Even if it is Bima that said it, regurgitating someone else's stance doesn't make it a valid point. That lottery-protected pick isn't standing in the way of jack crap. This is a team suffering from a lack of a franchise guy, and a high teens pick isn't getting you one of those. I'd even bet money teams would value a player we took this June in the late lottery on a rookie contract more than a 2013 pick in the high teens. The notion that the Nets obligation would be the make or break factor in our landing a Top 12 player holds as much water as a callender. Harsh reality: Lowry, Dragic, Martin, Lee, Budinger, Patterson, Scola, Dalembert, Camby, and almost certainly Parsons and Morris are never going to vie for All-NBA. Go find me a championship team that didn't have at least one guy that was at least 2nd Team All-NBA in his career and a multiple ASG inclusion. Even the Pistons had two. We've got a nice foundation to surround a stud with, but we're going to keep spinning our wheels until we land that stud. Patterson isn't taking us to the Western Finals, no matter if he has a good offseason or not. I wouldn't bet much money on Parsons doing that either. Morey's 0-8 trying to land a franchise stud the past few seasons. Generally speaking, the draft is your best bet to land one. Giving the Nets our pick in a draft this deep, and at its highest possible value (#15/16) is dumb. DUMB. Bring in better players, at least chase the #4 seed, and give the Nets a weaker pick (closer to #20) in a shallower draft. Don't give them a Kendall Marshall to replace Deron Williams when you could skip a year and hand them a marginal back up type like Isaiah Canaan.
The draft is a crap shoot in any year. Not a panacea. You're talking about landing all-star talent as if it could be easily identified and grows on trees. This year there is probably one certain impact player and a whole host of very large question marks. Even if Houston had the #4 pick there is no assurance that anything close to an all-star player would come from it. The best that any GM can do is to keep plugging away, making gradual improvement by adding key pieces here and there until they manage to strike it big in the draft. Landing an all-star can be done without having a top 5 pick. Just look at the last dozen or so draft results if you don't believe that's true.
While I agree that the draft is a crap shoot, I think the odds of building a championship team using the blueprint they currently have in their hand is a longer shot than blowing this up and finding your player in the draft. I mean how much progress have we really made drafting in the mid-teens, signing FAs that no one else wants and trading for a 37 year old C?
How you came to that conclusion is past me. All I was talking about was the worth of "releasing the Nets obligation" this season vs mining the 2012 draft class. Did you somehow completely misread my post and take away the idea that I wanted us to tank for a top 5 pick? With 6 games remaining? If you consider Thomas Robinson a very large question mark, I don't know what to say. And projections never bat 1.000 If they did, Rondo wouldn't have gone #21, Granger wouldn't have been #17, Nash wouldn't have been #15, etc. Just because guys aren't being billed as Can't Miss Superstar in April, it doesn't mean they aren't out there. I know it's true. I've brought it up repeatedly of late. I'm puzzled at how you've managed to contradict yourself, both knocking the draft (beyond pick 1) as well as admitting a need to strike it big (without a top 5 pick). Over the past decade, it's been the norm for a top guy to be lurking in the #11-#21 spots...giving a random team in a random year a hypothetical 10% at getting one. Why wouldn't you want to up that chance with additional picks in that same range? In a draft widely considered deeper than normal? The idea that giving the Nets our pick this year helps us land a stud more than coupling it with the Knicks pick makes zero sense to me. It's a minor trade asset moving forward versus one extra chance to land a "surprise" stud.
This is the same flexibility myth originated by Bima. If flexibility going forward is so important why would Morey entangle non-flexibility jargon in deep detail in every trade deal. Morey would never give a draft pick away without some protection unless it was Lebron. Even Miami put lottery trade protection in the first round picks they traded for Lebron. This not an issue about tanking. I have been on both sides of that argument this year. After watching the 4 game win streak I bought into this team. I thought Camby and Dragic had this team playing at a different level. But then the lose 3 of the most important games of the season back to back to back and I see nothing to think they could change that unclutchness going forward. I also do not see how getting humiliated in the playoffs helps us. But that is a different argument than flexibility to trade our draft pick in the future. If we do not make the playoffs and that was true than we can always take the lottery restriction out and just give the pick to NJ. I can guarantee you they would agree to that. I can also guarantee no NBA GM would be stupid enough to do that. It's ridiculous to say future flexibility is more valuable than a lottery pick. Morey will never give NJ our pick before he has to. He has even made 2nd rd pick trades with tons of protection taking away flexibility in those picks. Of course he prefers the picks over flexibility even 2nd round picks.
You do realize this is the best pick the Nets can receive from us (8th seed in the West ~ #18). What if we make the playoffs with a much higher seed next year? How much protection does the pick have after this season?
I am not sure why there is so much angst here about the Rockets. Going into this season, reasonable expectations put them somewhere in the vicinity of a .500 team. Currently they have a 32-28 record which in my book puts them exactly where they should be which is +/- 2-4 games in the vicinity of .500. So I don't understand what all the fuss is about. They are what their record says they are: an average team and I have come to the conclusion that even Morey does not have much of a clue as to how to break them out of this cycle of mediocrity.
