Magic’s Martins: I have no role in basketball ops
Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins claims he virtually had nothing to do with the basketball decisions during former general manager Rob Hennigan’s fiveyear tenure of misery and malaise.
Martins refutes the amplifying narrative that he is some sort of pushy puppetmaster who is pulling the strings on trades, draft picks and coaching hires.
Martins says he and the DeVos family hire GMs such as Hennigan, butt out and let their hires sink or swim based on their own merit.
“On a day-to-day basis, I don’t have any role in the basketball operations,” Martins told me in a recent interview. “The way I and the DeVos family operate is that we hire people that have the skill and expertise to do their job, we allow them to do
their job and then we hold them accountable.
“Our role is to hire and to fire. … We encourage and give them [the GM and his basketball operations staff ] the assets they need to be successful, but at the end of the day, they make the decisions … and they’re hired and fired based on those decisions.”
Martins, of course, fired Hennigan on April 13, and there are naturally many upset fans who believe Martins himself should be held more accountable for Hennigan’s monumental failure.
After all, Martins is the team CEO and the man ultimately in charge of overseeing basketball operations. He’s the one who hired a 30-year-old Hennigan as the youngest GM in the league even though Hennigan had never before been in charge of running an organization.
Not only that, but Martins says he allowed Hennigan to have carte blanche on every decision in regard to drafting players, hiring coaches and making trades.
“When trades happen and when trade talks occur, I’m not even privy to a lot of the discussion that goes on in those individual discussions with teams,” Martins said. “It’s the final recommendation that comes from our basketball executive that myself and the DeVos family ultimately say, ‘Yes, go for it.’ The bottom line, particularly during the last five years, is that the word ‘no’ was never used when anything was brought to us from our basketball operations.”
This is why it’s imperative that the Magic restructure their front office and hire not only hire a general manager but a president of basketball operations who reports directly to the DeVos family.
Martins is too busy doing other things — overseeing ticket sales, corporate partnerships and the Magic’s planned entertainment development on Church Street across from the Amway Center. There’s no doubt that Martins has been a valuable asset to the organization who made a name for himself by brokering the deal that got the Amway Center built.
Martins is a businessman and darn good one. He is a marketing guy and a darn good one. He’s a deal-maker and a darn good one.
But as the leader of the team’s basketball operations, he’s not been so good. Granted, when he took over, he waded into a cesspool of team and ownership dysfunction. He was thrust into the CEO role in 2011 during two messy divorces. Superstar center Dwight Howard was in the process of walking out on the Magic while Martins’ predecessor — former CEO Bob Vander Weide — essentially was getting excommunicated from the DeVos family during an ugly divorce from wife Cheri, daughter of team owner Rich DeVos.
Still, there’s no denying that on the court Martins has supervised a basketball operations staff that is 132-278 — the worst five years in Orlando Magic history. He handed the keys for the car to a young, inexperienced Hennigan, and now the car is in the ditch with four flat tires and black smoke billowing from underneath the hood.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe the narrative espoused by some that Martins is a meddlesome middle man between the general manager and ownership or whether you believe, as he says, he essentially “rubberstamped” all of Hennigan’s decisions over the last five years. Either way, the roster is a mess.
Let Alex Martins continue to do what he does best for the Orlando Magic: Make money.
But it’s time to let a new president of basketball operations be in charge of spending it.