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Dell Demps spent three season as general manager of the Austin Toros before being hired last month to the same position with the New Orleans Hornets, becoming the first person to use the D-League as a stepping stone to the top of an NBA front office. Danny Ferry may be hoping he's the next.
Ferry, who resigned as Cleveland Cavaliers GM in June after five years on the job, is expected to be officially announced as a member of the San Antonio Spurs' front office by week's end, reports Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News. Though "formal delineation" of front office duties and titles has yet to be determined, according to the report, Ferry will oversee the Toros, the Spurs' D-League team.
Overseeing the Toros is a more NBA-engaged project than any other job in the D-League, as the Spurs-Toros relationship is often lauded as the blueprint for successfully managing an NBA team's D-League counterpart.
This past season, for instance, the Spurs used their affiliate quite well to acquire and develop talent. San Antonio used the D-League draft to pick up one of the more intriguing players from their Summer League team, Alonzo Gee, adding to an already solid nucleus that included former NBA big man Dwayne Jones, rookie Curtis Jerrells and fellow Summer League player Squeaky Johnson. By the end of the season, Gee and Jerrells were both signed by the Spurs and Jones was called up to play for the Phoenix Suns.
The role of Toros GM entails more than just handling the day-to-day basketball operations in Austin. Demps would frequently travel to D-League cities and scout the rest of league's talent. This paid off on several occasions last season as the Spurs called up Erie's Cedric Jackson and Rio Grande Valley's Garrett Temple when in need of point guard help before Jerrells was deemed ready later in the season.
The Cleveland Cavaliers, however, never really seemed to buy into the D-League being used as a place to develop talent during Ferry's five-year reign. The Cavs rarely assigned players to their D-League affiliate for more than a weekend at a time, even when players like Danny Green and Darnell Jackson weren't being used in the rotation, and only called up six players from the D-League in the same timespan.
Ferry didn't have complete control of call-ups and assignments in Erie, however, according to an interview with Steve Demetriou, an owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers' affiliated Erie BayHawks.
"[Player movement between the Cavaliers and BayHawks] was more of Mike Brown's decision than it was Danny Ferry's decision," Demetriou said. "Danny used to tell me that."
Even so, Ferry is a familiar face in San Antonio's front office, winning a title both as a player (2003) and as a member of the front office (2005) before his career took him to Cleveland.
Ferry's first order of business with the Toros, before the D-League draft in late October, will be to find a head coach to replace Quin Snyder, who recently took a job with the Philadelphia 76ers.
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