10. George Steinbrenner, Yankees, 1980-90. Okay, officially, George wasn't the GM. But, let's face it, he was the man making the personnel decisions, no matter how much he blamed his bad transactions on "my baseball people."
When he had Gabe Paul from 1973 to '77, Al Rosen in '78 and '79, Gene Michael stepping in after his suspension in 1990, Bob Watson in '96 and '97, and Brian Cashman from 1998 to 2010, George was a great owner, which is why he's only Number 10 on this list. But he was a horrible "GM," and that's why he makes this list at all.
9. "The Secaucus Seven," Nets, 1978-98. Led by Joe Taub and Alan Cohen, these guys got little to work with, and they made less out of it. Having to pay $8 million just to get into the NBA following the collapse of the ABA, and to pay off the Knicks for "territorial indemnification," the Nets had to sell off their best player, Long Island native Julius "Dr. J" Erving, and a year later trade their next-best player, Bronx native Nate "Tiny" Archibald.
In other words, just to remain in the Tri-State Area, the Nets had to dump 2 of the men who would be named in 1996 to the NBA's 50th Anniversary 50 Greatest Players.
So how many times did the Nets make the Playoffs in those 20 seasons that the S7 owned them? 10. Which isn't actually all that bad. But how many Playoff series did they win? One. That was in 1984, against the defending World Champion Philadelphia 76ers -- with Erving -- before falling in 6 in the next round against the Milwaukee Bucks. How many Playoff games did they win? 9, with 5 of those coming, as I said, in '84.
It's not so much how often they made the Playoffs, it's how bad they were when they didn't. And the bad draft picks... Dennis Hopson, Ed O'Bannon, Yinka Dare... Maybe the Nets weren't as big a joke as the other "little brother" team in the NBA, the Los Angeles Clippers... but even when they were a good team, 1982-86 and 1992-94, they didn't exactly sell out the Meadowlands. Partly because the established, glamorous Knicks were also good at the same time.
The general managers over that time included part-owner Roy Boe, 1973-74 (he was also an owner of the Islanders), Dave DeBusschere, 1974-75; Boe again, 1975-78, including the decisions to trade Erving and Archibald; Charles Theokas, 1978-81; Bob MacKinnon, 1981-83; Lewis Schaffel, 1983-86; MacKinnon again, 1986-87; Harry Weltman, 1987-90; Willis Reed, 1990-96; and John Calipari, 1996-99. So there were some guys who really knew their basketball, but, given the Nets' situation, were in over their heads as GMs.
The S7 sold the Nets in 1998, and in 2001 new ownership made the trade for Jason Kidd and the team made 2 NBA Finals, reaching the Playoffs 6 straight seasons, before Bruce Ratner bought the team and put their breakup and move to Brooklyn into motion.
Despite a 20-year record of ineptitude, I can't rank the S7 any higher, for 2 reasons: There were 7 of them, not any 1 that was more responsible than any other; and the Nets have always been the 2nd basketball team in a 2-team town. Sometimes 3rd, when you consider St. John's.
In fact, counting all the area's major league teams, they're the 9th team in a 9-team town. And, frankly, counting the Liberty and the Red Bulls may not be doing the Nets any favors, either. We'll see if the current management team, led by owner Joseph Tsai and GM Sean Marks, can turn them around in Brooklyn, but don't hold your breath.
8. Mike Milbury, Islanders, 1995-2006. He was one of the players who typified the Boston Bruins' late 1970s-early 1980s "Lunch Pail Athletic Club": Not especially talented, but hard-working, the kind of guy you needed to win. As head coach of the Bruins, he got them to the 1990 Stanley Cup Finals, but got swept by the Edmonton Oilers, whose GM and former head coach was Glen Sather. (See #5 below.)
In 1995, the Islanders named him head coach and GM. He was asked by a reporter how he expected to compete with the Devils, who had just won the Cup, and the Rangers, who had won it the year before. He had the right attitude: "You know, fuck the Rangers and fuck the Devils! I'm running the New York Islanders!" From Flushing to Montauk, you could hear Isles fans saying, "Hell yeah!"
But even when they were winning 4 straight Stanley Cups, the Islanders have never been a team with deep pockets. The moves Milbury made were terrible, pretty much demolishing a team that had come within 3 games of the Finals just 2 years earlier. He removed himself as head coach, reinstalled himself, and removed himself again. He never hired a good head coach, and from his 1995 hiring until 2015, 20 seasons, the team made the Playoffs 6 times, winning 11 games and exactly zero series.
Milbury's heart was in the right place, and no one could question his courage. If he only had a brain. He is not solely to blame for the club's post-1993 decline, but, competitively, it still doesn't look good for the team's long-term future.
7. Wilbur "Weeb" Ewbank, Jets, 1968-74. Bear with me: In order to make you truly understand what Weeb did to the Jets, I have to make this one long. A truly great football coach, he was the only man to be head coach of both an NFL Champion (1958 and '59 Baltimore Colts, both times over the New York Giants) and an AFL Champion (1968-69 New York Jets, over his former team, the Colts). But look at what he did with the team as GM after owner Leon Hess fired Sonny Werblin.
Imagine that it is August 1969, and you are the General Manager of the New York Jets. Your team has not only won the World Championship of American football in its last game that counted, but it did so in a fashion that stunned and excited the entire nation. You've just won an exhibition game (strangely, played at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut) in which you decisively defeated the Giants, the City's NFL aggregation. So now you are definitively the best team in your sport, both in New York and in the world.
The Knicks have glamorous stars like Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley and the courageous Willis Reed, but they haven't yet won their 1st title, and even after 2 titles they won't be as big as a popular football team would be.
The Mets are in their 1st Pennant race, but haven't yet gotten their "Miracle" fully onto the City's radar. And even when they do, their marquee player, Tom Seaver, as great as he is and will be, is a private man: He can handle the spotlight, but he does not relish it, and isn't the most bankable guy around.
You have Joe Namath, a glamour guy at the glamour position (quarterback), in the glamour city, in what's becoming the glamour sport, and he loves the spotlight, eats it up. You've just proven that the Giants stink. So do the Yankees, whose big star Mickey Mantle just retired. The Nets are in the ABA, out on Long Island, so they're an afterthought. The Rangers are a bunch of Canadians, not exactly popular in an America that elected Richard Nixon. The Islanders and Devils don't exist yet. No college team in the area is doing big things.
Maybe you don't own the New York Tri-State Area, but you're co-owning with the Mets and the Knicks, and that's pretty good. You've got it made.
And your franchise loses in the 1st round of the next season's Playoffs... and then doesn't reach the Playoffs again for 12 years! And doesn't win another Playoff game until a year after that!
The Jets could have become the team in New York football, instead of becoming a joke franchise, which they still are, at least for the moment. Considering the kind of opportunity Ewbank had in 1969, it is almost a crime that, by 1986, Sports Illustrated could put Lawrence Taylor and Mark Gastineau on their cover, with the words, "In the Big Apple, the Jets are always the second banana."
Weeb never should've been named GM. Jerry Izenberg, the legendary columnist of the Newark Star-Ledger, calls the Jets' inability to win a Super Bowl, or even to reach one, these last 41 seasons "The Curse of Sonny Werblin." That doesn't make much sense, since they did win the next Super Bowl after firing him. Maybe "The Curse of Weeb Ewbank" is better.
6. Mike Burke, Yankees, 1966-73. A genuine hero of America's effort in World War II. A great businessman. A man who loved sports. And, along with Mayor John Lindsay, the man who saved the original Yankee Stadium for an additional 2 generations. We should thank him for those things.
But while he loved baseball, he didn't know how to run a sports team. Granted, the Topping-Webb regime left CBS, and their handpicked team president Burke, a pig in a poke, basically a brand name and nothing else. But he didn't do much with it: When the team finally won the whole thing in 1977, only 4 players were left from before George Steinbrenner owned the team: Roy White, Thurman Munson, Sparky Lyle and Graig Nettles. I think when George came in, and then bought Burke out, it was a great relief to Burke.
Burke, handing the team over to Steinbrenner, January 3, 1973
5. Glen Sather, Rangers, 2000-present. A Ranger defenseman from 1971 to 1974, he became one of the great coaches and GMs in hockey history when he coached the Edmonton Oilers to 4 Stanley Cups and was GM for 5. But what has he done in 20 years in New York?
His head coaches have been abysmal: John Muckler (who succeeded him in Edmonton and won the 1990 Cup, but awful at the Garden), Ron Low (aptly-named), Bryan Trottier (real smart, hiring one of the greatest Islanders with no head coaching experience to run the Rangers), himself (not so easy when you don't have Gretzky, Messier, Kurri, Anderson, Coffey, Lowe and Fuhr all in their primes), Tom Renney, John Tortorella, Alain Vigneault, and now David Quinn.
And when the Rangers finally did reach the Conference Finals in 2012, they ended up losing to the Devils, a humiliation that well and truly pus the 1994 Cup win deep into the past, every bit as much as the Isles' 1980-83 Cups irrevocably are. Reaching the Stanley Cup Finals in 2014 didn't help, as they got embarrassed by the Los Angeles Kings.
Sather still holds the titles of Senior Advisor and Alternate Governor (the NHL calls their teams' operational owners "Governors"), while Jeff Gorton (not auto racer Jeff Gordon) is the official general manager.
Of course, Sather hasn't done as much damage to the Rangers as Milbury did to the Islanders in a shorter span of time. The Rangers were never in danger of getting moved out of the Tri-State Area. Besides, somebody had to make the mistake of hiring Sather, and then keeping him for this long.
4. Omar Minaya, Mets, 1995-2002, 2005-10, and 2017-present. Previously a scout under GM Steve Phillips, he left to become MLB's 1st Hispanic GM, with the Montreal Expos. With that team getting moved to become the Washington Nationals, the Mets brought him back as their GM.
He was going to lead the Latin Revolution in Flushing Meadow. He brought in Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado, Johan Santana and Francisco Rodriguez. And David Wright. (How'd that Gringo get in there?)
2005: No Playoffs, but that's okay, because they're still working their way up. No shame in that.
2006: One run from a Pennant, but a 9th-inning homer by the opposition, and Beltran leaves the bat on his shoulder. Okay, that's not good, but there's still plenty of reason for optimism.
2007: Up by 7 with 17 to go, and they don't even make the Playoffs. Now that is a disgrace.
2008: Up by 3 1/2 with 17 to go, and they don't even make the Playoffs. In this case, half a disgrace does not lessen the disgrace, it compounds it. They couldn't even win the last game at Shea Stadium. They couldn't let their beloved home "die with dignity."
2009: The 1st season at Citi Field is, competitively, an unmitigated disaster.
2010: Another sub-.500 season.
All the while, the Yankees remain the Number 1 team in town, winning a 27th World Championship. The Mets are still looking for a 3rd. The Yankees have won 40 Pennants; the Mets won a 5th after firing Minaya, but are still looking for a 6th.
Can't blame it on the manager, because the Mets failed under Willie Randolph and failed harder under Jerry Manuel. Nope, don't blame the waiter, blame the chef.
Frankly, the Wilpons should have dumped Minaya after 2008. After all, '05 was a rebuilding year, '06 was pretty successful by Met standards, and '07 could be written off as a fluke -- a mind-numbing, nasty fluke, but a fluke nonetheless. But 2008 should have been the alarm bell. The Mets should've broken up with Minaya then.
Finally, in 2010, the Wilpons told him, "This relationship isn't working, and I think we should start seeing other executives." No, Omar, it's not them, it's you. The Latin Revolution left Met fans feeling so tortured, it should have been called the Spanish Inquisition.
For a while, he worked in the front office of the San Diego Padres. They didn't come close to a Pennant while he was there. He returned to the Mets after the 2017 season, as a "special assistant to the general manager." It seems that Fred Wilpon just can't quit Omar.
UPDATE: In 2023, Hal Steinbrenner hired Minaya as a front-office consultant. It appears to have been key to the Yankees obtaining Juan Soto in a trade. That trade may yet redeem Minaya, and force an update of this list.
3. Isiah Thomas, Knicks, 2003-08. It was bad enough that Isiah made some bad moves as GM. It was worse that he trusted some guys who couldn't coach, including himself. It led to the infamous T-shirts: "Don't hate the players, hate the coach." And if that had been the extent of it, that would have been bad enough, although perhaps not bad enough to make the top (or should that be "bottom"?) half of this list.
But through his private life becoming public, he dragged the Knicks through the tabloid muck. Once the team of Clyde Frazier, cool and stylish, a team the ladies could love as much as the guys, the Knicks had become a festering sewer, both competitively and morally.
Of course, Thomas didn't do as much damage to the Rangers as the Secaucus Seven did to the Nets. And the damage he did, while severe in terms of public relations and competitiveness, both on the court and in the boardroom, didn't put the Knicks in danger of moving or going out of business. Besides, somebody had to make the mistake of hiring Thomas, and then keeping him for that long.
2. M. Donald Grant, Mets, 1962-78. He was a friend of Mets founder Joan Payson, and she hired him to be the team's 1st chairman of the board. After the 1969 season, the Mets owned New York every bit as much as the Jets did. After the 1973 season, when they'd won another Pennant, they were so far ahead of the Yankees it wasn't funny -- though you can be sure Met fans were cackling with glee.
Surely, with their (relatively) new ballpark and exciting young players in a nice neighborhood, they had the advantage over the Yankees, with their old ballpark and failing players in a disastrous neighborhood, not to mention their crazy new owner.
The Mets, or rather Grant, frittered away so much of that goodwill, to the point where a few Met fans -- not many, but a few, including Brooklynite college student and aspiring filmmaker Spike Lee -- switched to the Yankees after they returned to the top, a rise coinciding with the Mets' collapse.
Grant, a stockbroker, was Mrs. Payson's close personal advisor when she became the original owner of the Mets. He probably had very little influence in player movement for the first several years, and in the days before free agency, no one could say that the Mets were particularly cheap. But... Grant did not believe that a ballplayer deserved to be making as much money as a stockbroker or real estate magnate, and probably didn't think they belonged at the same parties or meetings, either.
Grant's meddling, no doubt, played a part in driving Mets' GM Bing Devine, who was doing a nice job of trying to build a winner, back to St. Louis. It was probably after Mets' GM Johnny Murphy passed away in 1970 that Grant's influence began to increase. Whitey Herzog was Mets' player development director and heir to the GM job, but Grant passed him by because he knew he wouldn't stand for any interference from someone who in Whitey's words "knew nothing about baseball".
The next two Mets' GM's, Bob Scheffing and Joe McDonald, probably had their hands tied by Grant, his frugality, and his belief that ballplayers should be quiet, sign their contracts, and just play ball. When a player became outspoken about salary issues, such as Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman did, it was only a matter of time before they would be sent away. When Gil Hodges died just before the 1972 season began, Grant again chose to bypass the outspoken Herzog, driving him out of the organization, in favor of Yogi Berra.
Probably the best example of how out of touch M. Donald Grant was with the average fan was when he tried to explain the Tom Seaver negotiations and subsequent trade in terms of bluffing and playing tricks in a hand of bridge. How many Mets fans have any idea how to even play bridge?
Things got worse when Mrs. Payson got sick, and died late in 1975. Her daughter, Lorinda de Roulet, inherited the team, and she knew that she knew nothing about baseball, so she trusted Grant even more.
Observe the breakup of the "Miracle" team: The autocratic Grant traded away Tommie Agee after the 1972 season, Tug McGraw after 1974, Rusty Staub (who would later return) and Cleon Jones after 1975, Jerry Grote after 1976, and Seaver and Kingman on June 15, 1977, a date which lives in Met infamy. Aside from the Dodgers and Giants getting moved out of town, this is the most hated transaction in the history of New York sports -- even if Steve Henderson had a few hits in him and Doug Flynn was a very good fielder.
Lorinda finally fired the old buzzard in 1978. By that point, attendance at Shea Stadium was so sparse it was being called Grant's Tomb: It had gone from a City record 2.7 million in 1970 to under 800,000 by 1979 -- or, per game, 33,000 to 9,740. Contrast that with the Yankees: 1972, 966,000 (12,000); 1980, 2.6 million (32,000). Not until 1980, when Lorinda sold the team to Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday, did things begin to turn around at Shea.
Grant died on November 29, 1998, 16 days after the death of Weeb Ewbank, and 12 days after the death of the Knicks' title-winning head coach, Red Holzman. Weeb and Red got a lot of praise in the New York media. Grant's death was barely even noticed. Serves him right.
1. James Dolan, Knicks and Rangers, 1994 to the present. His father Charles Dolan hired him to run Cablevision. Which, until Charles sold Cablevision in 2016 but kept ownership of all of the following, owned ITT. Which owns Viacom. Which owns Paramount Communications. Which owns Gulf + Western. Which owns the Madison Square Garden Corporation. Which owns the Garden complex, the Knicks, the Rangers, the MSG Network, and the Garden's boxing, concert and other special-events promotion companies. (From the team's founding in 1997 until selling them to Nets owner Joseph Tsai in 2019, the Dolan conglomerate also owned the WNBA's New York Liberty.)
"Guitar Jimmy" has done great things. He has promoted the Concert For New York City after 9/11, the Big Apple to Big Easy Concert after Hurricane Katrina, and the 12-12-12 Concert to raise money for relief of Hurricane Sandy. He is one of the most charity-sustaining people in America. He is, by most accounts, a decent person. (I have heard suggestions of "Me Too" incidents, but these have not been seriously pursued.) I have no reason to dislike him. Especially since I am neither a Knicks nor a Rangers fan.
But this is the guy who hired Glen Sather to run the Broadway Blueshirts, and also the guy who hired Isiah Thomas to run the Knickerbockers. Through those 2 guys, whom he showed unbelievable loyalty, to the point where both New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica and I, independent of each other, have wondered what kind of pictures Isiah has of Dolan, he has managed to futz up one of the NBA's charter franchises and one of the NHL's so-called "Original Six" teams, the 3rd- and 4th-greatest franchises in the Tri-State Area in terms of historic success (behind the Yankees and football Giants), for over a decade.
Think about it: Starting with 2000-01, the first full season in which Dolan has, effectively, been the big boss of both teams, the Knicks have won 1 Playoff series, and only 9 Playoff games, despite spending more money (even with the league's salary cap) than any team in basketball history.
The Rangers have done a bit better, but even that took a few years to really get rolling. Over that stretch, they have won 10 Playoff series, but only 3 times have they gotten to the Conference Finals, and only once to the Stanley Cup Finals, despite spending more money (both without and then with the league's salary cap) than any team in hockey history.
Think about that: 2 teams, same building, 20 years, 11 Playoff series won. That roughly translates to 1 Playoff series win every 2 years, for each team, in what's promoted as "The World's Most Famous Arena." From 1998 to 2011, there was a 14-season stretch without either the Knicks or the Rangers making the Playoffs.
Messing up one franchise for a decade is bad enough. Jimmy Dolan has messed 2 up for 2 decades. He's not a cheap dirty bastard, like Walter O'Malley or Donald Grant. He's not a sleazeball, like Isiah Thomas, or an "ogre" as George Steinbrenner was often called And he isn't a legend whose sport has passed him by, like Glen Sather.
On the other hand, he isn't a good man thrown into an awful situation, like Mike Burke. He's a (possibly) good man who made an awful situation -- indeed, 2 of them. Like Weeb Ewbank (as GM, anyway) and Mike Milbury, he is a guy in over his head. But it's Knick and Ranger fans who feel like they're drowning.
