Ex-NBA GM Will Run Overtime Elite Amid Youth Basketball Anarchy

Overtime Elite is dipping into the NBA executive ranks for its latest hire. 

Former Hawks GM and NBA player Landry Fields has joined the nine-team basketball league for 16- to 20-year-olds as the president of league operations. The 37-year-old will oversee all competitive, development, and operational aspects of the league while looking for ways to grow it. 

Fields was fired by the Hawks in April after three seasons running the franchise, which included a postseason appearance in 2023. After a five-year NBA playing career, he went straight to work in the Spurs’ front office in 2016. With the Spurs, he worked as a scout and ran the team’s G League affiliate in Austin. He was hired by the Hawks as an assistant GM in 2020 before taking over the front office in 2022. 

The league launched in 2021 with a promise to pay teenagers a minimum of $100,000 annually as a way to get to the NBA without missing out on a paycheck, but the league is facing increased competition as more money enters college basketball. Fields’s hire comes amid a stretch of several G League and OTE alumni seeking to play college basketball after initially skipping school to sign with those leagues. NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NCAA president Charlie Baker recently met to discuss the eligibility issue, according toSports Illustrated.

“He’s got four unique parts of his career that touch everything we do,” Overtime CEO Dan Porter told Front Office Sports. “He was a player so he understands that ecosystem. And he’s a young guy. He knows what social media is. He deeply understands college. He played four years at Stanford. At the Spurs he really did player development and scouting and clearly our league is driven by talent. And at the Hawks, he dealt with all of the business side. 

“None of [our other staff] have gone all the way up and down,” Porter says. “We haven’t had someone who touches NBA, college, who was a player and touches all of those things.”

Fields told FOS that he explored other jobs in NBA front offices before taking the job with OTE. His family played a factor in the decision, as he doesn’t have to uproot his wife and three children from Atlanta in his new role. Fields says that with his experience playing in a totally different era before NIL and the transfer portal, he’s aware of what he can and can’t relate to with younger players now. 

“I think curiosity is a very underutilized skill amongst leadership,” Fields told FOS. “And that is something that I leverage often just to gain perspectives and learn things that for me creates connections among staff members and players.” 

Still, he’s no stranger to OTE, having scouted some of its alumni—includingAmen and Ausar Thompson—while leading the Hawks front office. The twins skipped college to play in OTE and were selected No. 4 and 5, respectively, in the 2023 NBA Draft. In 2024, Fields signed Dominick Barlow to the Hawks roster two years after he became OTE’s first alum to make an NBA roster. Fields said he talked to players such as Barlow and league investors such as Trae Young to get a better understanding of the league over the years. 

Overtime Sports Inc, OTE’s parent company, has a slew of investors including Jeff Bezos, Drake, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Young, and other NBA players, while being operated by Porter and co-founder Zack Weiner. 

The league is in its fifth season and boasts Alex Sarr, the No. 2 pick in the 2024 NBA draft and Arkansas’s Meleek Thomas, a projected lottery pick in the 2026 draft, as some of its alumni. 

“There’s definitely things even within the context of OTE that they’re experiencing that I haven’t,” Fields told FOS. “So on one level, it’s about understanding the professional level and understanding a craft and a skill that you do possess. I’ve walked that walk for sure. And then coming at it from an executive lens…you see more behind the scenes how teams are made, how cultures among front office staffers work, how those front offices and people relate to the players, it’s a much different perspective.”