Not to hijack the conversation away from basketball, but it's really unfair to use the Astros in your example as they were on of the most successful teams from the late 90s and peaked in 2005 in terms of winning percentage and making the playoffs. Since then they have obviously been bad, but with the way the CBA is in baseball tanking can be very beneficial. There was a great grantland article posted in the astros forum about this very idea. Go take a look if you care to see why you're wrong about tanking in baseball.
I was just using my smart phone Wasn't sure how to have auto-capitalization without it doing every first letter.
Amen for bumping this thread back up...Morey found a way...to parlay Kyle Lowry, Dragic, Twhackbackmac, Juwan, Kevin Martin into...James Harden, Dwight Howard, Asik and Lin...wowwwwwwwwww
I'm quite sure I've said a ton of stuff for which I am eating crow now. But it never felt so good to be so wrong.
Wasn't there an old thread where someone compared tanking vs. non-tanking and they used Portland as an example for taking since they pretty much gutted that team 2 years ago? I'm really curious because I really thought that was a compelling argument and I wonder if people's opinion is still the same today as it was back then.
Hard to imagine some of us were arguing against tanking & firing Morey not even 1 year ago.... Feels good
dude you LOF! STFU What do you know? Go back and play some old school call of duty world at war! You know nothing, vlad!
Actually we tried to tank, but then Harden fell into our lap and that put an end to that. Remember, before the Harden trade we were projected to be one of the three worst teams in the league.
eh not really, that team would have still finished around the 9th seed. National people and local debbie downers had always predicted us to do awful, but the team was always constructed with similar players that played hard and together.
After Yao went down, weren't we always projected to be one of the worst teams? But we still managed to have winning seasons and pretty much stayed competitive
Yes. I still feel that tanking was the right call. The fact that you successfully drew to an inside straight doesn't make it a good idea. Dwight chose us because we were able to offer him a max contract on a team that looks like it will be a strong contender. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the fact we were .500 instead of .230 from 2010 to 2012 was not a factor in his decision. If we had tanked, we'd have better assets. It's really as simple as that. To make a case that tanking was wrong, you have to make the case that this team would be worse if we had the following players (or the assets they would have brought back in trade): 2010 - Demarcus Cousins or Greg Monroe instead of Patrick Patterson 2011 - Jonas Valanciunas or Jan Vesely instead of Marcus Morris 2012 - Thomas Robinson or Damian Lillard instead of Jeremy Lamb I think it's pretty clear that we'd be in better shape with the better assets we'd have gotten from tanking. More assets are always better. Perhaps with more assets, we could have traded for Harden and Dwight last season and avoided running this free-agency gauntlet. Perhaps if we combined those assets with Asik, we'd have enough to pry loose LMA or Love this season and be title favorites. I'm really glad it worked out for us. Morey drafted smart, signed smart, and put us in great position to take advantage of the huge lucky breaks that came our way when OKC dealt Harden and LA inexplicably sucked - but we're still here because we caught really lucky breaks. I very much doubt we'd be in worse shape if we tanked, and we would probably be better.
Well, guess I'm eating crow. Never even crossed my mind that we would be here in only a year after getting rid of essentially the entire roster last year.
