Grunwald not gloating as Knicks hit new lows
Former New York GM was let go despite team having 54-win season under him
HAMILTON— In Glen Grunwald’s new office at McMaster University’s athletic centre, his walls are adorned with a colourful abstract of a fruit vendor, on loan from the university’s art museum, and a framed newspaper clipping about the university’s football team.
In spite of Grunwald’s 22-year career as an NBA executive with the Denver Nuggets, the Toronto Raptors and, most recently, the New York Knicks, the room is remarkably bereft of basketball souvenirs and memorabilia. It is as if the office was decorated for a man not all that interested in the past.
The lone memento from that period, a blue banner commemorating the Knicks’ 2012-13 Atlantic Division title, remains rolled up on the floor.
“What do you do with it?” Grunwald, the former Knicks general manager, wondered during a recent interview. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for here.”
Grunwald, 56, took over in August as McMaster’s athletic director. By then, it had been nearly a year since the Knicks had unexpectedly pushed him out of his job despite two straight winning seasons, in 2011-12 and 2012-13, and a run to Game 6 of the 2013 Eastern Conference semifinals.
With the Knicks now in the midst of a disastrous season that could turn out to be the worst in their history, Grunwald’s two years at the helm look more impressive by the day. With him as general manager, the Knicks went 90-58, including a division-winning 54-28 mark in 2012-13. It was the first time in 13 years that the Knicks had won as many as 50 games in a season.
Not only that, it was Grunwald who had the hunch to scoop up Jeremy Lin, an undrafted NBA castoff, leading to New York’s brief, but beloved, era of Linsanity. And he had the sound judgment to acquire Tyson Chandler, who became a pillar, for the most part, in his three seasons with the Knicks.
The acquisition of J.R. Smith was also a coup for Grunwald and the Knicks — at least until last season. True, his 2013 trade for Toronto’s Andrea Bargnani was a dud from the start. Still, no general manager connects on every trade, and Grunwald, known for his expertise with the salary cap and an approach that was all facts and no flash, did well enough to look back with satisfaction. Nothing, it should be emphasized, has gotten better since he left. Only worse.
Which is not to say that he gloated when asked about the Knicks, of whom he spoke carefully.
“I follow the Knicks; I follow the Raptors,” he said at one point. “Obviously, it’s easier to be a Raptors fan these days than it is a Knicks fan.”
Grunwald had a somewhat distinctive pedigree for an NBA executive. He never played beyond college — he was a teammate of Isiah Thomas’s at Indiana — and he is a lawyer, with a degree from Northwestern. He began his NBA career in 1990 as vicepresident and general counsel of the Nuggets, and then joined the Raptors as a front-office executive in 1994, working under Thomas, who by then was an old friend.
When Thomas departed in 1997, Grunwald replaced him as the Raptors’ general manager and stayed until 2004. Two years later, Thomas recruited him to come to New York and help in his wobbly efforts to turn around the Knicks.
The turnaround never took place, but when Thomas was pushed aside in 2008, replaced by Donnie Walsh, Grunwald remained as vice-president for basketball operations. And in June 2011, when Walsh stepped down, Grunwald, as he had in Toronto, stepped up. First, he was named the interim general manager, and later the permanent one. He did not have Thomas’s glamour, nor Walsh’s long-established reputation, but in the unpredictable, sometimes volatile, world of the Knicks, he achieved more success than either Thomas or Walsh.
“He was perfectly groomed,” said Walsh, who is now back in Indiana, again helping to run the Pacers. With the Knicks, he said, Grunwald was his right-hand man, “the guy making the calls to other teams, seeing what interests there were in trades.”
What Grunwald did not see coming, however, was the decision by James L. Dolan, the Knicks’ owner, to dump him on the eve of the team’s 2013 training camp, replacing him with a former club executive, Steve Mills. The Knicks never stated a reason for the move, although some attributed it to Dolan’s belief that Mills would be a more polished, and perhaps stylish, person to lead the team’s pursuit of free agents.
To Grunwald, the whole thing remains hard to fathom. “I thought I’d done a really good job in New York and I thought I had helped improve the culture,” he said. ”Jim just didn’t think I was the guy.”
Grunwald insisted he was not pining for a return to professional basketball. But he is not closed to the possibility, and he grew pensive when asked about those who view his current job as evidence he is no longer cut out for the NBA.
“I think my record speaks for itself,” he said in a rare moment of selfpromotion. “People tell me I have a good reputation, but whether that’s just people being nice to me, or in fact it’s true, I don’t know.”
What he does know, of course, is that the Knicks won 54 games two seasons ago and are unlikely to win half that many this time around.