Oh great so more of a ponderous fixation on analytics, and most likely coupled with a personality unequipped to conduct powerful negotiations.
I share the concern about the second part of this, but not the first.
Dundon’s whole thing was to create a high functioning organization, to run this like a business. Waddell was a manager of a decision making system that took all parties into account. I highly doubt Tulsky was somehow unheard or in disagreement with this approach, and if somehow he was, I don’t think Dundon will let him simply run things differently now that he’s GM.
That’s why I never really understood the “promote Tulsky” crowd unless it was a truly defensive maneuver (meaning, to keep him from going elsewhere). I don’t think, from an analytics perspective, Tulsky will do anything now that he wasn’t doing then. The system was designed to receive all inputs - Tulsky wasn’t being silenced. If anything, we better hope Tulsky put together a pretty good team underneath him while he was AGM, because he’s not gonna have the time to be as hands on with the analytics or player analysis anymore.
In a way, I’m maybe a bit concerned that we’re “losing” Tulsky. Having listened to interviews in the past (and I admit this is as snap a judgment as snap judgments go), he seems like a soft spoken guy who’d be very happy to continue diving into the player and systems analysis piece, and might be a fish out of water when it comes to all the “bravado” pieces that Waddell did so well (contract and trade negotiations, media relations, etc.) Now, Tulsky’s an ambitious guy, so of course he wants to try to be a GM and more power to him, I’m sure another organization would benefit immensely. But as it stands today, I think we’re worse off, because we’ve promoted a guy out of a very specific role that he’s very good at and have effectively asked him to divert his attention away from that.
An analogy since many of you are in/from the engineering/tech world: we’ve taken our most brilliant Lead Engineer and promoted him to Engineering Manager. Some guys thrive at that, others don’t. But either way, now that he’s an Engineering Manager he’s not going to be hands-on-keyboard designing products and systems, he’s gonna be wrangling a bunch of other engineers. Seen it go very well and very poorly a lot of times. Hopefully for Tulsky and for us it goes very well.