Not a basketball ops expert but is it a good idea to give away swaps on your draft picks then tank?

We do have the data, but we interpret it differently.

Bad players played well for a little stretch, then they played bad for a much longer stretch.

 

Again... ok... ??

It's not THAT valuable, but it is valuable and all that's available.

The love affair with DM is strange. Where are these championship rings?? For almost everything good DM did, you can point to a head scratcher as well. Nothing will top his best move, and that's what set him up for the whole run.

Don't get me wrong, I like DM and would be happy if he was still the GM, but am not crying that he's not or anything.

Yes.. and? if the goal is to win a championship, there weren't any other options. This is the path to take. It might mean the team is a 20 win team for the next decade. And that would suck. Hopefully not, but I'm happy to risk that if it means actually setting up a chance ot get a ring again.

Yeah, he's not great. But i will also look objectively. There's lots of little things i don't love, but the bulk of his not greatness comes from one move, just as the bulk of DM's greatness in Houston came from one move. The CP3-Russ trade destroyed the franchise.

But here we are. Can't go back in time.

 

How do you interpret a team with top 3 games missed due to injuries and most different starters and starting lineups in the league, and best player out for a crap ton of games, etc., etc. as equal to every team?

Yeah, they played well when surrounded by even better players. When those players were no longer there and their roles changed constantly every game they played worse.

That's par for the course with these levels and types of players.

 

I never said every team has had the equal amount of games missed by starters.

My point is that our "good" players aren't good; they are bad. (Their availability should also be weighed when assessing how good a player is; a guy who cannot play back to backs is necessarily worse than an equally talented guy who can play back to backs. I don't agree with the idea that "the best ability is availability" but availability is important.)

I think that what we're really disagreeing on is whether or not Wall, EGo, and Dipo have been good this year. I say they haven't, and it seems like you think they have. (You also mentioned Cousins, but I think it's clear that he was awful for us.)

The players' stats indicate that they have been playing badly. Our record indicates that as well. I don't think that having those poor performing players for more games would make us a much better team.

 

I think you're too stuck on the idea that they can be "really good". Again, there's a difference between Wall, Dipo, Gordon... and Mason Jones, Patton and Lamb. On ethe one hand you have players that can play in and win NBA games. On the other hand you have g leaguers. Like the Cousins comment. Was he great? No. Was he even average? Not really. But he was capable and competent of playing in NBA games and its kind of important to at least have that in a center sometimes, lol.

The reason the convo is in this thread is because this tread is asking about the benefit of tanking when yo have a pick swap in place and my point was they weren't trying to tank originally and likely had a playoff play-in at least in front of them, but for the insane amount of injuries. There are very few if any teams that can withstand the Rockets level of roster uncertainty and not suck.

The Lakers are 2-4 without Lebron for example. That's better than 20 losses in a row, sure, but aside from their two main guys they've been very healthy and they have guys like Trez/Marcus Morris/Kyle Kuzma coming off the bench because of that health.

 

Yes, its a great idea, the Fertitta-McNair school of management has analyzed this and found this strategy to be effective at reducing payroll and thereby increasing profitability.

 

I gotta call out this last part. Not greatness, or even terribleness, is in his DNA at this point. It's not just the Russ trade. It's the bragadoccio, the "Shut up and Listen", the admitting forcing the trade on TV, the salary dump trades, the covid layoffs, the superyacht, the team's staff web page, the Toyota Center mural. The guy screams supervillain and unfortunately, free agents are human beings and they're bound to be affected by that.

 

Our owner likes to gamble any time odds are better than the blackjack table odds of winning. Or if it's a long shot, better than roulette wheel odds.

 

#Truth

 

I will say that after the Harden trade, I thought the absolute highest ceiling of Wall-Oladipo-Wood was a brutal beating in a first round. So if that's all you are saying, then I think we are aligned here.

Yes, there is a difference in those players.

Wall, Oladipo, Gordon = bad NBA players
Jones, Patton, Lamb = mediocre G-Leaguers

It is possible that Oladipo and/or Gordon can at some point play in a way that isn't so bad, but they have been bad for us. And them being bad should not have been a surprise to anyone. Gordon was bad last year and Oladipo isn't the same post-injury. (Plus, Oladipo never wanted to be here long term, which was well-known - rumors of Oladipo wanting Miami were out there.)

And here again we just differ on player assessment. I don't think Cousins was competent; I thought he was embarrassingly bad out there.

I agree that the Rockets weren't trying to tank, so we align there. I think the tanking just happened because this is such a bad team.

... but here is where we disagree. First of all, injuries happening to injury-prone players should be expected. Secondly, even if we were somehow granted injury immunity from the basketball gods (which again should not have been anyone's expectation), this team would still be largely built around guys who have been playing badly - Wall, Oladipo, Gordon.

Wall, Oladipo, Gordon, and Wood are not comps to LeBron (or AD). They are not in the same stratosphere.

So what I was originally trying to say in this thread is that Tilman and Co. likely thought that Wall and Oladipo (and the rest of our ragtag crew) would be a good team. Instead, it has been a disaster. Why has it been a disaster? Because bad, injury-prone players played badly and had injuries. This should not have been a surprise to our organization, but it appears that it was.

 

Yeah, that's basically what i was saying.

Not sure what else can be expected when your #1, top 5, MVP level player requests out. There aren't a lot of examples of that happening to teams and having them be ok immediately.

The Pelicans did great in their trade and still suck.