Rebuilding without Tanking makes assets look better

I don't think many teams truly try to tank, they try to rebuild. The Rockets have just been much more successful at rebuilding than most other teams.

The Rockets blew up last years team and became the youngest team with the lowest payroll in the league. That's called tanking if the team plays poorly. The Rockets have played well, so people say we are successfully rebuilding the team. Morey and McHale deserve a a lot of credit for the quick turnaround. And to think the Rockets still have so much untapped talent in Anderson, Beverley, D-Mo, TJones, and White. The Rockets have everything; a pretty good team, young talent, and cap space. Whether they make a trade for another star, or just continue to develop their own talent, the future is bright for the Rockets.

 

Rockets have made their own luck... They've danced with assets and options for years and years. This Summer, they took advantage of OKC Thunder's need to move Harden in fear of losing him as a Max player.

Morey knew he needed a high draft pick to swing any major deals, so he traded Lowry for one! Martin is instant offense, not much afterwards. And then the hype around Jeremy Lamb is still resonating - he helped himself with a stellar summer camp (A lot of publications list Lamb as a future all-star).

Morey does not get fascinated with his Rockets pieces. He wanted to give Leslie Alexander a major star, and he accomplished that.

Now the asset building continues. In anticipation for another major move. Morey's already said that he wants to add another key player.

 

I agree that not tanking makes your assets look better, but I don't see that as some kind of justification for not tanking.

A couple of the deals OP cited, the competitiveness of the team didn't matter. We traded Courtney Lee for pennies on the dollar and any team could have gotten the same haul for him, no matter how bad their season was. People know Lee can play. Same deal for Camby. His value was predicated on the fact he didn't look washed-up as a Rocket, not that we won games. But, for young assets like Landry or Brooks who had significant blackmarks (tweener and chucker, respectively), contributing to a winning team helps.

But, then so what if we got marginally more when we traded role-players when you need a really big score to get your franchise player? Getting Dragic and a 1st rounder in a trade doesn't begin to compare to getting a top-5 pick or James Harden. In getting a franchise player, it seems like it's better to be lucky than good.

Morey did do a great job getting Harden and he got him because he had a unique package to offer -- an above average veteran and a promising rookie who both played the same position as Harden. I'll give him his props for that. But, you also should not forget that we got this trade only after Morey essentially gave up on the rebuild-without-tanking model. He was tanking this summer, letting go Scola, Lee, Camby, Dragic, etc. And then things fell into place for Harden and we have a competitive season. Harden was not thinking the Rockets would be an acceptable place because Scola, Dragic, Lee, and Camby were such great role-players. He signed an extension even after the roster was decimated and we had question marks with whether Lin and Asik could excel as starters, if Parsons was really legit, and who the heck would even start at power forward.

 

I highlighted the parts of your post that shows the reason why tanking is bad. You gotta understand, tanking is like selling your house to buy lottery tickets in hopes that you'll win the lottery. To tank is to destroy your team (aka blow it up) in order to get a high pick.

Meh/WNBA talked about how tanking would net you a more attractive asset etc, but the fact is other teams couldn't trade their picks for Harden because that was all they had. Take for example the Bobcats, who has a GM who's also pretty good. That team hit rock bottom, and the only assets they had were Biyombo, 2nd pick and Knight. Does it make sense to give OKC the 2nd pick+something else to get Harden? Of course not, Harden wouldn't do anything for the Bobcats, because they had nothing else to build around him. Same thing with the Wiz, all they had the 3rd pick and an injured Wall, if Harden turned out to be a bust they just gave a 3rd pick probably+other goodies away.

OTH, Morey managed to collect all these assets because he didn't tank. Lowry and Lee are players tanking teams avoid like the plague, because they help the team win games. You're confusing the Scola amnesty and letting Dragic go with tanking, those weren't tanking moves. Dragic was let go because he asked for a trade option, and Scola was amnestied to free up cap, none of those were done to make the Rox horrible.

Plus, there's also the fact that no "franchise player" wants to go to a tanking team. If the Raps have offered Derozan+their pickup last year for Harden, you think Harden would have been ok with staying with the Raps for the next 5 years? IMHO he would have just signed an extension. Hell, Harden already hinted that if Presti didn't trade him, he'd have signed an extension anyway.

 

Nothing's for free, my friend. Everything has its cost.

 

roslolian, I think you oversimplify tanking.

There are two ways of measuring talent on a team -- by how good the players are right now (measured in how many games they'll win this season), and how good they can be in the future. You can tank by minimizing how good you are right now and maixmizing how good you might be. That's how proper tanking is done. Trade your veterans for picks and young players.

You (and most people arguing against tanking) bring up strawmen with comparisons to the Wizards or Bobcats, because you're conflating teams that are bad because they're tanking, and teams that are bad because they are badly managed (and sometimes those are also trying to tank, but badly). To take the Bobcat example, they tanked by getting rid of players who can win now, but they also didn't manage to pick up many players who can win later. So, of course they've got nothing to spend when a Harden deal presents itself. But, that's bad management, not simple tanking.

Maybe you can defend the Dragic and Scola deals from a tanking accusation. I think Scola's cap space may have been needed for our other moves (I forget). With Dragic, it seems like they were pretty lukewarm on him anyway and wanted to get Lin instead from the start, likely for marketing. That's still talent they gave up for nothing. And seen in the larger canvas of dropping all their veterans and making Parsons the old man on the roster, I think Morey's intentions were clear.

And, I still don't see how Harden could have thought the Rockets were a better situation than Toronto, other than perhaps Toronto's reputation for mismanagement. Almost everybody involved with getting us a winning record the prior year got traded or fired. You can say Toronto has a bad rep because they're tanking all the time. The lesson there is not to never tank, only that if you are going to tank, don't be so bad at it that it lasts a decade. Which points back to the difference between the Rockets and teams like the Bobcats, Wizards, Raptors, etc. -- win or lose, the Rockets are well-managed and people know it.

 

This is it for me, JuanValdez.

You don't "tank" for any reason other than to change the fortunes of your franchise by getting the caliber of player you can build a team around.

And to "tank" effectively, yuo have to be very good at assessing talent, and also good at managing the team in other respects (particulary salary cap flexibility in the free-agent era).

It's not really how you go about gutting the roster, in my opinion.

It's that you know how you're going to accomplish what you've set out to do.

I think Darryl Morey has done a good job of that (managing the teams fortunes) since he became GM. He couldn't realistically bat for average until he could get the team to recover (in personnel and in finances) from two injury-prone "star" players setting the franchise back.

He's done as well as could be hoped for under those circumstances.

No reason to think the right steps won't continue to be taken in the future, sir (or ma'am).

Repped.

 

The point of the thread is that guys like Chase Budinger actually had a little trade value because he actually contributed to winning and showed that he has, at minimum, two NBA level skills (shooting and athleticism). I can't even tell you who the tenth person is on the Wizards roster and you probably wouldn't be able to get as much as a 2nd round pick for the guy because he has never proven he can contribute to winning. So from an asset stand point, winning an extra 15-20 games works in your favor.

 

And I think wizkid was right about that. But, then everyone wants to go on to say that this argument discredits tanking, which it does not.

 

good post. I think it also allows younger guys (Brooks, Landry as you pointed out) to have shining moments in big games / in the playoffs. Brooks was in the spotlight as he tore up Fisher and the Lakers...2 years in a row, right?

Without that opportunity--for more PT in general, for a lot of PT in the spotlight of the playoffs, for the "big game player" label that Flacco is benefiting from, and for playing on national TV a lot with no one else on (i.e. everyone has to watch you)--I think the assets may not have looked as good to other teams

 

Ridiculous. When a team wants a player, they don't care what his teams record is.. he looks at his preformace.. They don't care if he had a 1st round playoff exit or not.

 

Exactly! GMs aren't looking to trade for only players on teams that 40+ games. There is talent anywhere in the NBA. Winning a few extra games and being mediocre doesn't make your players necessarily look better in a trade.

 

No, I don't discount the effort Morey has put into this. What I'm saying is that rarely a superstar get traded, it's not as simple as you have enough cap room. When you are a superstar, you pick where you want to go, not the team picks you.

We got Harden because OKC was not willing to pay extra $$ due to the new CBA. Yes, the Rockets had the money, but you cannot spend it if OKC want to keep him.

So, yes the Rockets were luck, but they were also ready when the opportunity appeared, didn't let it go by.

 

But we did tank, going on a huge losing streak near the end of the season that allowed us to keep our pick and move up for Lamb while keeping Lowry to trade for Toronto's lottery pick. Imagine if the Rockets actually made the playoffs last year; this would be a team with Lin as its star and a mediocre record going into a draft with little talent. Losing wins.

 

We didn't tank those games, we just sucked. Every indication at the time was that they really wanted to make the playoffs to look more attractive to free agents. The tanking started when Orlando said they wouldn't trade Howard to us on Draft Night.

 

Milsap, Jefferson both in Utah and Utah still sucks,,,
these two players cant change much for the rox...even if we get both...

 

This is absolutely positively true. I am consistently amazed by what a high percentage of NBA teams are just mismanaged right into the ground. The key to success in professional sports is strong management, which ultimately does not happen unless you have strong ownership. It all starts at the top. Most sports fans fail to realize this even though it's as plain as day. If you have poor management/ownership, you may have Lebron James for a short period of time, but you inevitably blow it.

Houston has excellent ownership. The owner went out and found the smartest guy in the room in Daryl Morey, and the owner now just lets Morey do his thing. And this is why Houston got James Harden, ultimately. Not because of luck. One could argue that Harden "fell into Houston's lap," but this is missing the point. Morey created a lap that Oklahoma City wanted to put Harden into. Morey quietly accumulated assets and bided his time. Sooner or later, this strategy is bound to psy off, and it did. San Antonio's outstanding ownership obviously has done the same thing, i.e., the owner assembled an excellent management team and just lets the management team do its thing, so long as the budget stays at a reasonable level.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of NBA teams just make the same idiotic mistakes, over and over again. It never ceases to amaze me. If any of you have ever played fantasy sports, and played it well, you realize that most fantasy leagues are dominated by one or two guys who just clean everybody else's clock (which is why fantasy sports is so boring). There are one or two guys who aren't stupid, and everybody else is stupid. The one or two guys who aren't stupid rip off all of the stupid guys in trades, repeatedly. That's how the NBA is. The same handful of GMs (Morey's one of them) clean everybody else's clock, over and over and over again.

Look at Toronto. What a disgustingly managed team right there. It all starts at the top. Ownership has handed the reins to a complete idiot in Bryan Colangelo, who makes idiotic move after idiotic move. The latest is going to be a trade with Memphis (pretty well managed before they hired John Hollinger, now even better managed) for the absurdly overpaid Rudy Gay. Toronto will have the worst kind of team, i.e., a team with a bloated payroll, full of undesirable/overpaid commodities that nobody wants, and that struggles to even make the playoffs.