The moral of the story could not be clearer: Smart GMs, and smart fans, have to always be thinking about how their team can get a hold of a platinum, gold or a couple of silver and bronze superstars. It is the single most important issue—the defining issue—before an NBA GM. Once you have your superstar(s), then your job is to surround him with the pieces to win a title, but that is a day at the beach compared to trying to get a platinum, gold or even silver medal superstar in the first place.

As a GM, that was always the genius of Red Auerbach. He brilliantly planned far ahead to have his team stocked with a fresh superstar when the current one retired. From landing Russell to stealing Havlicek to drafting Cowens and then Bird, Red was playing the proverbial chess game to everyone else’s checkers. His capstone deal was the trade of Gerald Henderson to the draft pick that became Len Bias. Unbelievable genius by Red; incredible tragedy for the Celtics and the NBA.

Jerry West showed similar genius as he built the Lakers around brilliants maneuvers for Magic and Shaq and Kobe.

What Auerbach and West knew, and only a few still seem to comprehend today, is that it takes patience and planning to get in position to grab a superstar talent.

Yet there is a certain tragedy, an unconquerable degree-of-difficulty, to being an NBA General Manager or team president. Your job is to build a team than can contend and win a championship. Realistically there are never enough superstars to go around—if there were, it would be a different sport—and only a handful of teams in the league are legitimate contenders at any point in time. The vast majority are always on the outside looking in.

For that reason I have considerable sympathy for any NBA GM. They are supposed to win and win as quickly as possible. Sports media and fans are often impatient, as are owners. But achieving short-term success can come at the price of sacrificing the ability to get a superstar in the long run.

There is a powerful gravitational pull on a GM to produce a team that will make the playoffs, even if it cannot win a championship. This leaves teams in a purgatory where they never are bad enough to get high no. 1 picks, and they never have enough cap space to be players in the free agent market for superstar players. It takes courage, vision, patience, smart fans and a smart and supportive owner to overcome these obstacles and institute a plan that take a team off the treadmill and into contention.

What is maddening is there is still no guarantee that even the most visionary, patient and talented GM can pull it off; it requires a bit of luck as well. That is why so many GMs opt for the short-term program of immediate enhanced mediocrity rather than roll the dice on a long-term plan to win all the marbles.

There are three routes to acquiring a superstar in the NBA: the draft, free agency and trades.

The draft is the traditional and obvious route to get a superstar, because once you get one you seemingly are set for a good decade.

When one looks at the draft, it does not take a genius to see that a team has to have a very high draft pick to get a superstar player. Let’s see at what point in the draft the superstars were taken.

Where players were drafted by overall Pick No. (not round):

*Ben Wallace

The “funky” category refers to players like Larry Bird, Dr. J, Moses Malone, Spencer Haywood, George Gervin and Paul Arizin and a few others that did not go through a conventional draft process where they would be picked and then play for an NBA team the next season. This was due to arcane rules like the territorial draft or to the existence of the ABA. All of these guys would have been first or second overall in a conventional draft, and should be regarded as such. Many of the guys picked in the 2-5 range were selected in years where there were other superstars selected before them; otherwise they would have been No. 1 overall. (The draft is funny; it has bumper crop years like 1960, 1984 and 2003, and stretches of no-superstar years like we had from 1999 to 2001.)

So what does this mean? If one converts the funkies into top-3 picks, it means 41 of these 66 superstars were picked in the top-3. If the odds of getting a superstar are long in the top three picks of the draft—exactly 22 of the 120 top-3 NBA draft picks between 1971-2010 have gone on to make platinum-gold-silver superstar status—they barely exist as one goes deeper into the first round. Note that several of those No. 1 picks between 4-14 were either in superstar heavy years like 1984 and 2003, or were high school picks like Garnett, Bryant and Amar’e Stoudemire. But since 2006, drafting guys direct from high school has ended and it is far harder to steal a great talent after a player has spent one season in college basketball. Had any of those three guys played a year in college, where do you think they would have gone in the subsequent draft? Almost certainly first or second overall.

This is no surprise: the greater the player, the earlier in his career his greatness becomes obvious, even to the untrained eye.

This is why the smart move, even to a dummy, is to finish with the worst record every year and eventually, probably within four or five years, you will have one or two platinum or gold medal superstars. Then you are off to the races for 12-15 years of basketball nirvana and bliss. The problem is that if every team without a superstar rationally decided to tank, the league becomes a total joke, with a first division of five or six contenders playing their butts off and another 20-25 bumbling slapstick knuckleheads competing to go 0-82 as if it were the premise of a Will Ferrell comedy; it undermines the credibility of the league.

This is why the draft lottery exists in the NBA but in no other team sport. (It is also the tacit recognition by the NBA for the Superstar Theory.) If the worst team got the highest pick, or even had a coin toss to get either the first or second pick in the draft as once was the case, it would be extremely rational for teams to tank their season once they determined they could not contend for the title. Especially if a no-brainer platinum or gold medal superstar was going to be in the upcoming draft. The fact is, that even with the weighted lottery, it still is quasi-rational, especially in years like 2003, 1984, 2007—or 2014?—when the top of the draft is crawling with superstar talent. But, that being said, the lottery has reduced the odds dramatically. My beloved Boston Celtics tasted this bitter fruit twice, in 1997 and 2007. It truly is like playing the lottery.

The odds are today if an NBA team ends up in the lottery for several years it would still not get a superstar, and the owner and fans would grow impatient. GM heads would roll. Tanking is an option that has to be done carefully and intelligently.

One approach smart GMs like Auerbach and West have used to address the dismal prospect of tanking (and now the low likelihood of winning the lottery) is to make trades to get future No. 1 picks from desperate teams that probably are going to suck down the road. They follow the maxim of General Patton who implored his troops not to die for their country, “but to make the enemy die for his country.”

The NBA has been and is littered with short-sighted teams willing to trade the future for a slightly more mediocre present. This was how the Lakers got the picks that became Magic Johnson and James Worthy. Every NBA team used to have Cleveland’s Ted Stepien on speed dial and all the owners would race at the league meetings to be the first to get Stepien alone in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Finally the NBA put in the Stepien rule preventing teams from trading future No. 1 picks in consecutive years.

Even poorly managed teams are wary about trading future No. 1 picks these days because it could blow up in their faces, so they put restrictions, such as lottery-protection, on them. It is rare for a traded first round pick to not have restrictions on it. That makes the deals that netted Magic Johnson and James Worthy for the Lakers far less likely.

The rule changes as well as the use of restrictions on traded No. 1 picks make it harder to use the draft unless a team is picking first overall and/or it is a year crawling with superstar talent. As a rule, approximately just four platinum and gold medal superstars enter the league every decade, as well as around six silver medal superstars. So there are drafts, many of them, with no superstars in them at all. Kenyon Martin, anyone? How about Andrea Bargnani? Or Anthony Bennett, if the scouting reports are accurate, for that matter.

Bottom line: Tanking makes sense in certain years and certain situations. But the lottery makes it an implausible course on an annual basis. Smart GMs try to get future no. 1 picks from other teams that are unprotected many years down the road. That way your own team does not need to stink in order to have a shot at a top pick in the future. This has gotten a lot harder to do, though it is not impossible.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the Celtics trade of Garnett and Pierce to the Nets is that the three No. 1 picks the Cs receive are unprotected. That won’t matter in 2014, but in 2016 and 2018 that could be huge, as the Nets are an old team with an inflated payroll and few options to rejuvenate themselves when Garnett and Pierce meet the end of the road. The Celtics also have the right to swap No. 1 picks with the Nets in 2017. An absolutely brilliant trade for the Cs. If the Nets do not win a title in 2014, it could go down as a miserable trade for them. If the Nets do win a title, it was well worth the cost. It’s not like they were going anywhere otherwise.

Free Agency & Trades

As using other team’s draft picks has become less effective for netting superstars, free agency—and trades associated with impending free agency—have grown in importance. This is now the standard way teams acquire superstars.

In the 1980s and 1990s, with the salary cap and Bird Rights rules, it was almost impossible for a superstar to switch teams in free agency. Most teams were over the cap and could not compete, those that could compete tended to be lousy teams, and the team holding the superstar could always exceed any outside offer. The rare time this did occur, Shaq to the Lakers in 1996, it was because Shaq wanted to be in Los Angeles so badly, he was willing to accept the salary the Lakers were in a position to offer. Jerry West did everything in his power over two years to get under the cap far enough to make a competitive offer. Bravo, Jerry West.

This is unusual, and had a lot to do with Shaq liking Los Angeles. But aside from Shaq, free agency was not a viable way for a team to grab a superstar.

That is no longer as true, due to an unintended consequence of an important change in the 1999 collective bargaining agreement. When the NBA instituted its “maximum” salary, it meant that a team with sufficient cap space could offer a superstar nearly the same salary as the team holding the superstar’s Bird Rights. Interestingly, it took until the summer of 2010 for NBA superstars to understand this was something they could exploit to cherry pick the team and teammates they wanted. That was the beginning of the new world order.

This is why and how James, Carmelo and Howard switched teams; such a prospect would have been unlikely before the era of the maximum-contract.

Some cities and franchises will always have more pull than others if salary is off the table, and each superstar may have his own tastes for where to live and play. This puts pressure on teams to create an attractive environment for prospective free agent superstars. It is almost like college recruiting. That tends to be easier for Miami, New York, and Los Angeles than it is for Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee.

Because of this change, having cap space has become far more important for an NBA GM. If a team is far enough below the salary cap, it can sign a maximum contract superstar without having to worry about what anyone else will do. The most recent example: Houston and Dwight Howard. The increasing importance of cap space makes those four-year, $20 million contracts to mediocrities like Courtney Lee far less palatable than in previous CBA’s. Teams that have superstars and are in serious contention can afford to add journeymen at such rates—Mike Miller, anyone?— but for non-contenders it is suicidal to waste serious money in deals for mediocre players. Joe Dumars’ insane decisions in 2009 to sign Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva to five-year mega-deals are exhibits A & B. That team did not have a prayer of winning or contending for the NBA title even with the free agent signings. Far better to sign anyone to one-year deals and keep the option of cap space alive for the next year (and have expiring deals in the meantime).

One other advantage to clearing cap space: it makes it far easier to do “sign-and-trades” for restricted as well as unrestricted free agents.

One mechanism that remains underexploited by NBA GMs is to add an unguaranteed year (or years) to the end of contracts. This allows teams to trade players in the off-season before their final unguaranteed year for the value of the unguaranteed deal, and then the team that gets the player can release him. It is, in effect, a way to easily create effective cap space for trades. Expect to see a lot more of that in the future.

One other consequence of the maximum-contract and the emergence of free agency as a viable way of acquiring superstars is that trades have again become an important tool.

Previously, no rational team with a platinum or gold medal superstar in his prime would ever trade him unless forced to do so by the superstar. There was simply no price on earth that was acceptable compensation, unless it was another platinum or gold medal superstar in his prime. Between 1960 and 2010, seven times platinum or gold superstars have been traded while in their prime in deals that did not net the trading team a similar superstar in return. In six of those seven deals, the team that got the superstar went on to win an NBA title in short order, while the team that traded away the superstar never won anything with what it got in return. They usually went into a tailspin. The only traded gold-medal superstar who failed to win a title with his new team was Charles Barkley, whose 1993 Phoenix Suns made the Finals and gave the Bulls a serious run for their money but could not win the title. As for the 76ers, after Barkley was traded they continued to rebuild for a decade.

It brings to mind Kevin McHale’s maxim for judging any NBA trade: whoever gets the best player wins the trade. Period. (Ironically, McHale broke his own rule when he traded Garnett to Boston—where Garnett immediately led the Celtics to the 2008 championship—but who was equal to or better than Garnett in 2007? Duncan? LeBron? Kobe? Think those guys were on the trade market?)

Moral of the story—you never win by trading a platinum or gold medal superstar.

But now that has changed. On the one hand, teams that know they are going to lose their superstar, like Cleveland in 2010 with LeBron James, will do a sign-and-trade so they can get one or two No. 1 picks and create a massive trade exception. Miami does it so they can add a year to James’ deal and pay him at a slightly higher rate.

On the other hand, trades play a much larger role because teams know in the new era of free agency it is better to trade a player before he hits the market and you may get nothing back in return. Denver did this with Carmelo Anthony, Utah with Deron Williams, New Orleans with Chris Paul, and Orlando with Dwight Howard.

What this means for an NBA GM is that free agency and trades associated with free agency are much more important than they used to be, and the draft is less important. That is where the great GMs put their energy: create cap space and accrue assets like No. 1 picks and promising young players to make deals for superstars possible when they present themselves. Just as important: make your team a place a superstar would want to hang his shingle. Often times that means already having a superstar or potential superstar in tow. The nature of the current system reinforces the Superstar Theory because the rich get richer.

CLICK HERE to read Section C: What The Superstar Theory Does And Does Not Explain.