2023-24 Executive of the Year Award

[Minnesota Timberwolves]

2023-24 Basketball Guru Executive of the Year Award

Welcome friends, to the 2023-24 Executive of the Year Award. We once again find ourselves at the pointy end of a year-long campaign, and regardless of how our finals go, we should have a fitting end to an excellent season. Basketball Guru remains one of the most unique and engaging fantasy leagues out there by my estimation, and headed into year TEN I continue to just be grateful to the lot of you for sticking around and making it possible. Here’s to many more!

Now, with that said, here is your Executive of the Year:

Runner up: Milwaukee Bucks

At time of writing it looks like the odds may be slightly against them, but another finals run puts our Milwaukee Bucks in the enviable position of being two good weeks away from a repeat championship--hopefully enviable enough to take the sting off another runner-up placement here. While the Bucks didn’t have picks to speak of in the ‘23 draft, their path to this year’s finals was a well-rounded GM performance, highlighted by the free agency signings of Tobias Harris and Nikola Vucevic and a handful of trades made to keep salary pressure off the sheet (jettisoning Christian Wood and Zach LaVine) and competitive pressure on the opposition (bringing in Randle, Bridges and Hartenstein). Bucks is a quality GM, and I can’t imagine we won’t keep seeing that name pop up in this EOTY post on a fairly regular basis.

2023-24 Executive of the Year Winner: Phoenix Suns

Victor Wembanyama was a can’t miss prospect and is obviously going to pose some real competitive problems for at least 15 other Guru squads for at least the duration of his rookie contract. But I’m pretty sure it’s the rest of the 2023 draft that did the most to earn Suns as many votes as he got here. Brandon Miller, Amen Thompson, Brandin Podziemski have all joined Wemby as clearly valuable assets and have slotted in nicely with Suns’ ‘21 class that shows no sign of slowing down. Moves to further add Pascal Siakam and De’Aaron Fox cemented Suns as an immediate title contender, and while one could argue that another move or two could have been made, the worst thing upshot is that there is still more left in the war chest to enable Suns to make moves going forward without damaging that core. It’s hard to imagine that much work will need to be done to keep this squad competitive, and “don’t touch anything” isn’t usually a winning strategy for EOTY honors, so it is more than fit to acknowledge this as the year where the work was done.