I know I had bigger goals for Houston today. But wonder if they would do Marvin Bagley for the trade exception.
What's happening right now can't be good for the league. You have 5-10 teams in legitimate contention for the finals that are stocking up on talent with 5-10 teams or so that are basically divesting of all of their assets to stockpile draft picks and mediocre young players. Short of those lesser teams landing a transformational star in the draft, they will be stuck in limbo with developing players, some of whom may turn out to be good rotational pieces, maybe even all stars, at which point they will be traded to the competitors for future draft compensation again because the alternative is losing them via free agency to more attractive teams/markets. As an example, the Magic have been rebuilding since 2012. Their 2013 #2 overall pick was Oladipo, 2014 got Gordon at #4, and 2015 Hezonja at #5. Orlando didn't really "miss" on any of these picks. 2013 was an awful draft and Dipo was the best of the top-10, even in hindsight. Gordon in 2014 was better than Exum and Smart who were drafted after him. Hezonja was worse than Cauley-Stein and Mudiay who came after him, but not by much. I guess my point is that even with decent general management, until you break into the top tier, you can stay in rebuild mode for a long time, and the dynamics of the current NBA make breaking into that tier incredibly difficult. Not sure how the NBA fixes it, but there has to be a way to fix the current system where rebuilding teams languish season after season at the bottom of the league with no hope of improvement.
You know how to fix that? By not hiring dumbasses to run your billion dollar franchises. The Rob Hennigans (the Orlando GM that mucked **** up from 2012 to 2017), the Vlade Divacs and Billy Kings of the world, thankfully, are almost extinct. There are far more competent GMs in today's NBA than incompetent ones. The teams that have been languishing in a perpetual place of garbage--Orlando, Chicago, Sacramento, etc.--got there because they had bad GMs and also bad ownerships. You can't change ownerships as quickly as you can change your GM.
Denver needs one more piece imo. AG fills the void of losing Grant. I'm not sure if he's as good as Grant defensively.
I agree with these points, I just wonder if the NBA really cares, provided that those stacked 5-10 teams with all the stars play exciting games & series against one another.
