The sport industry is a thriving business. In Figure1, it reported that a comparison of growth rate of US GDP, NBA revenue and box office revenue. It suggests that the NBA which is a fast-growing organization has better growth rate in comparison with US GDP and box office revenue. As the result of our survey, we notice that sport industry has great market potential value. However, the basic of sport industry is the quality of the matches. To have the best quality of the games, the NBA needs talent players and great coaches to support the content.
Figure 1-1 Growth Rate of US GDP, NBA Revenue and Box Office Revenue
Source: http://www.worldbank.org/, https://www.statista.com/ and https://www.boxofficemojo.com edited by author
The NBA is a dream stage where plenty of basketball players desire to stay. It has two conference: East and West. Both of two conferences have 15 teams each. There are a lot of basketball players who have the best gift on basketball in the world.
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
US GDP 2.53% 1.60% 2.22% 1.68% 2.57% 2.86% 1.49% 2.27%
NBA Revenue 6.72% 6.64% 5.25% 5.76% 8.84% 8.12% 7.76% 30.08%
Box Office Revenue -0.30% -3.70% 6.50% 0.80% -5.20% 7.40% 2.20% -2.70%
-10.00%
Growth Rate of US GDP, NBA Revenue and Box Office Revenue
With these talent basketball players, there is a fact that they need the top sport management to achieve some important goals, for instance, the title of NBA championship. Winning a title is every player`s goal, but there is just an O'Brien trophy for the championship team. To be the winner, each of these teams make a suitable plan for themselves. Some teams are very dominant for a long time, so they might only need the very one last puzzle piece for the championship to enter the final game of the NBA.
Some are the bottom of the league. For them, they have no idea about the puzzles for the championship, only they need the players who have super power to change them into a playoff-level team from a team which is bottom of the standing. To achieve their goal, they might have a decision which is to tank. Lose each of games in the regular season. Once they are the bottom of standing in the league, they can have higher draft selection to choose a player who has more talent in the NBA draft. The last one type is that the teams are middle of the standing. They might neither enter the playoff, nor have better draft selection. For this situation, they have to make a choice with either doing some trades for making in playoff, or tanking for better draft selection to get a more talent rookie player and rebuild the team for benefiting the team both competitively and financially (Walter & Williams, 2012).
There are not only three situations of the teams but also others. It might be that there are 30 teams in different condition. However, a team would evaluate its situation and then find out the suitable strategy for it. It`s an important operation issue which the management group should deal with. There are many characters in the group. Such as owners, president of basketball operation and general manager. As Wong and Deuber definition of a general manager`s (GM) duties, it follows:
A GM will normally be responsible for approximately all activities of the organization, involving business functional elements such as finances, marketing, stadium issues and media and PR. Thus, the GM has duty on basketball operations such as coach selection, scouting, contract negotiations and possibly most essentially, player personnel decisions. Whether the GM possesses the power of decision-making or a little consulting contribution into each of the sections differs from team to team. Clearly, the clubs' achievement in all of its activities is fairly challenging if the team doesn`t thrive
on the court. (Wong & Deuber 2011)
However, a general manager might have no power of decision making in a team.
In some teams, the President of Basketball Operation has the power of decision making.
Due to this reason, we call the one who has power of decision making as GM.
As a coach, he/she has different responsibility and goal from the management group. The International Council for Coaching Excellence (ICCE) and the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) stated that coaching functions focus on raising athlete performance and personal development. As a result, we notice that they have totally different goal from each other. The management team concentrate on how to make the whole company better; however, a coach aims on elevating performance of the team`s athletes. This paper wants to discuss that a fact which the head coach is/was the executive of the team. If the head coach is a GM, it benefits the team or not. For instance, Gregg Popovich, the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, is the president of the basketball operation. He makes a lot of great decision for the Spurs which won 5 times championship in 20 years. Due to this example, more and more teams made the similar decision to inspire the team`s ability of competition.
This paper is organized as follows. Chapter II describes that the past literatures.
Chapter III describes the data and the method we used. Chapter IV tests our hypothesis and discusses the results. Chapter V will present our conclusions.