It’s been five years since Sean Marks took the job as Brooklyn Nets general manager. Five long years as Buddy Guy sings. Five years since the Brooklyn Nets were considered the most hopeless team in the league, five years since a roster that peaked with Brook Lopez and Thad Young with no sign of visible draft picks on the horizon thanks to the gargantuan whiff that was the Nets-Celtics trade. Wins on the hardcourt were equally as elusive. Five years later, however, the Nets are championship favourites as we crack into the first round of the playoffs.

The Executive of the Year award is a weird one because at least things like MVP and MIP and ROY have defined parameters. They’re seasonal awards based on seasonal performances. Game one through to game... well, in this case 72. But the Executive award is a little slipperier because a GM’s job doesn’t stop and start with each season like that, you don’t reset the win count or whatever. It’s an ongoing, continuing, flowing thing. What happens last season sets you up for this season, what you do this season affects how next season unfolds.

Sean Marks’ 2020-21 season has been highlighted by one major move: the James Harden trade. There have also been some sneakier trades (Landry Shamet and Bruce Brown have been really important depth players for them) as well as some free agents and buyout additions. Jeff Green has played the second-most games on the roster. LaMarcus Aldridge didn’t quite workout as health reasons caused him to retire midseason (fair enough) but Blake Griffin shapes to be a useful dude in these playoffs. Plus we can’t overlook the hiring of his old mate Steve Nash as head coach either (nor the world’s most illustrious assistant coaching crew). Mostly it’s the Harden Trade though. And it’s one big move like that, coinciding with some winning basketball, that often defines these awards.

Like, Marks has arguably done better work in previous seasons but nobody’s giving him EOY for stumping the Blazers and Heat with poison-pill restricted free agent offer sheets (for Allen Crabbe and Tyler Johnson who both ended up at the Nets anyway before the ends of those contracts). There was the D’Angelo Russell trade as well, flexing salary space and taking advantage of a weird situation to improve Brooklyn’s standings. Not to mention the ones that really changed the course of the franchise: Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving signing in free agency. Sean Marks started off making small net gains and like a winner at the blackjack table he’s continued to do the same only with larger and larger stakes as the pile of chips builds up beside him. Here’s a thing about that whole process.

But the Executive of the Year award doesn’t go to guys who make tidy moves, it goes to guys who make big splashes. Last season it was Lawrence Frank of the LA Clippers who got the gong after having brought Paul George and Kawhi Leonard into the franchise. Before that Jon Horst got it with the Milwaukee Bucks in the year that Giannis Antetokounmpo won his first MVP and the Bucks emerged as title contenders. The time before that it was Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets as James Harden won MVP and Houston got the 1-seed. That was also the year they traded for Chris Paul and re-signed Harden... a couple seasons later and heaps has changed there. We can go deeper on past Executives but you get the idea, it’s all the same.

The trend is that you’ve either gotta be GM of the best team in the league (most likely with the MVP in tow) or you wanna be a contending team that’s just made a huge move to get into that contendership. Sean Marks definitely ticks the latter box. The former box is close too as the Nets gained the second seed in the East but with the caveat that there were only a handful of regular season games in which Durant/Harden/Irving all played together – eight games in fact. A mere 5.8% of the team’s total minutes. All of these awards are as much to do with perception as they are reality (hence why Jordan Clarkson won 6MOY and not Joe Ingles, although the presentation was pretty cool). The perception here is that Sean Marks has built a juggernaut, even if most of the work was done last season.

It may or may not work in his favour that, unlike other awards, the Executive one is voted for by their peers. Representatives from the front offices of all thirty teams. Marks seems to be a well respected dude amongst that crowd but whether he’s a popular fella is a different matter considering he’s been more than a little ruthless in his dealings at times. All in the game but remember he got just a single third-placed vote in last year’s ballot – despite signing KD and Kyrie which moved the needle much more than the Harden trade (granted Durant missed the whole season so there’s a chance some of that consideration is passed along until this term when things actually moved forward from those deals).

Still, rival GMs will have seen the steady work that Marks has done and how it’s gone under the radar. They’ll also be well aware, and a little jealous, that a blockbuster trade like the Harden one is not an easy thing to pull off. Not with multiple teams involved, not with the secrecy of the negotiations, not with being able to acquire an MVP calibre player for as little as they gave up. There were four teams involved in the deal but here’s specifically what the Brooklyn Nets gained/lost in the transaction...

Admittedly that’s a lot of draft picks... which is about all that the Houston Rockets have to console themselves with given that Victor Oladipo isn’t even on the team any longer. The one major guy they got back for one of the five best players in the NBA over the last half decade and he only played 20 games for them. But at least they have three first round picks over the next five years which will probably convey outside the lottery every single time. And those pick swaps are worthless unless they finish ahead of the Nets in those seasons. For reference, the Nets went 48-24 this season while the Rockets went 17-55.

Meanwhile the Nets have gathered up four picks in the upcoming draft (three of them second rounders plus 27th overall) and while they gave up Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert, both were dudes that Marks drafted himself with non-lottery picks and developed to that level. Gotta think the relative fleecing there of a rival in the trade also counts towards Marksy’s case.

Who are his main challengers for the nod? There are a few, to be fair.

1. James Jones (Phoenix Suns) – After that 8-0 run in the bubble gave them some momentum (even if it didn’t give them a playoff spot), the Suns have gone hundies this season to capitalise and capitalise they have done. Second best record in the NBA with 51 wins in a 72 game season after scooping up Chris Paul from OKC in a trade that definitely legitimised what they’ve been building there for several seasons. But watch the Suns in the playoffs and it’s more than just CP3 and Devin Booker, they’ve got a really talented roster that gels together with ease thanks to clever transactions throughout.

2. John Horst (Milwaukee Bucks) – Hadn’t worked out for them the previous two years, so Horst went out and traded for Jrue Holiday to really tighten up that starting five (PJ Tucker and Jeff Teague have been useful veteran adds too)... but most importantly was getting Giannis to sign that supermax contract extension which was the most important move any GM made this season considering the benefits of getting it done versus the consequences of failing to do so.

3. Daryl Morey (Philadelphia 76ers) – The Sixers needed to shake things up. Along with GM Elton Brand, new ‘president of basketball operations’ Daryl Morey set about doing exactly that by getting rid of Al Horford and Josh Richardson and replacing them with genuine shooters like Danny Green and Seth Curry to fit around the re-upped core of Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons... with Embiid getting MVP buzz and both in the DPOY consideration. What counts against Morey though is he’s not actually the GM so there could be split votes (and it’s kinda rude to Brand otherwise), plus a lot of the performance stuff comes from the hiring of Doc Rivers which occurred before Morey landed in this gig.

4. Sam Presti (Oklahoma City Thunder) – He’s surely not gonna win it because this is not an award that goes to tanking teams as we’ve already established. But collecting a king’s ransom in future first-round picks while continuing to develop the impressive young players already on the roster is a hell of an achievement.

5. Travis Schlenk (Atlanta Hawks) – Trae Young is The Dude in Atlanta, he’s the man in the spotlight as they’ve leapt back into the playoffs for the first time since the Mike Budenholzer days... but they couldn’t have done it without quality additions like Dan Gallinari, Kris Dunn, and Bogdan Bogdanovic. Probably not enough pizazz here to get Schlenk the award though – no blockbuster deal and they’re only the fifth seed after all.

The trade that led to the bottoming out of the Brooklyn Nets franchise, which Sean Marks was hired to dig them out of, happened in the 2013-14 season. One of the most one-sided beneficial trades in NBA history which set the Celtics up for years to come – Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown were both drafted with picks from the Nets (tbf, they traded down two places to get Tatum but in effect it’s the same thing). Plus they hired Brad Stevens that season. Yet Danny Ainge only got one first-placed vote that season for Executive of the Year.

Maybe that’s because the benefits of the trade were more visible further on down the road. Ainge won the award the year that the Celtics last won the title (2008) but hasn’t won it since, perhaps if he’d been more aggressive with all those draft assets he picked up then he might have (Celtics ratio of ‘rumoured with star player’ versus ‘actually traded for star player’ is almost as wonky as the Nets trade). Arguably an even bigger snub was when Masai Ujiri was overlooked the year he traded for Kawhi Leonard and won the title... although the voting presumably would have happened before the playoffs so that’s a flaw in the system, s’pose. There was also the year that Sam Hinkie got fired and still ended up on like three people’s ballots. Lesson here being that there are only thirty votes, one per franchise, it’s the only award decided by peers, it’s the only one for which the ballots are never revealed, and professional bias and pettiness definitely come into account.

It feels like it’ll come down to James Jones vs Sean Marks. Jones is in his second full season as GM of the Suns with more of a clean slate than Marks. He’s quite a few years closer to his playing career having only retired in 2017. Will any of that matter when it comes to the voting? It might. Will Sean Marks get carry-over points for the quality work he’s done in rebuilding this franchise over previous seasons? He might. Though it’s possibly not the best sign that he’s only ever gotten one first-placed vote before (in 2018-19, when they made the playoffs for the first time in his reign). The work has been done. The case is clear. We shall see how it all happens.

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