It's not that it's an excellent path. It's that a great amount of luck still comes into play whatever path you choose. You guys act as if tanking guarantees that we will end up like OKC. Well, there are teams that have sucked for longer than that and still suck. So perhaps: get rid of your good players and replace them with worse players is not a very good tactic either.
Tanking requires luck. The Morey way requires extraordinary luck. Either way the odds are against you getting that special player, but some odds are better than others.
The Kings and Wizards have followed this exact path for years .... and look at them!!!... It's a copycat league , but no way would I put all my faith in "tanking" 3+ years just to start a rebuilding plan (another 3+ years).... The Thunder are the exception to this unwise plan..
It is still a much better plan than being mediocre for another 100 years with nobody caring about the team.
Still not a fan of blatant tanking but we can surely stop using the Drayton method of signing stop-gaps like Dalembert. You can't just ask Morey to stop finding gems in the rough like he's done with Lowry, Parsons, and Scola, though. If we don't sign Dalembert last year and trade for Camby I think there's a good chance we'd be in the top 10, which would probably be more than enough for Morey to trade up for a potential star. Watching that Thunder/Spurs series brings about the sobering reality that you just can't get by without great players. The Spurs have three very good players and they were no match in crunch time for the greatness of Durant and the havoc he wreaks on defenses. And the only reason the Heat may lose is because of terrible coaching and garbage role players...but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them come back and win the series now that they'll have a reason to play with urgency.
If you tank , you lose money... If it's half empty now in the Toyota Center, imagine the empty seats when we're in tank mode.... If Im Les, I would only "truly" want to tank if this overachieving, mediocre team starts underachieving ....Meaning , we know we're a middle-of-the-pack team... But if we suck badly record wise, then pull the plug.....until then, keep trying to improve it....
It sure is. It's a good thing being mediocre for 100 years is not in the Rocket's plans. People see that we've picked 14th three seasons in a row and act like that's the front office's full plan for moving forward. But they're trying to judge the outcome of the plan before the end result. We've known that the team's plan is to put together solid role-players, have cap-space available, and to gamble on low risk high reward type players all in an attempt to set us up for a star player. That chance will come again, and eventually we'll be the winning team. But this approach of keeping our team competitive and still giving us a chance to win that star player probably takes about as long as it would take to rebuild. Not giving the team as much time as it would have taken by going the tank route isn't fair. I know it's frustrating no longer being a power in the NBA. But we'll get there again, one way or another. Let's give this front office the same time to put together a contender as we would have given them had we begun tanking last season. I'm just as frustrated as you are. The only differences are that I probably have a bit more patience and I might understand the Rocket's plan a bit better. Their plan is not to continue getting the 14th pick each draft. Their plan is to cash in when the time is right. The time hasn't been right yet.
I know we aren't a winning team right now, what I said is I appreciate the fact that the front office try thier best to put a winning team together
This worries me the most. If the front office had done their best to win, yet Rockets have not been winning for 3 years? The tanking strategy may not work simply because the front office we have is as clueless as Bobcats. Wake up, tankers.
Cleveland lucked into perhaps when is all said and done the best BB player ever. Miami had to get their hands on a small little piece named Shaq. Orlando was never really bad. Don't get me wrong I am pretty agnostic on this issue. I just try to state facts. But I would bet it the number of teams that tried to rebuild and failed for 5+ years is way longer than the list of successes.
Seriously. Basketball is incredibly frustrating because so much of winning is tied into draft luck, as opposed to football or baseball where luck plays a far greater role in the actual determination of the outcome of each individual game. Has this ever been done, where a single team drafted 3 all-NBA performers back to back to back with top 5 picks? I'd wager that it's just as common as when contenders have been built without the benefit of tanking: Bad Boy Pistons, 90s Pacers, the JailBlazers, mid-2000 Pistons, 7 seconds or less Suns, Dirk's Mavericks, even the Chicago Bulls (their odds of getting Rose were worse than the odds of the Rockets getting a top 3 pick this year). And once again, if the Rockets had a lineup of Gasol/Nene/Parsons/Lee/Lowry with Jeremy Lin as your sixth man, that's a team that's probably only behind OKC and SA in the west, and they'd still have Llull, Motiejunas, Morris and Patterson as prospects with less than 2 years experience.
Agreed. This is going to take some time. I hate drafting fourteenth but ultimately if you bring in young players with upside, and take the time to develop them, you either get pieces for your team, or at the very least valuable trade assets. You don't always have to tank to get good draft picks.
Actually, the Rockets had 85.1% attendance this year per home game. That puts us at #19 out of 30. About in the middle.
Well obviously, but things still have to fall into place for you exactly. Jerry Krause, the architect of 6 championships, had #1, #4, #8, #2, #4, #2 on his team. He did exactly what everyone wants; fully rebuild, play the kids, and lose a whole bunch. After Krause left the Bulls, the proceeded to pick #7, #3, #7, #4, #9, and then turned a 1.7% chance of winning the lottery into the youngest MVP in league history. If they stay where they were supposed to and get DJ Augustin instead, or even get #2 and Michael Beasley instead, that's a full decade of top 10 picks and no relevance. So yes, you can of course increase your odds of getting a superstar, but oftentimes it just comes down to who can pull a 1.7% Rose or 1.5% Penny out of their ass, or who can't punch their 6.4% LeBron Ticket (Memphis). Nothing is guaranteed in basketball, and although it's an incredibly tough thing to think about, no matter how much you increase your odds by being terrible.
Its not just 3 years in a row, genius. KD was drafted in 2007, if you're counting from now that means its 5 years. It took them 5 years to become where they are now. Not only that, it also took Portland making one of the biggest mistakes in history and passing on KD to take Oden. If they took KD instead where would OKC be right now with Oden (who'll be injured), WB, Harden and Ibaka? Also, the Bobcats had one of the worst seasons ever and still missed out on the top pick, I don't know why you keep making it sound like tanking is a solid strategy, its not.
