Presti's Principles

Sam Presti became the second youngest general manager in NBA history at just 29 years old when he was hired by the Seattle Supersonics in 2007. Since that time the franchise was transplanted to Oklahoma City and he has drafted several future hall of famers, developed five NBA general managers under his tutelage, and had the second most postseason appearances in the league since 2010.

At the end of every Thunder season Sam does an exit interview with the media in which he delivers an extended monologue summarizing his thoughts on the year before answering specific questions from the audience. I listen to Sam’s exit interviews every season and frequently return to them as they are continuously littered with insight and wisdom that is applicable to anyone who leads or is a member of a team, regardless of industry.

Coming off of a 24 win campaign during the 2021-22 season and a season ending injury to their #2 overall pick during the subsequent offseason, Vegas projected the Thunder to win 22 games in the following season. The club finished went on to outperform expectations with 40 wins and seemed poised to continue on its upward trajectory going into the current season. Vegas set the 2023-24 line at 44 wins for the team, which they easily surpassed on their way to clinching the 1 seed in the West and 57 regular season wins. While many NBA fans and critics were shocked to see the Thunder continue to significantly outperform the expectations set for them, in retrospect it is clear that the organization’s success was more than coincidence and was the direct result of “…things that were being discussed, molded, sculpted, pressed” for years leading up to it. Throughout this season and since originally listening to Sam’s recap of the 2022-23 season (https://open.spotify.com/episode/7mBULHlPwF4Hq7fnXfyXry?si=MPsG14HIS3i0QMplHIYcXQ&nd=1&dlsi=40031e4fd3464522) over a year ago, I have returned to the episode on numerous occasion to listen to either its entirety or take notes on specific segments concerning team building, internal development, and process improvement, among several other principles. These principles have resonated with me and I have found that many of them are directly applicable to my daily work. Below I have summarized a dozen of the most insightful segments of the interview from my perspective and hope that you find Sam’s beliefs as valuable as I have.

Top 12 Takeaways:

1.?Building on Past Achievements: “More on this season, I thought the play style continue to grow and evolve. I do think that a lot of the progress that we saw this season in that respect is all linked back to what we were able to get accomplished in the 2020-21 season. And I do think it's important to point out that we got so much accomplished in that year. And I think probably for people that don't do this for a living, they may not understand or see that. But many of the things that people were praising this year had nothing to do with this year. They were things that were being discussed, molded, sculpted, pressed in that period of time that allowed us to execute or implement some things now. And so I don't think that should be forgotten. And there'll be things hopefully that we accomplished this year that may be invisible now that could show up at a later date.”

2.?Focus on Quality Decision-Making: “The team from (the beginning) to the end of the season was a completely different team. If we were trying to race against arbitrary timing or arbitrary expectations that are set for us, we wouldn't have gotten to those things. A lot of credit to the coaches and the players for seeing the season as a real marathon and maintaining a real open perspective. The development of the team happens in that environment. I have to continue to try to create that environment. One of the things I say to the coaches, and I've said, since I've done this job, is do not fear the outcomes. The outcomes will come downstream from the decisions that we make. Let's make quality decisions. Let's ask the right questions. Let's define the problems and then move from there. The outcomes are only going to teach us those things.”

3.?Building Successful Relationships with Personnel: “You observe, you watch, you support, you try to create conditions for the players. And I think you challenge. And I do think that's one thing that sometimes in the league today is missing is because the playbook in so many ways is to pit the player against the team. You know, in a lot of ways, people are not challenging… I don't think that's a relationship. I think a relationship can't be built on a piece. No, at least no relationship that I've seen be successful that way. I think you have to be open. You have to work together. You have to challenge and continually raise the bar.”

4.?Learning from Adversity to Gain Wisdom and Poise: “This was a good starting point for us and I thought the guys continued to learn. Part of that is because of the situations that they were put in. I also think that Mark did a great job of not blasting through adversities, but taking time to explain and unpack why they may be happening and how they can be utilized down the road for improvement. Again, part of seeing the season in segments and not just in these bite sized, hot take moments. I think that was really important. I talk all the time with the staff and have for years about this theory and it’s kind of like natural selection for the NBA, but in order to make it, first you have to have instincts as a player and as a team… If you have reasonable instincts, that affords you experiences. If you are a good learner, you can accumulate the experiences good and bad, learn from them and then eventually over time, you can you can funnel those into wisdom. And if you have collected enough of that wisdom, eventually that leads to poise during uncertainty. We're seriously still in the experience gathering phase. But I do think we're learning from those effectively and hopefully down the line in the future, we'll be able to look back and say, well, we have some wisdom as a result of this. We've seen this situation before. We've been in this dynamic before. There's no way for us to speed that up. There's no way for us to slow that down. That's going to present itself as it should, however it may be.”

5.?Good judgment hinges on toggling between soft and hard skills: “It's a combination of left and right brain all the time. I think you have to be able to operate both ways. Can you go left and right brain? But more importantly, do you know when to deploy each side? I think if you're operating in one space with one limit, one way, I think you shut off and the nuances of bringing all that stuff together, the current team, the player that you'd be adding and the personal component, the analytical component, the strategic component, all that stuff factors in… But the processes are really just means to identify the best options. And then you have to pick one. Everything goes through that kind of process, but it's not just a concrete process and it's not just a subjective process. I think you have to be able to play in both of those worlds to come out with good judgment. Good judgment, I don't think is (only) a result of expertise. I think it's experience and the ability to toggle between soft and hard skills. It's a little bit of everything.”

6.?????? Internal Growth & Development: “Our net rating improved nine points or something like that. Probably won't see that again. And a big part of that is because of where it was, quite frankly, but it was a significant jump. Again, I'm less concerned with what happens. I'm very, very concerned with how it happens. And the jump on that is pretty simple. We were able to get those numbers going in the right direction because of internal growth and development of our players. And the fact that we had some guys that had been steadily improving over years, and then a few guys that steadily improved over games is what gave us the jump that we got. And if you really think about the teams that we've had here, the through line for a lot of the jumps in net rating or even the sustaining of net rating has been through the internal development that we've had player development-wise over the last 15 years.”

7.?Learning from Challenging Situations and Starting Fresh: “Again, going back to the rate of learning, the guys were not put in comfortable positions over the last few years. And there was a lot of concern about that. And I mentioned in these conferences that we can't bubble wrap everybody. They're going to have to face steep circumstances. They're going to have to compete. And they're going to have to learn that you get your ass kicked sometimes. And if you don't, if you do, how do you respond to that? And I thought we had some good response. I thought that again, we didn't make it easy on the guys… But we needed that experience for the guys that we were moving forward with… And when you're put in those adverse situations, you compensate and you learn and you figure out how to do it as a team. So I think that was really important for us. Turning to next season, this will be our third draft in this kind of sequence that we're in as a team. So, you know, we're excited about that. At the same time, you've heard me say this for 16 years. Every season, you go back to square one. I think you probably heard that from the guys too. You go back to square one, whether we won 60 games, Western Conference Finals or we won 20 games, we have to start over and that’s what teams are. And that's how you build these types of endurable habits that we want to have. You don't carry that with you. So it's going to get harder for us. There's no question about it. And the only way to solve that problem is to go back to square one and start figuring out how to be the best team we can by the end of 82 games and flush whatever happened previously… Again, conscious discomfort. You have to go through these things. You have to experience them. You can't just tell people about that. They have to go through that and they have to build the endurance to deal with it.”

8.?Achieving Team Harmony Over Individual Success: “So we're in, I always say observation mode, but we have to continue to observe and see how the team is continually kind of improving and changing. We're at our best when everyone knows when whoever's on the floor knows their function, isn't trying to redefine their function and isn't trying to expand their function. When that's happening, we have a chance to play at a really, really high level. That's hard to do. I thought our guys did a really good job with it because the goal isn't to have great individual performances. The goal is to have everybody playing well together in one totality. If we can do that, and that's hard to do, but to me, we figured out ways through the year to do that.”

9.?Continuous Improvement and Consistent Performance: “What we're looking for is consistent performance over a long period of time as a result of continuous improvement in progress. Some years are going to be better than others. I use craft work as the example. Craft work being the thing that's just mechanical and just runs on its own time. I use some other drummers because I use analogies and these are a big part of my life. But sometimes you're going to be ahead of the beat and sometimes you're going to be behind the beat. The key being that at the end, you just want to be better than you were. There's going to be a point in time where we were behind the beat. This year, we were Stewart Copeland. We were definitely ahead of it. There were some really positive things that were happening. But there's going to be a year where we may not be ahead. We might be behind a little bit. That's okay too. Like I said, resistance, regression, struggle. That's how we've gotten to this point anyway, even in the season. But also individually, the players, we need resistance and friction as human beings to be at our best. If not, unless you're superhuman, your standards will wilt a little bit.”

10.?Optimizing Personnel Evaluation: “I don't know. None of us know. You try to shift the odds in your favor and make quality decisions. But there's a lot more to it than like watching a guy on film. There's a difference between evaluating if a player can play and knowing how to use the player. That's two different conversations. The other part about evaluation is that what's going on in the evaluators mind? Because there's so much bias in the evaluator himself or herself… They're already thinking a certain way. What’s the process leading up to the evaluation? How consistent is that? Are you just popping it on? Are you doing the same thing every time? How are you documenting? How do you know how well you're doing? What kind of notes are you keeping? Are they being measured some type of way like empirically? There's a vast concept to player evaluation. And the reason why there's all these different aspects that you try to optimize for is because it's so random.”

11. Culture of Winning vs. Culture Where You Can Win: I think we've been fortunate, obviously, over the years. I think that word (culture) is just absolutely abused today. I think it's more environment then it is culture. I don't know, I guess everyone's definition could be different, but I think environment is better because environments change. I think as good as it is here… (it seems like) everybody's happy. It may seem like that at least, but not everybody's happy, but they still know it's good. The one thing about it that I have always thought about, and I've said this recently to our leadership team here is that cultures like that or environments, they are not static… I think a lot of times when the team is winning at a high level, their best environmental days are usually prior to that. Because I think there's a huge difference between a culture of winning and a culture where you can win. And we've always focused on trying to create the best environment for people to be their best selves, but that gets stressed sometimes and when you're in an environment like pro sports, like any environment, it's not going to be perfect all the time. And I think when you realize that it can ebb and flow at times. So yeah, right now, I would agree with you that the environment is pretty good. The guys are great here, but it doesn't mean we own that because there's going to be periods where that gets stressed (and when it does) it doesn't mean you have a bad culture. It means the culture is going through a test of some kind. And I think if you have the right principles, the right ingredients and the right people, you can regrow out of that. Even in times where it seems like, man, this is not the way it was. Nothing’s the way it was. It doesn't go that way. So we'll be tested. There'll be tough times. If we have the right group and the right temperament, we'll survive that and we will be stronger for it. Like I said, the sky falls twice a year on every team and you get better as you go through that. I just think the same thing about environment. It's not, we like to say, “Well, these people have a great environment”. We tend to say that about teams that are winning but it's much deeper than that, in my opinion, and it can go to any business industry. I could be winning, but they may not have a great environment there. But you don't own it. You try to do your best to curate it, keep it, but it's going to go through tough times. And we've had that ourselves. And I don't want to act like everything's perfect. It isn't. But I do think that over the course of time you can get it right most of the time.

12. Embracing Volatility & Uncertainty: “I think you have to have humility in the face of volatility and randomness and you have to accept it for what it is. Maybe we'll get extraordinarily lucky. The odds are very, very sharply against that. I wouldn't plan on it. I think you just have to always recognize how little you really control. I was talking to someone that called me recently for some advice on something. And I basically said, the job is you have to be able to deal with aftermath. Aftermath, get good at that. Recognize what that is. Cause that's essentially what you're working with. The aftermath of whatever it is that takes place. You have to come in and you have to organize, inspire, strategize and ultimately lead out of that. And that can be good or bad. You know, there's aftermath to success too, because people start to forget that maybe not everything was they're doing.”