Sign David Griffin and get out of the way. Only way to salvage this heaping pile of crap.
OK. What has David Griffin done? LeBron was a gift. Everything else was in place already. All he did in Cleveland was cave to Rich Paul and give stupidly large contracts to mediocre players because LeBron wanted it.
He has GM experience, he cut his teeth here as an assistant GM. He has history with the organisation. Who do you have in mind since you're critical of my suggestion?
I’d be supportive of hiring Griff as well. Let him keep Jones and Bukstein around.
How many great GMs are there? There are really more teams -- an organizational culture -- competent folks constituting a "brain trust". The real loss in Phoenix was the loss of this brain trust...
...and David Griffin was the last remaining member of this brain trust to leave. We would do worse than to bring him back and ask him to re-establish this culture. I think Jones would fit right in as long as he wasn't calling all the shots.
"There are 3 rules I live by: never get less than 12 hours sleep, never play cards with a guy with the same first name as a city & never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Everything else is cream cheese."
Looking at the list of Griff's transactions: He did pretty well building a championship-contending team around Lebron. He orchestrated a trade of Andrew Wiggins for Kevin Love, which looks quite good for Cleveland in retrospect. He picked up some nice pieces, such as Iman Shumpert, JR Smith, James Jones (heh), and Richard Jefferson. Doesn't do very much interesting in 2016-17 era; mostly picks up end-of-the-bench guys like Deron Williams, Derrick Williams, etc.