CLIP: What Makes a Great NBA General Manager in 2026?

**Wes Goldberg** (0:00)
All right, welcome into the RealGM Radio Summer Roundtable today. We're talking about what makes a good general manager, head coach and star player in the NBA in 2026 I'm Wes Goldberg here with Mo Dakhil, Jared Dubin and Mike Shearer. These are the four voices that you know already from the RealGM Radio feed. And for the rest of August, we're gonna be doing these weekly roundtables instead of our usual shows, mostly because the news and the buzz has slowed down. We're gonna use this as a chance to zoom out and talk about some bigger picture topics in the NBA. We're gonna be going live on YouTube on Wednesday mornings and then posting the show to your podcast feeds soon after that. So make sure that you hit subscribe on YouTube right now so you don't miss a live stream next week. But let's jump right in. We're gonna start at the top with General Manager. Then we're gonna go to Head Coach and then Star Player.
Mo, I know it's early on the West Coast and so it might not be fair for me to go to you first, but I'm gonna do it anyway. When you think about a successful General Manager in 2026, what qualities does that person have?

**Mo Dakhil** (0:54)
First, I just wanna point out that this is geographically discrimination. All you guys on the East Coast and then making me have to get up early and actually get ready to do this, it's discrimination. We're still on the best coast.
There's a lot of things in terms of what you need from a General Manager, and I think this is gonna be an underrated skill that I don't think most people will understand, but it's managing up. It's managing your owner. It's the most important skill you need as a General Manager, right? And I've seen this on many levels, working with the Clippers during the Donald Sterling era, working with the Spurs, which was Pop and then Peter Holt as the owner, such drastic differences in the way things worked. And I think the most important thing a General Manager can actually have, and this goes beyond scouting and evaluating, and those are all important skills. But being able to manage up and manage your ownership, and being able to communicate effectively with your owner in terms of what you need, how your team is going to succeed, how we're going to build, and how these things are going to work out. And when things aren't going right, how we're going to fix it, all those things. Being able to manage your ownership might be the single most important skill a general manager can have.

**Wes Goldberg** (2:23)
Jared, what do you think? Because obviously the managing up part of this is a big part of this, but is that a whole lot different than where it's been over the past two years, if you think about currently in 2026?

**Jared Dubin** (2:35)
I don't know if it's different than where it's been. That's always probably been the most important thing. Because if you don't have the permission structure, I guess, from ownership to be able to do everything else you want to do, then you actually don't have anything, because you're not going to be able to do all of the other most important things.

**Wes Goldberg** (2:56)
What else are you thinking of when you think about a successful general manager in 2026?

**Jared Dubin** (3:01)
So I think beyond that first thing of having the ownership, I think the most important thing is having a vision or a plan or an organizational ethos, but having the adaptability and flexibility to deviate from it when things don't go the way that you think they're going to go because they're not always going to go the way that you think they're going to go. You're going to have to make moves that were not necessarily in your plan in the first place, and you're going to have to adjust from what you thought your plan was going to be. Being able and willing to do that, having the humility to do that when it doesn't go exactly the way you thought it was, I feel like is the next most important thing.

**Wes Goldberg** (3:41)
Mike, what about you?

**Mike Shearer** (3:43)
Yeah, I had something similar about flexibility. I said, you don't want to just change with the league. You want to change the league, right? You want to be at the forefront of whatever the next major movement is, whether it's possession battles or it's pace in youth, whatever it is. You want to be one of the first guys there. You want to be at the vanguard of that.