I like to believe Stone had a gentleman’s agreement giving them Allen in exchange MIL 2022 FRP plus first dibs on KPj (for nothing in return) should they part. I also believe JBB pushed for us knowing we had Lucas to help. Essentially a delayed completion of the Allen trade, which would be Allen for KPJ plus Milw 2022 FRP (which is now a 2023)
And how many extra games would we have won in the process? Could we have swapped them for a top 4 pick in a good draft? That’s what we got. The teams that finished with the 3rd and 4th worst records did not get top 4 picks.
You can't prove a counterfactual. 1) We got so lucky to even keep our pick. We had basically a 50% chance of sending it to OKC even with the tanking and last place finish. 2) We could have tanked the exact same way even with Allen and Levert, but even if we didnt, 5 more wins wouldn't have killed our chances of a high pick. Raptors had 10 more wins than us and got 4th pick. Clev was 5th worst team and got 3rd pick.
I can prove that the Rockets lost as many games as possible to keep their pick, and it worked. We lost as many games possible to increase our odds to keep our pick, and it worked. No, we couldn’t have. Those two are better players. LeVert helped Indy win 18 games, more than our total for the entire season. We do know what 5 more wins woulda got us. We have seen the lotto results. Only the bottom two teams landed in the top 4. If we aren’t bottom two then OKC has our pick.
So. At this point, I would gladly take Levert and Allen and the pick swap over Green, we would have better players or better assets to trade.
Just because we (arguably) blew the pick doesn’t mean we chose wrong in doing what we had to do to get the pick.
Just because you like to believe that it does not make it true, and even if true we lost the asset battle. I can agree with that, I never thought we got a great package and wanted to keep both players because I thought they could be flipped into more assets.
Are we seriously considering players busts in less than half a season? Steve Nash, Kyle Lowry, Rudy Gay, and others took a while to break out of their shells.
