Welcome to the first annual PBSL Slime Power Rankings, the only article that ranks all 26 GMs in terms of overall sliminess (what a slimy-looking word) with no promises of following it up next season with updated rankings.
The Webster’s English dictionary defines slime as:
1. soft moist earth or clay, especially : viscous mud
2. a viscous, glutinous, or gelatinous substance: such as
a. a mucous or mucoid secretion of various animals (such as slugs and catfishes)
b. a product of wet crushing consisting of ore ground so fine as to pass a 200-mesh screen
3. Copy/pasting definitions of words to easily increase your word count for extra points in an article.
4. US, informal : a morally repulsive or odious person
5. Inserting additional definiens* into a copy/pasted passage to further increase said word count for the purpose of maximizing the number of points achieved from an article at the expense of relevant substance.
* Please incorporate the 20 minutes of internet searching I did to obtain the word “definiens” and how generally impressive-sounding it is when considering your media point judgment.
PBSL faithful, however, know that defining slime is a slippery proposition. Maybe you can’t describe it, fully, but it’s a feeling. It’s the feeling of seeing your star player on the injured list with a broken leg if that feeling were a person. It’s that knot in your stomach that you feel when you imagine the darkest corners of Doug’s Japanophilia if that knot were a person. But most importantly, it’s a necessary attribute to have as a PBSL GM. You need to know when to ooze and know when to lose, because it’s hard to win without just the right amount of that sticky stuff called slime.
Now without further ado, here are the somewhat arbitrary GM slime rankings.
26. Digiskunk - Utah Jazz
SEASONS: 21
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .405
Digiskunk is obviously the purest of all GMs. If Gary murdered someone, it would still be more innocent than if all 25 other GMs simultaneously released one dove each into the sky and then linked hands and sung “We Are The World” in such perfect harmony that God shed a tear. Gary is the lookout when another GM is spewing slime in public.
25. LoCo89 - Atlanta Hawks
SEASONS: 40
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .423
LoCo89’s comeback introduces newer GMs to the owner of the largest tax bill in PBSL history. Now, when it comes to ranking GM sliminess, a GM who performs no actions is not necessarily the least slimy, but it’s a lot more likely that any action undertaken pertaining to SLOE is perceived, at least for the purposes of this article, as slimy than not slimy. And not slimy actions don’t necessarily make up for the slimy ones. But the way Louie racked up that tax bill with reckless abandon and in full acceptance of the consequence is, categorically, about as opposite of being slimy as you can get. Besides, being in debt to the tax man robs you of your ability to slime (see entry on 26. Digiskunk). I think slime comes from points.
24. Drkavarga - New York Knicks
SEASONS: 13
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 1
CAREER WIN PCT: .425
About the slimiest thing that drkavarga has done was winning a championship in his first full season as GM of the Knicks by going recommended with a team built by slimier stewards. The last of our active, tax-burdened GMs, Dr. K has represented himself to the league as a complex character, equal parts blunt and cerebral, but for all the descriptors you can give to the Knicks GM, sliminess isn’t one that really jumps out at you.
23. Xist2inspire - Washington Wizards
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .544
Xist2inspire makes a strong argument for least slimy GM with a win percentage over .500, and here’s why: It’s not, as many say, because he’s the nicest GM in the league…sure, he might be…but it’s because he’s as professional as they come. I’ve never seen him have any beef with another GM or get involved in any way in the noise and hype that comes with being the general manager of an imaginary basketball team in the most advanced Fast Break Basketball leagues I’ve seen…and that’s coming from a guy who used to regularly check the other 3 or 4 to see if I could poach GMs for the holy grail of points—active GM referral. Has xist gotten the better of another GM—perhaps. And since he’s been a GM since at least the beginning of this iteration of the league, maybe he got the better of GMs that were newer than him…but I don’t really remember anything that stands out as slimy from xist. But to win consistently over such a long time, he needs savvy, and savvy is the handsome cousin of slimy.
22. Logpmess - Miami Heat
SEASONS: 44
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .469 (more like four-sixty-nice, am I right?)
With recent absences and reappearances, that 44 seasons in the league comes with an asterisk, but logpmess is back now and putting together a season with the kind of successful team that he’s proven capable of building before. One of the best lotto pick re-namers, logpmess plays more defense than offense from the management spot. But when a GM just goes AWOL for a few seasons and then reappears, you always gotta wonder. Where did they go for a few months? Who did they murder, and where did they hide the body? Maybe no one. Maybe they carried it to a boat in the Florida Keys and lit the boat on fire like Kyle Chandler in Bloodline. We’ll never know.
21. LHamilton - Cleveland Cavaliers
SEASONS: 28
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .456
LHamilton is about as close to true zero as you can get in terms of GM sliminess. (Man, I’m using that word a lot. Let me start over.) LHamilton is about as close to true zero as you can get in terms of GM viscosity. (Yeah, that’s the stuff.) He shows up at every stage in the game in the offseason, sets his depth chart at the beginning of the season and rides or dies with it. His PER (PM-writing Efficiency Rating) is outstanding, getting straight to the point in two words or less. Reminds me of one of my favorite presidential stories:
Legend has it that Calvin Coolidge, a man of so few words he was dubbed “Silent Cal,” was once challenged by a dinner guest with the idea that she could get him to say more than two words. He replied, “Frye You.”
20. PaulyP - Indiana Pacers
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .507
Like xist, it’s impressive that a GM who’s been here since the beginning of this 46 season sequence falls so low on the list, but PaulyP only gets a little slimier than LHamilton because he wades a little further into the murk that is the rest of the league with answers to more PMs and even outreach with trade proposals. Despite his increased exposure, PaulyP runs a disciplined ship, hovering a few ticks above .500 in his career while routinely structuring his team’s contracts to be within a dollar of the cap report, a habit so compulsive that if it were Doug doing this, there would undoubtedly be some element of sexual deviancy attached to it.
19. greepleairport - Los Angeles Lakers
SEASONS: 8
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .547
Greeple is aided here by his newness to the league. Despite a relative successful first 8 seasons, he hasn’t won a championship or blindsided anyone in a trade, either of which instantly adds to any ooze factor a GM might have. He’d also admittedly rank as one of the hastier GMs, and slime is a patient man’s game. He’s still got that fresh-out-the-placenta new GM goop about him, though, and without a body of work to prove he wouldn’t run off with your camera if you asked him to take your picture, I can’t definitively say how slimy a GM he’ll turn out to be.
18. RPF - Brooklyn Nets
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .503
As far as I’m concerned, Ed still owes me the other 5 points for the time he’d only give me 5 points, a mid-1st round pick, and Jamey Brown for rookie contract year Simon Pheonix when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to afford retaining Pheonix in RFA. We’ve had good, productive talks and dealings otherwise as long as you don’t get me started on Deuce Fortre. In his favor, he’s very loyal to his renamed players and values his homegrown guys relatively highly, which is good, I guess, because Ed’s a dad, and he wouldn’t try trading one of his kids to the Suns for William Pearman like Doug is probably doing before he can even finish reading this sentence.
17. JNR - Minnesota Timberwolves
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 1
CAREER WIN PCT: .539
The Fangs of Horns and Fangs (the longest running runner up for Media Entry of the Year) fame, Rays done a lot of work to paint himself as a fair GM and a fair person in general. He won’t ask for a better deal than he thinks it’s worth, and as proof, I routinely nominate him and vote for him for the new trade of the year award because that gets me an extra point and maybe salves the wound that the horn is indeed sharper than the fang come Media Entry of the Year time. He’d be further back in the slime standings, but he was the first GM to point a finger at me and call me slimy, so he who smelt it dealt it, as they say.
16. 78# - Houston Rockets
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .509
After the legend of Al Horford, who purportedly stayed b/b from birth to the star death of the universe, Jerry West, steadfastly approaching the age of his real life namesake and survivor of broken legs galore, doesn’t lose an athletic step in training camp. Didn’t Aaron Pastor gain like, 40 points in HND in one sim? Has 78# found the glitch in the TC matrix? He claims so. And I hope so, because it would only be more infuriating if it was random luck.
15. Ballsohard - Detroit Pistons
SEASONS: 41
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 4
CAREER WIN PCT: .587
Perhaps it’s because it’s good to have BSH back in the league that his sliminess is disproportionately low in comparison to his success because I remember Scott’s great teams more than I remember any heinous misdeeds committed to put those teams together (though I do remember a bicoastal salary trafficking ring that operated between Philadelphia and Los Angeles). He’s got savviness in droves, and his ability to make consistently good moves will still be infuriating to competitors even TrayWithoutAnEscape route for oversized contracts that get Bynum’d in TC. That’s all ancient history, though, and his finish in the least slimy half of the league goes to show that slime, too, in time fades, but if at this point, you’re more slime than man, it’s probably too late for you, Doug.
14. AngryBanana - Oklahoma City Thunder
SEASONS: 13
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .507
At this point, it’s so hard to rank people objectively on something so subjective that it defies measurable criteria. I’ll put someone in a certain order, and then when I start writing about what makes them slimy, my blood boils and I want to move them up the slime ladder. For example, I want to rank AB higher because A) It seems like he’s been here a lot longer than 13 seasons, and B) that Daniel Oturu trade is just something you don’t do to a friend. I would rank him higher, but his point guards keep getting broken legs, and any sliminess in a post-Zagars season has to be at least partially because he’s in a dark place mentally.
13. BowToTheBill23 - Portland Trailblazers
SEASONS: 36
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 3
CAREER WIN PCT: .544
Perhaps it’s because it’s good to have <strike>BSH</strike> BowToTheBill back in the league…et cetera. His first run ended a bit before Scott’s did, so my memory of whether or not he did anything even the slightest bit slimy is shot. All I have to go by is his work since returning, and he hasn’t done much slimy on the trade front. However, some of those depth charts in the first couple of seasons sure did feature a lot of his rookies over the vets he signs (adding an extra $1,000 to try and give himself a leg up over someone who rounds to the nearest million).
Imagine how those talks go: “Hey DeAndre Ayton/Thomas Edison/Daniel Harrison/Andre Nickels…how would you like to come play for me for a few sims before I trade you to the Bucks or the Pelicans? No? Well what if I gave you an extra thousand dollars? Of course I have a pen!”
12. NickMalone77 - New Orleans Pelicans
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 1
CAREER WIN PCT: .505
I wanted to rank Nick a little higher, mostly for his activity on the trade market. Though he’s only traded at half the frequency as the 76ers in the same amount of time, one of those trades WAS with the Jazz, and the difference hasn’t been from a lack of trying, but a lack of assets. At any given time, I’d wager money that there are less than 2 Pelicans 1st round picks in Nick’s possession. Because of that, Nick might end up sliming himself a little bit because he places no value on the future. Perhaps that’s because he works for Fox News Radio and knows there’s no point in developing talent for the future based on secrets he overheard. And he’s also a Yankees fan. I was going to rank him at 13 because he’s very close to being a .500 GM (perhaps the closest on this list) and he takes about as much slime as he dishes on the Finalized Trade board, but I can’t do that anymore. Also, Kyrie Irving.
11. Eazy P - San Antonio Spurs
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 3
CAREER WIN PCT: .542
Every time I see the Spurs on the trade board, I cringe. I know that either Carlos has made a move that thrusts him immediately into the title conversation or that he’s made a move that gets him a highly coveted rookie contract player. Maybe that’s just being a good GM. And while in most cases, I see Eazy’s trades and they’re mostly slime free, I didn’t need a blacklight to know that Jonathan Lewis was worth a lot more than 2 late first round picks spaced two years apart. Sure, he wasn’t purple potential then, but he was close, and I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a player of that caliber on any current roster who was acquired for less. I think the Pistons drafted Jason Minter and Rod Keane with those Spurs picks. At least it gave ballsohard a nice challenge when he took over in Detroit.
10. Mexican Mamba - Los Angeles Clippers
SEASONS: 8
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 1
CAREER WIN PCT: .587
Still wiping off slime and champagne from his reigning championship run, Mexican Mamba gets a huge bump to the top third of the power rankings. Of the newest GMs, he is the most naturally skilled as evidenced by that record and that ring. He got incredible deals on both ends of Boban Marjanovic’s tenure and the most valuable player he gave up for Bryce Dejean-Jones was James Kirkendall. To add to his squad, Mamba abused the one sim trade rule on vet mins to such a degree that I finally understood Wig’s hatred of this rule, and not only from the perspective of never knowing if I had to force trade in the admin panel. For a league that’s almost pining to go back to the realm of real players, everyone sure is opposed to ending a slimy practice that you don’t see happening in real life.
9. Soundwave - Toronto Raptors
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 2
CAREER WIN PCT: .514
Geoff rarely ever engages in lopsided trades on either side of the see-saw, However, he did name a bunch of guys after Lord of the Rings characters, and he has a subtle tendency to acquire Bucks picks and then trade them off like some middleman of scum. Most damning of all, he’s let Doug use his node, so naturally, I had to bump him up a lot higher for that than I’d originally planned. Once Doug gets in your node, there’s really no cleansing yourself of that. Plus, I haven’t forgotten the single most important attribute of any player on my team.
8. the_syndicate - Denver Nuggets
SEASONS: 44
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 5
CAREER WIN PCT: .555
Tied with WigNosy for most championships, the success doesn’t necessarily make Ryan slimier, but it doesn’t help. His combination of skill, luck (especially in the offseason), and an almost telekinetic control of reverse cursing makes for a conducive surface that slime sticks too a lot easier than failure. He’d probably be mid-table without it. But even though Jerry West did help the Lakers get to the Finals last season, (and let’s not forget that the Nuggets/Lakers conference finals could have gotten the Nuggets there if it wasn’t for a spell of bad luck due to injury) when I see the Nuggets on the Finalized Trade board, and it’s a trade I wouldn’t do with no points involved, seeing Ryan also squeeze out 10 points gives me flashbacks to Chet Dooley that not even hastily flipping Leiker could shake…especially if the Heat end up De’Aaron Foxing David Leiker.
Speaking of which, if the slimiest player in the game blocks you on Skype chat, you can’t be that far behind.
7. NOLa. - Sacramento Kings
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 2
CAREER WIN PCT: .571
Before this season, Tani—one of PBSL’s most well liked GMs—might have found himself a lot less gunky, but given that he’s been trading with Gary and taking points to accept cuttable salary, While the sim gods have punished him by injuring the only players that anyone would be interested in trading for in Renato Mosher and Joshua Mitchell, this serves more as proof that ranking Tani this slimy is not just a case of recency bias.
6. False9 - Orlando Magic
SEASONS: 25
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 3
CAREER WIN PCT: .551
At first, I had thought that false9 had slowly started washing off some of the slime because it’s probably been 15 seasons since the last time he traded Andrew Bogut to the Jazz, but as I dug deeper, it became more apparent that Andy was just sweeping that slime under a rug. He’s also owned plenty of Jazz 1st and traded them back to the Jazz on more than one occasion. I guess he had a Jazz pick as recently as 2032. And let’s not even get into his history with Mavericks picks.
5. MESSI_2.0 - Phoenix Suns
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 2
CAREER WIN PCT: .453
No need to readjust your screens. Even though the Suns rank as one of the least active teams, MESSI_2.0 has pretty much ONLY reappeared in the league to do things that are slimy, including, but not limited to coming out of hiding to trade with Doug. The Suns have 3 naturally occurring purple potential players on their team that they got through pure luck of the draw. And they’ve had 3 naturally occurring purple potential players in three configurations without a gap. They traded one of them for best player in the game, De’Aaron Fox, lost Fox due to negligence, and then William Pearman went purple. The Suns have also compiled at least 500 points (and haven’t totaled any new points in several seasons), which they proved they planned to use all at once to create a superteam so unstoppable, it’d hijack the fun of the league. They ordered several hundred points of training at one point (before losing Fox), and the only reason that the Suns didn’t eclipse PBSL in a several-seasons-long era where there’d be no point in any other team competing is that most of that training would’ve been against the rules.
4. Letsplayhorse - Dallas Mavericks
SEASONS: 16
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .463
Because how the Frye else would you explain the S45 playoffs?
3. Garbageman - Chicago Bulls
SEASONS: 26
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 2
CAREER WIN PCT: .630
Game recognize game and slime recognize slime. With a roster featuring players acquired in trades from the Jazz, I will proudly place myself among the slimiest GMs so long as Silky Johnson or Cristiano Felicio is on my roster. Sure, it’s concerning that the commissioner of the league is the 2nd slimiest GM on this list, but I took over from a definitively slimier interim commissioner, so that’s progress. Besides, gotta ooze up those tracks to keep the trains running on time.
P.S. I know those Raptors renames weren’t from Lord of the Rings.
2. KeepIt100 - Philadelphia 76ers
SEASONS: 6
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 0
CAREER WIN PCT: .384
OLD: K100 is the newest GM here, so he gets some slack for that, and he probably won’t rank in the upper echelons of the most moist GMs unless we get newer GMs than he in the league. He’s been extremely patient with his core, but beyond that, he’s been very active moving everyone else around (and extremely active in every other aspect of the game). It’s because of this activity—and because of the lack of hesitation in his actions and plans—that I am certain he’ll eventually become a slimy GM once his grasp of player value refines itself. Since his first trade, he’s been involved in almost 25% of all the trades that have happened. There’s that adage about how some insane percent of US currency has cocaine on it, and if you have 25% of all US currency, chances are you’ve got a lot of slime passing through your hands.
EDIT: KeepIt100 moves up to #2 from #16 because he was too cheap to even send a point for Thomas Minter, but claimed him off waivers. I knew this guy was going to be shady, but I didn't think he'd prove it so quickly. I no longer feel bad about Obi Toppin breaking his leg because slime heals all wounds.
1. IamQuailman - Milwaukee Bucks
SEASONS: 46
CHAMPIONSHIPS: 3
CAREER WIN PCT: .544
You’ve gotta be kidding me if you were expecting this article to end any other way.
