18 minute read
Milwaukee Bucks: Interview with General Manager Jon Horst
LOCKED AND LOADED TO SUSTAIN SUCCESS
Jon Horst, General Manager of Milwaukee Bucks, shares an insight into his career in the NBA, the development of athlete welfare, the financial impact of winning, as well as building the foundations off-court to sustain success on-court.
Advertisement
Milwaukee Bucks. NBA Champions. The 2021 championship represented a landmark achievement for a city that hasn’t seen its NBA team win a title in half a century. One of the influential figures in the Bucks’ triumph has been Jon Horst, who made a name for himself previously by taking home the 2019 NBA Executive of the Year award and has now helped steer the Bucks to success.
Journey to NBA Champion
When Jon Horst was hired as General Manager by the Milwaukee Bucks, he became the youngest basketball executive for an NBA team. Horst recalled how he made his entrance into the NBA: “I’ve loved basketball my entire life. I played and participated in basketball from the time I was about four or five-yearsold, and I still play two or three times a week today.” Horst touched on how the world of professional sport offers much more opportunity today compared to when he was first looking for a career in sport. At the time, the idea of joining the front office staff seemed less likely than becoming a coach, which Horst considered first.
“When I played in college, I wanted to stay involved in basketball in some form for as long as I could, as a career. My mind was, I love the game of basketball, I love the business, I love creativity, I love strategies – I want to be involved in this game.”
To pursue his goals, Horst attended Rochester College due to its close proximity to the Detroit Pistons – who at the time were headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan – with the ambition of getting a chance to work for the franchise in some way. The decision paid off and Horst earned an internship with the Pistons in an administrative role in which he stayed in for just over two years, even after he graduated college.
At the Pistons, Horst worked under Vice President of Basketball Operations John Hammond during one of the franchises most successful runs in NBA ➡
MILWAUKEE BUCKS
MILWAUKEE BUCKS
history. That's when the Pistons had six consecutive seasons in which they played in the Eastern Conference Finals each year, reached two NBA Finals and won an NBA Championship.
“That run in the early 2000’s for the Pistons was incredible and I am so thankful I was able to learn from being a small part of that group at that time," explained Horst.
When Hammond became General Manager of the Milwaukee Bucks in 2008, Horst was fortunate enough to join Hammond in Milwaukee as Director of Basketball Operations.
“John [Hammond] gave me the opportunity. It just so happened that at that time the NBA really started to grow rapidly in terms of analytics, salary cap management, player health, relations, and education and I was able to learn, grow and evolve.”
“Throughout my time with John I worked in a lot of different roles and continued to learn and develop.”
When Hammond left to join the Orlando Magic in 2017, the position of General Manager became vacant and Horst was hired for the position.
Development of Athlete Welfare
Injuries were a prevalent storyline for two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo in the 2021 NBA Playoffs. The commitment to the welfare of the players behind the scenes proved critical for the Bucks as they went onto defeat the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals. Horst said the focus on player physical preparation, enrichment, training and wellness has evolved dramatically throughout his career in the NBA.
“There is much more awareness, sensitivity, concern and education in the area of player wellness and health, including mental aspects on and off the court. The health of a person is holistic, from their nutrition, their mental health, their physical health, family and professional structure, their surrounding environment and having resources at their fingertips.
“All those things go into the wellness and health of a person, and athletes are no different. Athletes may actually need a higher accelerated level because of the stresses and pressures they put on their bodies mentally and physically.
“I think that the world of sports has done an amazing job in trying to be the leaders, setting standards, implementing processes, and coming up with new ideas that can be carried over beyond the world of sports and into corporate structures.
“This has been an area that the NBA has invested in for a long time, and I think it has paid a lot of dividends.”
The programs for the NBA and the NBA’s G League are a league-wide effort to help educate and engage the players, but the teams invest in their own initiatives, as well.
“At Milwaukee, we care a lot about that holistic approach,” Horst affirmed. “Using the example of a person who has a knee injury, if your solution to help them get back to a high level of performance as soon as possible is just to focus on the injury, in my mind you probably miss.
“If you then look at what the right solution is: The right solution is [to ask]: How is your family dealing with this?; What are the things you were able to do before that you can’t do now and how can we support that and fill that gap?; How are you doing mentally with not performing or playing a certain way as you did before the injury and how can we compensate for that and help you through that while you are injured?; What are the goals you need to set from a basketball oncourt standpoint as we need to help you develop that? “Then if it’s a really extended time that you are going to be unable to play and perform, what are the things that you can use this time wisely to grow and develop as a person – is it a business, a passion or hobby?
“I think 20 to 30 years ago if you had a knee injury you would get the operation and you would rehab the knee. Today, I think the world of sport says if you have an injury, we need to control your entire life around that knee, so that when the knee gets healthy you can go back to who you were.”
Meeting Physical and Technical Demands
As the focus on athlete welfare evolves, so do the methods that the Bucks have adopted over the past few seasons to meet the substantial increase in physical and technical demands of basketball.
“Nutrition is a big investment for us,” explained Horst. “We’ve always had good food services, in terms of the quality of food players eat, the nutritious value, making it accessible, and convenient for them – I think we’ve done a good job there.”
Nutrition plays a valuable integrated role in optimising performance of elite players during training and gameplay and maintaining the overall health of players throughout the season.
“Our goal is not to do a good job, it’s to be industry leading,” said Horst. “Not only does it [need to] taste good and nutritious, but the nutrition is specific to each player, their deficiencies, and the things we want to balance with them. It is a very detailed, specific, and customised approach.
“From an analytics perspective – we call it data research – TJ Barra (Director of Basketball Research and Innovation) is someone who has worked with Major League Baseball (MLB) previously and the New York Mets for a big part of his early career. When we made a shift in that space, we wanted to make sure that we were thinking outside the box and taking a different approach to data research, how we were going to apply it to basketball and find useful."
Horst explained how he wanted to explore methods being used outside the sport of basketball, and how baseball he believes is one of the best leagues ➡
in the world when it comes to data research.
“Getting one of the best in the business in that area in my opinion is another thing we have done in the last year which has paid some dividends to us and will continue to,” he said of TJ Barra.
Horst has also modernised the Bucks’ scouting methods over the past few seasons, introducing a ‘Global Scouting’ department, rather than having scouts who focus on a particular level of player.
“When I say that [global scouting], I mean that everyone scouts everybody. The main reason we do that is because if you are not watching pros every day and you are only watching amateurs, then you very quickly lose context for what a pro is.
“Likewise, if you are only watching pros all day and you are never watching amateurs, you can quickly lose context as to what a player looks like when they are 17, 18, 19 [years-old] and their development through to 27, 28 or 29 [years-old].
“The same thing for international scouting. All of our scouts actually scout the world of basketball and get to see all different levels of players at different time frames in their development stage. I think that has helped us be better in that area, as well.”
A Holistic Approach
The Bucks’ commitment to its players, and staff, off the field contributed significantly to the franchise being crowned NBA champions. “It is very foundational and philosophical in our organisation from the top down,” said Horst.
“The holistic approach accounts for the coaching, the performance, the research, the operations, the cap and strategy, our player enrichment philosophy, the nutrition, the security and communications. Each of those have their role.
“When you care about each area, not just check boxes, and you put great people in each area to star in their roles with each of those areas having an impact, the only answer is 100 percent.
“You can’t get to the top if one of those areas is a failure. If that accounts for 15 different pillars of success, and 14 of them are really good and one of them is really bad, you are going to fail.
“I think we work really smart, I think we’re humble and I know we work really hard. But in sports to win you have to be very lucky, you have to have great timing, you have to have great talent and you have to have great health. And so, if it’s that fluid and fragile, the things that you can control, you have to hit on 100 percent.
“It seems that in the world of professional sports it's so hard to win. Our approach is to get better every single day and put things in place in every area that matters.
“We don’t want to do something that is shortlived, because it is so fragile around us. We want to build something that’s solid, foundational, and collaborative that you can build, grow, and sustain.
“That’s what we have tried to do, and it’s worked for us. I don’t want to go as far to say that we are doing that better than anyone else because there are so many ways to win. “There are many examples in our sport, and probably across the board, where people do things differently, they go all in on a short lived ‘we’re going to figure this out for one year, or two years’ and maybe that foundation doesn’t have to be as strong because you’re not trying to build it to sustain, but you’re trying to get to the top as quickly as you can and nail it – and teams have done that, that’s ok too.
“I don’t know if any team
that has won a championship would say there’s a wrong way to win a championship. Winning a championship is incredibly hard in any sport and if you’ve done it, then it’s probably a right way. But I promise you, they’re not all the same way.”
The Financial Impact of Winning
The topic of luxury tax has been one of great debate, considering it is intrinsically tied to the Bucks’ decision to move on from Malcolm Brogdon nearly two summers ago. While viewing Brogdon as a luxury at the time, Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry made it known that he and the team’s ownership had no issue paying the luxury tax in the next couple of years.
NBA owners frequently say that they are willing to pay the luxury tax for a team capable of contending for a championship, but never has that qualifier applied as directly as it does to the Milwaukee Bucks. By virtue of clinching the franchise’s first title since 1971, the newly crowned champions now have to pay the luxury tax for the 2020-21 season. Why? Because Jrue Holiday had a US$1 million championship incentive in his contract that triggered when the Bucks won it all.
“Because we won an NBA championship so efficiently, we weren’t a luxury tax team until the day we won it – pretty hard to get more efficient than that – and we’ve won a lot with efficient spending in previous years also,” said Horst.
Milwaukee actually began the season far above the luxury tax line. They made a series of aggressive offseason moves, including the addition of Holiday, that nearly pushed them up on the apron’s hard-cap line (a figure that is typically around US$6 million above the tax). This was done in part to help convince eventual Finals MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo to resign with the Bucks ahead of his possible 2021 free agency. He eventually did so, and that gave the Bucks a bit more freedom to shed salary.
“I think we’ve all said it, winning and winning at a high level is expensive,” Horst admitted. “However, it is incredibly rewarding, and I don’t think any of us would take it away for any reason. We want to do it again as many times as we can, but it is expensive and that’s the reality of it and part of that is the system we play and perform in.
“Those conversations [around luxury tax] are obviously not conversations that you have retroactively. No one is surprised that we are in the tax or will be in the tax going forward and it’s on us to continue to make the best decisions we can.
“Luckily, we have always operated incredibly efficiently with what we spend. We’ve been one of the most efficient spending teams on a cost per win basis in the NBA in each of the last four seasons.
“None of our philosophies or strategies change in terms of trying to be efficient with what we spend and trying to win to get as much success➡
as we can with the dollars we spend.
“It’s just because of the rules and because of our salaries the dollars become exponentially more each decision that we make. Each decision is going to be scrutinised harder and have even bigger financial implications. But I have a great business partner in Peter Feigin (president of the Bucks), who is one of the best in the world in generating revenue and generating interest in our team and league. Most importantly, we have Marc Lasry, Wes Edens, and Jamie Dinan (Bucks ownership group) who want to win more than anything in the world and then win again, and they are willing to resource it.
“It’s my job to continue to push the envelope and make smart decisions collectively with them and be as efficient as we possibly can and continue winning as much as we can.”
Building Foundations and Sustaining Success
The Milwaukee Bucks are the reigning NBA Champions. That phrase doesn’t get old, and it won’t go away until the Bucks are no longer able to defend their title next season. But there are a number of threats to that defence, and it’s no sure thing that Milwaukee will claim the name ‘NBA champion’ for a second year running, but Horst and the Bucks worked tirelessly during the off-season in order to do everything they can to build upon their accomplishments and sustain the success of last season.
“The biggest challenges are that you are prepared the best you can, but you don’t actually know until you get into it.
“You have to do it with transparency
and honesty every step of the way because if you don’t it will always come back to you. Just communication and management are big, big challenges in our business, but it is also one of the things I thrive on and enjoy and want to continue to get better at and grow in.
“So much of our work in front offices and sports executive roles in my opinion goes unnoticed when it works but is the first thing that is noticed when it doesn’t. That’s a really big challenge.
“Culture actually matters and philosophy and foundations matter in building something that you hope will work two years, three years, four years, five years down the road.
“There are a lot of things that go into it, to establish and plan for and organise and prepare for so that you can take advantage of those opportunities multiple times. Again, if you do it wrong it’s the first thing that’s noticed when it falls apart and crumbles. If you do it right, you don’t often get the credit for it. It’s not as easy to see if you do it right, unless you win a championship, or multiple championships. “There are so many people in the world of sports that I am learning from and getting to know, whether that’s from [English] Premier League soccer or the National Hockey League (NHL), or the other folks in the NBA. There are different people across the board that do these really well but don’t often get noticed for it until they win at the highest level. And only
very few people get to win at the highest level.
“In our business that’s a real challenge as an executive, the fact there is a lot of pressure and not always a lot of credit. It’s not that we seek credit in these positions, it’s just that there are a lot of folks here that are really good at that stuff and we can all learn a lot from that don’t get enough recognition until they win. It’s really hard to win and you don’t have ultimate control over that.”
Horst is confident that the championship contributes to making the franchise one of the most attractive propositions for any basketball player or basketball executive alike: “We are in Milwaukee: We have a state of the art arena, Fiserv Forum, and a state of the art practice facility, Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Sports Science Center; The best coach in the NBA, Mike Budenholzer; The best president of the business side in the NBA, Peter Feigin: The best player in the NBA in my opinion with Giannis; And we have just won an NBA championship. Those things will help recruit [players].” Horst explained that in order to build a sustainable structure, the Bucks have continuously focused on recruiting from within in recent years.
“Yes, Giannis signing an extension is incredibly important and set the path forward for all of us to do this for a long time together and an amazing commitment from him to our city, the state and our organisation, and of course is an amazing commitment from our ownership to him. "What I think is really important is that we’ve just won an NBA Championship and here’s how we are stacked up going forward: Giannis has signed his long-term extension for another five seasons; Khris Middleton has another three seasons; Jrue Holiday just signed a four-year extension; Brook Lopez has another two seasons; Donte DiVincenzo is a restricted free agent who we love and we hope he comes back; We have Pat Connaughton, who is part of our top eight and who is on contract for two more years; Bobby Portis, who is part of our top eight, committed to us for another two seasons; Grayson Allen joined us this season and has an extension for two seasons after this one. And our head coach, Mike Budenholzer, just extended with us.
“How do you sustain success? You have a core in place, and you keep it. So, this team that just won an NBA Championship is locked and loaded to go forward and sustain the success. Everyone is coming after us. They’re going to try and break down our ways and expose us.
“We didn’t rest on the fact that we had a core, we have gone and tried to get better. I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, we’re going to have to find out. But if it doesn’t work, we are in a position to be flexible and adjust. And that’s how you sustain success in my opinion, you have something that you build and believe in, then you recruit from within, and you retain it.” ◆
