embiid, Utah)

*Not actively trying to win (Boston, Milwaukee)

Each team trajectory and position directly influences how they behave within the league, including what they value in trades, how active they are in making changes, perception of how valuable wins/losses are, willingness to take risk and I think has a strong impact on how much they contribute and add to the league in a ‘visible’ sense.



What I wanted to attempt to do was to put risk taking and risk aversion head to head, and think about whether or not there is a more successful attitude to possess. It is likely that there isn’t a more valuable attitude to possess, as mentioned earlier that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Trading picks for a star that leaves in free agency could have you thinking

“Oh my, I just traded off valuable assets for nothing. My team is worse off on the court and within the asset portfolio.”

or

“Well, all that cap space that has been created will allow me to sign another great player and role players, which will help me win and can be traded.”

After contemplating what risk is in this league, I am comfortable quantifying different risk factors (and I am sure I am forgetting something – let me know if you identify another area)

Risk of poor record

(Having a poor record leading to always starting each season, at free agency, with less momentum. On top of that, not maximising the talent you might have on your team, learning less about what you have and how to make it work when the time comes.)

Risk of lost assets/value

(Being unable to retain assets, like trading a first for a player and having that player leave in free agency and being unable to recoup the value in subsequent players.)

Risk of undervaluing assets
(Selling assets for under what they are worth is something we might all have been victim of at some point or another, but this occurring too frequently will cap your team’s talent and ability to compile/move value in future deals.)

Risk of reputation
(Not putting in the effort with other managers, or being so difficult and/or unreasonable to deal with, due to subjectivity in viewing the value of assets, can alienate managers and make it hard for them to engage in talks and acquire assets from other teams. Why play with the difficult kid?)

I am still, however, no clearer on what is more valuable in this league. I feel the popular vote would be to make draft picks, keep players on your roster who you can secure under contract years. But in valuing those two factors so highly, you will be limiting your ability to make any deals, because you won’t want to move any of the aforementioned assets, and to compound the problem, you will only want to add assets like that, making dealing almost impossible.

Take a risk-taker GM... call him, Glenn Melo. He doesn’t value picks because they aren’t going to lead to on-court contributions for years, and in that time, his team could have achieved considerable success. Or another GM, who values cap space and what it can do, won’t see a big-contracted, great player leaving in FA as something as bad as a manager who is risk-averse.

Risk-averse teams tend to make lots of draft picks because of the security it gives them. I think it has a tendency to lead to sentimentality about the picks they make and about the drafting process in general – the warm fuzzy scouting and nurturing that comes with no expectations and just love, love, love.



I started this piece thinking I could deliberate style is more ‘successful’ but I tried to turn the greyest of greys into black and white and it was just not going to happen.

To conclude, there is no one measure of success or successful behaviours. Success depends totally on aspirations and aspirations depend totally on what key ideals that person holds dear to them. This whole crazy, mixed-up NSL world is a constantly tilting, skewing series of events and subjective reactions to those events’ a constant ripple that we ride as it swells and dissipates throughout the season and years.