How is that? I mean if you draft a player and in turn trade them for a Kevin Martin (in reference to the Landry+McGrady trade) it wouldn't be to make us a better team? If we used that logic than Spinoulis (sp?) was a major hit because he netted us Scola which also made out team better. 2nd round picks generally don't make a great impact so they can never really be considered misses, just pleasant surprises. I rather us have all that turnover thru the past couple seasons after Tracy and Yao being gone than Morey be sitting on his a** waiting for something worthwhile to come along, he's been working towards the future since the present has been hampered.
Flash, Did any of those trades make the team significantly better? I mean if we step back and look at it from a distance the results have still been mediocre. Sure, maybe from an individual talent position we seemed to get better, but team wise, not really. The problem with trades is one of chemistry if you are constantly churning your roster, you are sort of treading water - which is what I see going on here. Sure the team looks better on paper, but the Ws and Ls look to be about the same. DD
So, it's water under the bridge v head held under water? Yeppers, CH, let's do the latter. Play the '09 lottos and strike '12 LottoMagic!
yeah, Last year. http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/30227/carlisle-pushed-all-of-the-right-buttons
****. I thought the title meant the user spoke to Popeye and had the inside track on a potential trade.
Minny's crap, with Houston's secret they become mediocre. I guess you can say that's a big step up for them. In other words, tanking did not work for Minny. They want to rebuild on the fly if possible. Improving thru S&T, finding cheap valuable assets thru the draft and trading them as part of a package once their contract is up hoping to land a superstar.
People still don't understand about Morey. Morey is extremely adept at finding wheat among the chaff. See: Landry, Lowry, Lee, Dragic, Budinger, etc etc. It seems like every 'unexpected-source' player Morey picks up, turns out, 'the kid can play'. However, that skill, and it is a skill, is not what builds a champion. What builds a champion is having one or more superstar-level (and HEALTHY) talents on the team, surrounded by secondary-skill players, harmony, and good coaching. Morey's skills do not create a champion, HOWEVER, once Morey manages to land us that elusive bona-fide superstar, his skills will KEEP us as champions for a long long time, because our supporting cast will almost always be better than most other teams' supporting casts. The problem, as it has always been, filling the team with b-level talent, all hustle and heart, leads to the worst possible destination: draft limbo. We must, as everyone knows, either draft the next superstar franchise player, or sign one that someone else drafted. We are probably never going to be bad enough to draft one ourselves, so we are going to have to figure out some way to bring one or two of them here. It has catch-22 written all over it, from so many different angles, I don't know how Morey can keep his sanity. But all we need is that one guy. THEN, DM's 'secrets' will work their magic to KEEP us on top for a lot longer than most people would ever think. The trick is getting over that hump.
RJ Adelman is in charge of stats now? Time to call it a season boys. The T'Wolves have just locked down the 2012 NBA Championship.
It's well known that Adelman (the senior) never really used the advanced stats that the front office would provide. Even if his son is now a proponent of them, and is incorporating elements of our system, it's not likely that he actually knows everything about it. It's extremely unlikely for something like that to leave the primary brain trust from the front office, so all the coaches and players would likely see is the end result: you shoot better here; try to get the ball away from this player; pressure here, here, and here. The data collection and analysis wouldn't be so transparent. The principles and ideas are probably borrowed, but the methodology is likely proprietary. And Adelman (the younger) would have to re-build a statistical database from scratch. That takes a long time.
