For years, I’ve been making comments like this, referencing rules for team management:

This situation with Dedmon is a good example of where my “no player options for non-max players” rule of team management comes from. https://t.co/ABLyLyFMhw — Ryan Bernardoni (@dangercart) January 16, 2018

This is mostly a trope to highlight things that I think are good practices for franchises to follow, but over the years the list has grown and shaped the way I think about the decisions that teams make. These rules are rarely absolute, and in some cases are more a guideline, but I do believe in them. Still, it can be hard for even me to recognize their wisdom in the moment, when reacting to news of a move.

There’s no way to get around that luck plays a huge role in determining NBA winners and losers. A franchise with competent decision makers and good luck will beat one with excellent decision makers and bad luck. However, even good luck can’t save an incompetent franchise. With that in mind, these are some rules (in no particular order) to help a franchise achieve basic competence and responsibly build up a team.

1. The purpose of the NBA is not to crown the best team in basketball, it is to make money

This is an absolute. No matter what plan you embark on in managing a franchise, you must remember that you are still a franchisee of an association that is part of the entertainment industry. The NBA goes 1,230-1,230 every season. They don’t care who wins or loses. They care about how much money they’re making. If you undercut that by subverting the idea of entertainment through compeition, the league will step in and ownership will fire you and then leak your manifesto and you’ll end up a beloved but unemployed meme while ownership skates by scot-free.

2. You can’t achieve your goals without defining your goals

It’s tempting to think that every team has a singular goal of winning a title within [X] years. This simply isn’t the case. Ownership sets the agenda and if you play in a small market, or have a fickle or disinterested fan base, your franchise may be focused on more immediate goals. Pretending that this isn’t the case leads to failing to achieve any goal, and can strand a franchise in the wilderness for years.

Recognizing that you have to deal with other goals that may not be ideal for putting together a title-winning team at least gives you the hope of being able to do both.

3. If you’re thinking about firing the GM, you should have already fired the GM

Let’s say you go to a casino with $100 and make a deal with the house. If in 24 hours you have $300 you can keep the money and get a free room for the week. If you have anything less than $300 in exactly 24 hours, you get nothing and have to leave the building. Ten minutes before the deadline you have $125. Under normal circumstances, you’re fine. You’ve won $25 and you’ve been gambling for a day; not a life changer but not bad. However, in your specific situation you have no choice but to quickly make some higher risk bets to try to get up to $300. Losing the $125 on a low-odds bet makes no difference; you lose it in 10 minutes anyway.

Don’t let your GM make decisions under the Sword of Damocles. They will make bad decisions.

4. The front office should listen to the coach, or fire the coach

Every team has a decision maker on personnel and that decision maker should not be the coach. However, that person should listen to the coach. If your coach cannot maximize the play or development of your players because they have a fundamentally different idea about how a team should be built, everyone is wasting their time.

5. Volume overtakes quality faster than you think

There’s nothing more valuable in the NBA than a top-5-ish player. I don’t think anyone would trade two perennial All Star reserves for the MVP. However, that calculus of having the singular “best asset” compared to multiple pieces who are currently perceived to be worse, flips higher up the totem pole of NBA players than I think most people believe.

This is not because having two good players is better than having one very good one. The reason the quantity/quality dynamic doesn’t hold up beyond the absolute best players in the league is that “quality” is a perception shaped by circumstance and luck, and it is not static. The 15th best player one season is regularly viewed as the 30th best player 18 months down the road, and vice-versa. Volume overtakes perceived quality not because it is inherently better, but because volume often becomes quality when situations change.

The team that gets the best player in a trade is more often than not deemed, “the winner” so this is a dynamic that good front offices can exploit.

6. Player options are for max-level players only

If a player tells you that they want a player option you should either offer them a bit more money to lock them into a set contract or walk away and let them sign elsewhere. Max contract players can’t be offered more money, which is why some of them are worth giving an option year to.

Option years are entirely downside for the team. It’s better to sign a three year deal for $36M than a four year deal for $40M because you aren’t only committing an additional $4M, you’re doing it in a way that can only be painful. Bad teams use player options to push risk into the future, keep current cap hits down to facilitate other signing or dodge the tax, or because they are lazy and impulsive.

A non-max player who you can only afford by giving them a player option is a player you don’t need and can’t afford. The only caveats here are “mutual option” seasons where a non-guaranteed year has a player option (this is basically just for ego and show because in theory it will almost never be played out) or a low-money, in-season signing, like a buy-out veteran.

7. Bad teams shouldn’t use the stretch provision

Just take the hit when you’re bad. Also ownership shouldn’t force management to use the stretch provision to avoid the tax. Just pay the tax; your team equity probably appreciated by multiple millions of dollars in the past year, anyway.

8. Front-load contracts when possible

This is another simple rule. If you can pay extra in the years when you have cap or exception space available, do it. This is really based on circumstances, though. You may find that following this guideline forces you to violate a different rule, in which case it may not be worth it.

9. The full mid-level exception is a sucker bet

The history of the full MLE is rife with bad signings. It hard caps you for a player who is supposed to be league-average, making league-average money. League average is barely different than a good minimum signing, in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes these signings do work out, but they’re still bad bets. Using the full MLE dollars to get a veteran but not for the full years of the MLE is a different category of contract and isn’t necessarily a bad bet.

10. Hard capping yourself for a non-star is bad planning

The gap between the cap, tax, and apron isn’t a huge amount. If you’re acquiring a max-contract star via a sign-and-trade then it may be perfectly fine to hard cap yourself. What you don’t want to do is find yourself hard-capped because you were being cheap, planned poorly, or have convinced yourself that a specific player is better than they really are in comparison to other options.

11. Preserve more than the minimum exception for your second round picks

This isn’t going to be possible 100% of the time, but proper sequencing of transactions and intelligent use of exceptions should make it almost always manageable. Locking up a second round pick for three or four seasons is much better than getting them for just two years. It gives you more time to develop the players and gives you choices as to when and how you want that player to hit free agency. A consistent stream of low cost, team controlled players each with a relatively low chance of succeeding is probably more valuable than whatever you did to run out of space or exceptions before signing your picks.

12. Never sell a draft pick for cash

The Celtics bought Rajon Rondo for cash and then he started on a title team, made four All Star appearances, and was traded for a bunch of good stuff. The Bulls would be better off, and richer, if they just drafted Jordan Bell and pocketed the money they gave to Christiano Felicio instead of letting the Warriors buy Bell from them. Don’t be short-sighted and cheap. Remember that volume beats your perception of quality in most cases, and that you’re already extremely wealthy.

13. You cannot have too many draft picks

Draft picks are tradable, stashable, and expendable. It costs nothing to have “too many” so you can’t have “too many.”

14. The best G-League player is probably as good as the worst player in your rotation

First off, we must recognize that talent is not perfectly distributed between the NBA, 2-Way contracts, and the G-League. The worst NBA players are definitely worse than the best G-League players, because the NBA includes young players who teams are trying to develop, old players kept around as “veteran leaders,” and players on long contracts who have had their careers derailed by injury or disinterest. If you had to rank every pro player in North America, the best G-League player would be closer to 300th than the high 400’s that would would hit if taking every NBA and 2-Way player first.

From there, the difference in current talent between the 200th and 300th best player is very small. Opportunity and role make a much bigger impact in differentiating those players than pure skills. If the 10th man in your rotation gets injured you probably do not need to spend assets to replace them, even if you believe that players 11-15 are all projects or washed up. Simply finding the best fit from the best players in the G-League will give you as good a result as giving up even a low value draft pick for someone else’s 10th man. You have scouts and coaches. Use them.

15. Don’t pay the full market rate for role players until you have the stars that define roles

Star players define their role players. If your team is not a contender it probably means you’re still searching for the star player(s) that can make you one. That being the case, it’s better to sign value contracts with talent that doesn’t fit the exact needs of your current team than stop-gaps who do, but are more expensive or who you don’t have long-term contract control over. It’s entirely possible that when you do know what roles you need to fill with non-stars, those roles will be different than the ones needed by your current team, anyway.

One of my team building rules:

Do not pay market rate for role players until you have the stars that define the roles you need to pay for. — Ryan Bernardoni (@dangercart) July 20, 2017

16. Buy flexibility whenever you can

Not only should you not give out player options, you should overpay in the short term to buy team options and non-guaranteed years whenever you can. In some years this won’t be possible because you’ll be operating under specific salary cap constraints, but when it is it’s worth taking advantage of. When you’ve got ~$10M in salary available and are faced with this choice:

Player 1: Grade B | Will accept a 4-year deal for $40M with a 4th year player option

Player 2: Grade: B- | Will accept a 4-year deal for $40M with no options either way

Player 3: Grade: C+ | Will accept a 3-year deal for $30M with the final year a team option

Sign Player 3 unless you’re a title contender. (Better yet, don’t sign $10M role players when you’re not a contender, but it’s just a simplified example.)

17. Only the most secure teams trade stars when it’s smart; most do it when they’re forced

If your goal is to trade for a true star player, you’re going to have to plan for when you think they’ll become available. The media, fans, and even other teams will start speculating about that player before they actually become available. If you buy into the chatter you’ll probably end up with the value of your trade assets peaking before the player is truly available, and then possibly not be in the ideal position when they are. Look to future points of leverage when trying to determine when a player may become a realistic trade target, not to when you “want” them to be or are hearing that they “might” be.

18. The trade that will solve your problems almost never solves your real problems

Unless your problem is “we have everything but an MVP candidate” and then you trade for Kevin Garnett, the trade market likely isn’t the answer to much. A good trade can be the difference between sneaking into the playoffs or not, or winning a round, but realistically the reason you achieved that goal may had more to do with luck than the trade you made. We can’t ever know how things would have played out if you didn’t make the trade, so it’s impossible to prove.

If the volume of options overtakes perceived quality relatively high up the player rank, and viable options exist on the fringes or outside the league, why trade future assets with upside and long-term cost control for short term fixes? If you’re looking for a fix to a specific problem your real problem is more likely something like “don’t have LeBron James” than “don’t have anyone to guard LeBron James,” anyway. You’ve just convinced yourself that it’s the second problem and not the first, because the first problem makes you feel powerless.

19. Narrative is important in trying to attract star free agents

A season before the Celtics got their free agent meeting with Kevin Durant, I wrote this:

We’ve seen many times that part of what draws stars is the chance to be part of a larger story. Tim Duncan almost joined the freaking Orlando Magic in his prime because he would have been able to team up with Grant Hill. T-Mac DID join the Magic for the same opportunity. LeBron left for Miami only when it was part of a package deal with Wade and Bosh. KG came to Boston only after we had traded for Ray. Aldridge almost went to Phoenix because they had Tyson Chandler signed and in the pitch meeting. There’s an allure to this. The Celtics with max cap space are not a contender for Kevin Durant. The Celtics with double-max space pitching Kevin Durant and Al Horford together? That’s interesting. The Celtics pitching Kevin Durant and Al Horford together with the promise of trading the 5th, 12th and 18th picks this year plus future picks tied to the wretched Nets for more veteran help? Now we’re talking.

The absolute best players want to own their situation. They don’t want to join a good team with a good situation. They want to join the best situation imaginable, or a transformative one that puts them at the center of a storyline. It seems that having an All Star in place and the cap space to add one more is, for some reason, less appealing than having double-max space and signing two stars together.

20. Bad contracts are bad contracts, even if you can “afford” them

Just because you have $25M to play with this season doesn’t mean that you need to sign the best player you can get to take a four year $80M contract. Team and player circumstances change quickly and “the best we could do” can become “this anchor is pulling us down” in the blink of an eye.

The problem with paying a player every dollar that you think they could be worth is that if they play up to the level you hope, all you’ve done is pay exactly what you should have. If they underperform you overpaid, and there’s a lot more space covered by “underperform” on the performance probability graph than “over-perform” when we’re talking about non-star, unrestricted free agents.

21. Roll a portion of your assets forward whenever you can

Invest in your future. In a world where most teams are looking for short term gains and consolidation of assets, breaking things up into pieces and playing the long game has a strong rate of return. Now obviously this doesn’t mean to trade Steph Curry for Damian Lillard and a draft pick, but when opportunities present themselves to not only break up one non-prime piece into multiple ones but also stretch some of those assets into the future, you should probably do it.

This runs against conventional wisdom and will probably get you skewered in the media on a regular basis, but that’s also probably why these are the most profitable opportunities to take. A sustainable pipeline of contract-controlled young players who become your reliable role players or, if you’re lucky, underpaid star, are what turn contenders into league dynasties.

22. Draft young in the top picks and old in the middle picks

At the top of the draft, where upside is king and the investment cost guarantees patience and opportunity, teams should draft young players. These are the players most likely to over-perform their draft slot, because you have to get really good to over-perform the normal high lottery pick. It may seem like they’re also more likely to bust, but history contains no shortage of “safe bets” on older players that turned into memorable draft busts.

Later in the first round and into the high second round it’s smart to shift your focus to older players. Unless you’re stashing a player outside the NBA, most franchises don’t have the bandwidth to give a young player without elite upside enough opportunity for them to develop. Coaches don’t trust 20 year olds and management isn’t heavily invested in the 24th pick in the draft. Players who are older and can immediately take advantage of the rare opportunities they get are more likely to succeed for the team that picked them (there are plenty of young players taken in the middle of the draft who found success with a different team when they got older after being dumped from their drafting team). The occasional swing for the fences is fine, but historically older players have done better in the middle picks.

23. Try to trade down in the draft

This is similar to the “volume surpasses quality earlier than you think” and “roll assets forward” rules. The historic performance of draft picks drops off quickly beyond the first few selections and is “flatter” than is normally recognized. It’s easy to fall in love with a specific prospect who you think everyone else is stupid for overlooking, but history says that trading up to get them usually doesn’t work out too well. It of course can, as it appears to with Utah and Donovan Mitchell, but the history is not good.

24. Make friends with the stupid, cheap, and desperate

Not all front offices are created equal. Smart teams know who the dumb teams are and they maintain positive relationships with them, or fleece them so badly to make it worth becoming an unlikely future trade partner. Who the poorly managed teams are shifts year-to-year, and much of our judgement from the outside is retrospective, but they always exist. I believe that the gap between good and bad management has been closing over the years, but there are 30 teams and someone has to be the worst managed.

Invasive and impatient ownership, inexperienced decision makers, rumors of front office ultimatums, or unclear hierarchies are characteristics of the teams you want to be trading with. These things can make them frustrating trade partners, but these are relationships worth cultivating. It’s a dog-eat-dog world when 30 teams vie for one title a year. Better to be the eater than the eaten.

This list is not absolute, static, or complete (I have more items but wanted to keep it to a tight 3,400 words). Circumstances change and a team can do everything wrong, fall backwards into a superstar, and never look back. A team can do everything right, suffer a catastrophic injury, and not recover for a decade.

The keys to NBA management are competence and luck first, excellence after. Following these rules will grant a franchise a baseline of competence which, if good luck strikes, will allow them to take their shot at making the biggest decisions, which are not governed by simple rules. The team that gets those right gets to throw a big party.