Weekly Countdown: The art of negotiating, free-agent notes, more

Not content to bask in the glow of his Executive of the Year award, Denver general manager Mark Warkentien has worked this offseason at honing his negotiating skills. AP Ian Thomsen's Mailbag Ian Thomsen will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his mailbag. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

While his rivals were preparing for the draft last month, Denver Nuggets VP of basketball operations Mark Warkentien was spending a week at Harvard Law School. Here is a little of what he was taught.

5 negotiating lessons from the Executive of the Year

5. Keep trying to improve. "We're always on the players to take the time to get better," the 56-year-old Warkentien said, and so he applied the same dictate to himself. Early last month, he enrolled in a prestigious five-day workshop at the Harvard Negotiation Institute on the law campus at Cambridge, Mass.

"I wanted to look at the other guys' playbook,'' Warkentien said. "Often in my chair you have to joust with attorneys and agents that have negotiation training, and they're professionally educated. I don't think a whole lot of us sitting in NBA front offices have that kind of training in negotiations. You have experience but you don't have training."

Enrolled with him were judges and attorneys from around the world who had come to Harvard to sharpen their oratorical knives. They must have been surprised to meet Warkentien, a former UNLV assistant to Jerry Tarkanian, a self-made executive who last November packaged Allen Iverson to Detroit for Chauncey Billups in the trade that drove Denver to the conference finals. That move, along with the minimum-salary contributions of Chris Andersen, Anthony Carter and Dahntay Jones, earned Warkentien his award as executive of the year.

Without a first-round pick to prepare for, he could afford to spend a few days in early June away from the Nuggets offices. (Though on draft-day the Nuggets acquired the No. 18 pick, which they spent on North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson.) At Harvard he was in class with lawyers and judges from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., followed by a night of reading to prepare for the next day's arguments. "That was the hard part for me," he said. "I had to read it all twice. If everyone else had an hour of reading, I had two hours. I had to really concentrate and read it again to understand it.

"The conversations weren't about side pick-and-rolls. If I was daydreaming for five minutes and I would try to pick it up in the middle of the conversation, I was lost.

"What did I get out of it? For every four things they presented, three of them were things you already knew from experience. You'd hear a guy say something and you'd think, I get that -- I can use that in the future. Then there were the other things where I would be thinking, wow, I never thought about that. I'd say 25 percent of the material was new for a layman like myself.''

4. Prepare. Before a GM sits down at the negotiating table, he needs to understand what the player's agent is going to say. That understanding is crucial to negotiation.

"I got this from [Bob] Whitsitt," Warkentien said of his former boss when Whitsitt was GM of the SuperSonics and later president of the Trail Blazers. `"What are they thinking at the other guy's breakfast table? You sit there and spend all day thinking about why you're right, why your position is just."

The experts at Harvard crystallized that point of view. Instead of fine-tuning your own argument, predict the reasoning of your opponent. "And then find all of the commonalities," Warkentien said. Because if you can find points of agreement, then you have a chance of pulling the opponent to your side of the table.

"They talked a lot about this," he said. "They tell you to find the 'predictable surprises' -- that was something new for me. Like when you're in the negotiations and the other guy says something you never thought of and you don't know how to respond."

The best advocates hijack the opponent's argument. "You've got to find out what the other guy's interests are," Warkentien said. "They teach you to ask a lot of questions. 'I understand why you might want that, but I don't understand why you would deserve it.' Make him explain where he's coming from and that may give you stuff to build your own argument."

How does this apply to the NBA? "More and more so now you have multi-party negotiations," he said. "On your end it's yourself, the coach, the owner, so right there you have people with multiple interests in the negotiation. And then on the other side it's the player, his agent, his wife, perhaps somebody from his entourage and on down the line. You've got to somehow bring everybody into the ballpark."

3. Get out of the office. Put away the Blackberry and the cell phone and get on an airplane. "Whenever you can, you need to close the personal distance," Warkentien said. "Sending an e-mail is probably better than a fax. A phone call is better than an e-mail. And face-to-face beats a phone call. In this electronic era we're so busy texting and e-mailing and all that stuff, and it was a reminder to hear them say you need to get face-to-face. Think about something as simple as an argument with the wife -- it's a lot easier to blast her over the phone than it is when you're talking face-to-face. It's a lot easier to hang up the phone and be mad all day, but when you're in the same room it's a different kind of argument."

The workshop students were divided into teams. Warkentien's team had to argue its side of the case, and then it had to argue on behalf of the opponent's side. "And then you had to turn your back to each other and argue it as if you were on the phone," he said. "It's a lot harder and slower over the phone, which is why whenever you can you have to get face-to-face."

By spending a week in a foreign environment, he realized that the best professionals in all fields are forever working to improve themselves. "You'd have a negotiating partner, and the guy I was with was a judge from Thailand," he said. "That was no fun. He was smart. He had experience and training. But how do you get better in tennis? You play against better players. That's the only way.

"A lot of them were attorneys from big corporations, and 60 percent of the class was internationally-based. These governments of Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Australia, the Netherlands -- they were sending their negotiators over here to learn. I'm not ashamed to say I got tattooed a few times. But I liked being the UNLV guy at Harvard. I brought them some diversity.

"Our sports world has some macho and bravado to it, and that's probably not helpful in a negotiation. It's like playing hard at golf. Having that bravado and coming in with great passion and emotion isn't going to do it, and emotion isn't helpful. Think about when you were having that argument with the wife and you got all angry: How helpful was the emotion?"

2. Learn from your own lessons. Warkentien remains proud of his UNLV association, regardless of the NCAA investigations and penalties that eventually chased Tarkanian out of the program. "People can make light of this, but you had to be creative there," he said. "If your kids have 1,200 scores in the SAT, you're probably not sending them off to Las Vegas. So you couldn't do [basketball] conventionally there -- you had to do it with transfers and JC guys who were overlooked and undervalued. In 11 years (1980-91) I think we had four or maybe only three McDonalds All-Americans, and one of them -- Anthony Jones -- was a transfer from Georgetown.''

And yet in those 11 years they won 84 percent of their games as well as the 1990 national championship.

While his basketball role models -- Tarkanian and Whitsitt -- were controversial figures, Warkentien was struck by their versatility. "Jerry, when he was the coach at Long Beach State (1968-73), he played slow with a tight 1-2-2 zone," Warkentien said. "When he got to Vegas, that wasn't going to work. He went to pressing and running and trying score 100. He did what he had to do.

"Then you look at Bob, who had a totally different situation in Seattle with (owner) Barry Ackerley than in Portland with Paul [Allen]. You were on tight dollars in Seattle and he took a bunch of character guys, and he was executive of the year doing that.

"One thing that's lost on everybody is what Bob did in Portland -- he had a completely different set of marching orders than anybody ever gets. The window on the Clyde [Drexler] and Terry Porter era was closing, and Bob's mandate was to get back into the championship window without going to the lottery and without becoming a bad team. Detroit, Boston, Chicago -- even the Lakers -- they all went to the lottery before they became good again. But when Bob was in Portland we went four or five years staying in the playoffs and then we became conference finalists twice in a row. That takes different thinking. You've got to get unconventional to do that."

The lesson here is to take what the game gives you.

"There's only a handful of places that can be like Duke, and everybody else has to scramble," he said. "Think about the very best coaches in college or the pros: They don't have just one way of doing things. If you come in with one way of defending the post -- defending behind, three-quarter, or fronting -- sooner or later the good coach will beat you if you only have that one way. They'll figure it out. You've got to have different ways to do it."

Which comes back around to the need for flexibility in negotiations, based on an understanding of the opponent and his arguments.