July 24, 2009

Kiki on the Couch: 18 Months In (Part II)

On December 31, 2007, Kiki Vandeweghe joined the Nets as a special assistant to President Rod Thorn. Fewer than five months later, on May 8, 2008, he was elevated to General Manager. Another year after that, the team has shifted from a core of Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson and Vince Carter to one centered around Devin Harris, Brook Lopez and other young, talented players (like the recently acquired Courtney Lee or first-round pick Terrence Williams) who are surrounded by a cadre of capable veterans on short-term, cost-effective contracts.

A year-and-a-half into his tenure, we sat down with Vandeweghe to discuss the direction of the team and why "the real work begins now." Part one of our Q&A follows.

Check out Part I of our Q&A, and also the moves he's helped make.

NJNets.com: You've had to make some tough decisions, like trading future Hall of Famers in Vince Carter and Jason Kidd and a scoring forward in Richard Jefferson. How does the process of deciding to make those moves evolve?

Kiki Vandeweghe: When I came in, Rod and I sat down and went through tons of different variations on how we could improve the current team. Because that’s always your first alternative on how to get there, with ‘there’ being a championship contender: you may not make it to the championship, but you have a very good chance of making the Conference Finals and you’re a successful team during the year. Could we figure out any way to get there and sustain it, where it’s not just a one-off year?

Putting our heads together -- and obviously you need to be able to sign players or have the cooperation of other teams to make trades -- there was no way to get ‘there’ and it wasn’t practical for us to do that. We had no cap flexibility, no picks. We weren’t in good position; we were a classic ‘middle’ team and that’s a tough place to improve from, because generally your picks aren’t great, and unless you have all young players and all the extra space, being a middle team is difficult. And we didn’t have that stuff. Once you sat down and looked at all the alternatives, your decision -- although difficult -- became much easier to make.

NJNets.com: So when it comes to actually making those type of moves, how do you actually begin formulating deals?

Kiki Vandeweghe: My opinion is, just like any other business, you need a business plan and you need a direction. If you don’t have a direction, any way will get you there. So you need a direction, a goal, you need an understanding of what you’re going to be. When Rod and Bruce Ratner hired me, I said, ‘I really want to be part of a championship-caliber team and I’ll be a pain in the rear end if that’s not where we’re going.’ Both of them are highly competitive people and that was a shared goal, so it was a good fit. We knew where we wanted to go and we understood that our fans deserved the best possible team we could put out on the floor and that if we had to go through a rebuilding process, we wanted to do it as quickly as possible.

Lots of teams take years and years and never get there, but if you have a gameplan, talk to your fans about it and execute against your gameplan quickly and decisively, then you have a better chance of getting there. It’s not easy, because along the way there are always Band-Aid solutions. And I think that’s one thing we tried to stay away from: marginally improving in the short term and taking away the flexibility to really improve, to make a big step. But that’s always very difficult, because all of us are competitors, all of us want to win.

There’s no one way to do this, there’s a lot of different ways and Rod’s been through probably all of them at this point. But this was a path we agreed on, that this was the right thing to do. And if you’re going to do that, you try to do it as quickly as you can, and to do it, you have to go out on a limb a little bit. When you trade a great player like Jason Kidd for a younger player in Devin Harris, you never know how it’s going to turn out. But we had a lot of confidence in Devin and I think it’s turned out very, very well for us. Devin’s been great, he’s got a big future ahead of him. He was an All-Star last year and I think he’ll continue along that path, continue to improve as a point guard.

It’s a tough process because you’re trading away, at times, very good players. But if you stay with your gameplan -- ‘Can you do the right thing for the right reason?’ -- and generally it works out.

NJNets.com: With all that in mind, how would you respond to a fan concerned about the team on the floor this year?

Kiki Vandeweghe: I would say we had Vince Carter and we didn’t make the playoffs, so that limited our ways to improve. If you’re going to keep him again and just miss the playoffs again … that’s not where we want to be. Last year, I was very proud of the guys; they played extremely hard. But I think we went as far as we could. Now we have a very young team, and I think an exciting team that is going to play hard every single night and I think can be more competitive – last year they picked us to be last in the league (and we weren't).

Everybody always says, ‘Well, you traded away a great older player,’ and it’s difficult to get better trading away, in the short-term. but unfortunately, players don’t last forever. Although I think Vince can be a great player for two, three more years -- however long -- he’s a tremendous athlete, tremendous talent, but unfortunately for us, we didn’t have the flexibility to improve to take advantage of that. We got to trade Vince to a championship-caliber team where he’ll do very well and have a long playoff run next year, and that fits his time horizon as a player. And we got a real good young player in Courtney Lee, who’s going to be with us for a very long time, and that fits for us. Plus, we got all the cap flexibility of of Carter’s contract coming off, and you can utilize that. It’s always tough trading good older players, because they’ve done so much in their careers. But it’s nice when you can reward them and send them to a good place.

NJNets.com: One more -- what other team turnarounds would you offer examples of how this process could prove successful, and soon?

Kiki Vandeweghe: Certainly Boston’s an example where you’ve got one tremendous player who just changed your equation. They developed some good young players and traded one of their best young players (in Al Jefferson) for a great star (in Kevin Garnett) to add with Paul Pierce and Ray Allen. And just from personal experience, my last job was Denver, and we won 17 games one year. But we made the playoffs the next year, winning 43 games, and they’ve been good, winning close 50 games ever since -- the team was built to last. Whether you make it to the Conference Finals or not, you know you’re going to be in the playoffs and be competitive every night, maybe one good player away, but you’re there.

So you look at that, you look at Phoenix, where they sort of tore it down and built it up over a couple years. Those are examples of teams that have done it. But Boston, that was a four- or five-year process to get to that. Obviously, you’d love to have the success they had at the end, but we hope we don’t have to take that long to do it.