Rumors have been swirling about the Minnesota Timberwolves President of Basketball Operations position for several weeks. Darren Wolfson reported that minority owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez were looking to make a “splash hire,” and Dane Moore listed five big-name POBOs the Wolves stated they were interested in hiring.
While, in theory, this sounded like a good idea, would it be possible to get any of these guys? If you are a top-5 executive in the NBA, the team you created should be good or competently tanking à la Sam Presti and the Oklahoma City Thunder. Therefore, you wouldn’t want to leave the good situation you’ve created. By the same logic, if you are one of the five best people at your job in an incredibly competitive sports league, you would think that your ownership group would value your talents. You’d think they would be willing to pay you a premium for the expertise you bring to an organization.
Despite this, Adrian Wojnarowski reported yesterday that the Timberwolves were able to hire Tim Connelly out of the Denver Nuggets front office by offering him $40 million over five years and ownership equity. This contract will make Connelly one of the highest-paid POBOs in the NBA. Regardless of its size, a slice of ownership equity would surely be a compelling offer to many POBOs without equity in the league. Despite this, there are no reports that the Timberwolves have had meetings or officially interviewed any of the other candidates they were reportedly interested in. So what made Connelly more available than any of the other elite executives in the NBA whom the Wolves could not lure to Minnesota? Several sources close to the Nuggets front office said on the DNVR Nuggets Podcast that they believe the owners of the Nuggets, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE), are partially to blame for Connelly’s departure.
KSE is not your typical ownership group. It is a giant holding company that owns many major teams, including the Nuggets, Los Angeles Rams, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids, Colorado Mammoth, Arsenal F.C., and Arsenal W.F.C. They also own two professional gaming teams and several of the stadiums their teams play in. To put it bluntly, they are very, extremely, unfathomably rich. So why then would they not consider matching the Lore and Rodriguez’s offer to keep the executive who drafted two-time MVP Nikola Jokic in the second round and built a team around him that contends for championships when healthy?
There are worse ownership groups than KSE. History suggests that they know how to hire good front office executives to run their franchises for them. Outside of basketball, the Los Angeles Rams just won a Super Bowl in the NFL. General manager Les Snead’s notorious “F*** them picks” philosophy helped them trade draft picks for veteran players like Matthew Stafford, who were integral to their Super Bowl victory. It also forced other teams to consider whether or not they’ve been overvaluing the draft. Meanwhile, the Colorado Avalanche are up 3-1 in a 7-game series that, if they win it, would bring them to the conference finals in the NHL playoffs. While their general manager, Joe Sakic, had some ups and downs at the beginning of his tenure, the Kroenke’s trusted him to work through the problems, and he has since built a strong team primarily through the NHL draft.
Hiring the right people is not the only part of being a good owner, though. You have to invest to keep your valued employees happy too. Connelly isn’t the first time KSE has let a great general manager get away from them. In 2013 Masai Ujiri was awarded the NBA’s Executive of the Year Award partially due to his adept handling of Carmelo Anthony’s trade demands. Despite their best player’s departure, Ujiri made enough moves that the Nuggets could still have a successful season by winning 57 games, the most in the franchise’s history at the time.
During Ujiri’s departure, ESPN reported that “Denver has a history of paying its front-office architects below-market salaries, from Kiki Vandeweghe to Mark Warkentien and Ujiri, who was one of the league’s lowest paid GMs with an annual salary south of $1 million.” The Toronto Raptors, who had missed the playoffs five years in a row, lured Ujiri away with a contract that ESPN reported was worth “nearly $3 million annually” over five years. While KSE had planned to extend Ujiri before Toronto’s offer came in, they clearly didn’t value Ujiri enough to make a counteroffer that was large enough to make Ujiri want to stay in Denver. Six years later, the Raptors won the NBA championship in 2019 after Ujiri made a stellar win-now trade for Kawhi Leonard, among other moves, that put the team he had constructed over the top.
History is now repeating itself with Minnesota’s hire of Tim Connelly. While the Timberwolves are obviously not guaranteed to win a championship because of their hire, KSE is once again letting their team’s architect walk. Woj reported that “Nuggets governor Josh Kroenke made a bid to keep Connelly, sources said, but an offer that would have made Connelly one of the higher-paid league executives was still dwarfed by the Timberwolves’ massive offer.” While ESPN points out that “only a handful of top league executives have ownership equity as a part of their deals,” the fact that there are a “handful” at all means a precedent has been set. If you want to keep a top-level executive in your front office, you may have to offer a slice of ownership equity.
While I would understand a smaller ownership group being unable to match Minnesota’s massive offer, the Timberwolves are the smaller group here by a large margin. According to Forbes, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment is the second most profitable sports ownership conglomerate in the world, valued at $10.7 Billion. With that in mind, $8 million a year and a sliver of ownership barely seem like a drop in the bucket for a holding group of that wealth, especially when paying a POBO who’s built such a great roster from the ground up. It’s a sentiment that many Nuggets fans and journalists seem to agree with, judging by the reactions in the past several days.
The Kroenke empire also has pinched pennies in other ways that have hurt their teams and fanbases. Denver Nuggets fans have experienced local TV blackouts for three years due to an ongoing contract battle between Comcast and Altitude Sports and Entertainment, a regional sports network owned by KSE. As a result, the Nuggets last season had one of the lowest local TV ratings in the NBA in the past 15 years.
DNVR Basketball Podcast proposed that KSE’s lack of commitment to the Nuggets fanbase and employees allowed Connelly to be “poached,” and from what has been reported, that seems true. Regardless, KSE’s failure to match Lore and Rodriguez’s offer has netted the Timberwolves one of the NBA’s best POBOs. It will be exciting to see what Connelly does to improve the team in the draft and the offseason.
