Reading the title, most fans will make the obvious joke. Of course Ryan Pace should be like Jerry Krause because the latter managed to build a dynasty with the Chicago Bulls. That is not what this is about. Krause was not a perfect GM by any stretch. Despite an obvious eye for talent, he was heavily criticized for his lack of people skills and a fractured relationship with the media.
That is one thing people can’t say about Pace. While he does lie to the public sometimes, it’s never out of mistrust or malice. Simply gamesmanship in an attempt to not give away anything to other teams. He’s also widely respected and liked in the Chicago Bears locker room by both players and coaches. No, this is about something else. Specifically, the way he approaches player acquisition and how he tends to let other people sway his opinion.
Something Krause never let happen according to Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf.
“He outworked everybody,” Reinsdorf said. “If he was scouting a game, he didn’t arrive at game time. He would arrive during the warmups. He wanted to see what players did before the game if it was basketball. If it was baseball, he wanted to be there for batting practice. He also never let his opinions be colored by other scouts.
“It’s fairly common in both sports for scouts to be buddy-buddy. They hang out together. They talk about what they’ve seen. But Krause didn’t want anything to do with the other scouts for two reasons: one, he didn’t want to tell them anything, and he didn’t want anything they believed to color his own opinion. It was very important to him that he formulate his own opinions, not be colored by somebody else.”
Ryan Pace operates too much like head juror
Anybody who has served jury duty understands that the way to reach a verdict requires all members to agree on it, one way or the other. The head juror is the one in charge of directing the process towards settling on that verdict. Too often it feels like this is the type of person Pace is. Rather than a king with his advisors, he’s more of a delegator who gets swayed by the opinions of others. A man who wants consensus.
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“We do have seven draft picks,” Pace said. “Having the two 2s is important. But I think you just have to weigh it. For me, it’s whenever there is conviction from us as a whole and there’s a consensus from our scouts and coaches together, that really makes it for me easier to pull the trigger on something like that.”
Krause, for all his faults, understood that letting other people dictate his own opinions could lead to disaster if left unchecked. He trusted what his own eyes told him. If scouts backed up those beliefs, all the better. For Pace, it too often seems like the opposite.
The thing to remember is that sometimes the governing body can be wrong. It’s important to ask this question. If Pace was hesitant about a player but the scouts and/or coaches liked him, has he ever decided to say no? Based on his track record, the answer to that is obvious. This could be the fatal flaw that has routinely hurt him on a lot of his major player and coaching acquisitions.
