Its always easy to pick on the coach or the Gm, or the owners, and rightly so. They represent the team in some capacity. And, I'm by no means saying that some don't deserve it. I also think that being objective about a GM is one of the harder things to do when the GM is someone like Petrie. Is Danny Ainge a good GM, based on his one year of, either luck or educated, or both moves that brought the Celt's a championship? Would any of you want him to replace Petrie? I don't think I would.
GM's are like an iceberg. You only see the third thats sticking out above the water. When you watch a game, you get to see every play, every move and every timeout. So you can make a pretty good judgement about what you saw. With a GM, not so true. Its the two thirds thats below the water that we need to see and don't, won't and can't. All we can do is judge the results, without knowing how the results occurred. Its sort of like seeing the score of the game without actually seeing the game.
Don't get me wrong. If the results are always the same and leaning mostly to bad, well then you have a pretty fair idea how good the GM is. But if the track record is inconsistant. A good move here, followed by a bad move there, it gets trickier. In Petrie's case the track record has been consistantly decent to good, if less than spectacular at times. He certainly ranks as one of the better GM's in the league. He's a bit of a plodder,and perhaps I can identify with him because I tend to be one myself.
I guess I would say, be careful what you wish for. Most of those who wished for the firing of Adleman, would probably wish to have him back right now. Hmmm, I may have been one of those people. Great thing about getting old. You don't remember your mistakes.