Tanks, but NO Tanks: The lottery odds against drafting a franchise player

You keep calling it the smart way. Can you think of a team that was able to rebuild into a contender by trading for former lottery picks that were barely two years into the league??

It's not like Terrence Williams is the next Carmelo Anthony that New Jersey just gave up on. Or Jordan Hill the next Amare that D'Antonio didn't realize.

Terrence Williams fetched a heavily protected 1st rounder -- guys like Derek Favors/John Wall/Cousins fetch Carmelo Anthony. If we're going to acquire the next franchise player that becomes available (Dwight?), we need to have those kinds of assets.

Now if you're telling me it's smart to acquire these assets to help us move up into the draft to acquire that kind of talent, I'm 100% on board with you. I don't want to trade Kevin Martin just to trade him. But if he can help me get a potential cornerstone piece in the draft, he's gone.

 

Over the past couple of years, we've seen Morey more aggressively pursue ways to trade up into the top 5-10 of the draft, haven't we?

Perhaps after this season he'll have acquired enough assets to do so. I expect to see a more aggressive Morey come draft time this summer. I also don't think this draft class is going to be as bad as others do. Terrence Jones, Kemba Walker, Kyrie Irving, Perry Jones. I see star potential in those guys and a few others, particularly the first three.

 

The problem here is people like you love to talk about blowing it up and tanking, but nobody really wants to go through a very ugly rebuilding process. To get a top 3 pick means gutting your entire team and turning them into picks or horrible players. Good, young and productive players like Jordan Hill/Lowry/Brooks won't do, these guys will ensure your team competes every night and you'll end up with a top 10 pick rather than a top 3. Once you do get that top 3 pick to exchange for Dwight/Cp3/Melo, then what? Will Dwight want to come to Houston that has been stripped of all good young players?

Celtics used a top 5 lottery pick to get Allen, but they also needed to part with Al Jefferson and a ton of other young players to get KG. Basically it needed 10 years of supreme tanking for the Celtics to get their big three, and if Rondo didn't exceed all expectations and became a star in his own right they wouldn't have a ring at all.

 

The biggest obstacle to tanking is Adelman. He's just consistently good at getting his teams to overachieve. If we swapped coaches with Memphis, Sac and GS, all those games would likely have been losses for us imo.

 

When you are as bad as the Rockets are, you only need to lose 5-10 more games to double your odds or increase your draft position by 4-5 spots.

 

If the Rockets were a 55-60 win team, tanking would be awful. It would be asking them to lose 25-30 games.

Last season, the Rockets managed to lose 40 games by themselves and weren't going to make the playoffs anyway. If they are going to be bad, they should get a better pick for a rookie or for trade. Treading water gets you nowhere.

 

Last season, the Rockets needed to win 9 extra games to get the 8th seed, but they only need. They could have focused on developing their players in a few games.

3 losses would have meant the difference between Patrick Patterson and Ed Davis.

 

They was going to devour Brand's contract and select Cousins - that deal fell apart. But yea, those guys look like good picks. Perry Jones is like another Anthony Randolph. I think the top '5' is where we need to be. And if that deal is open again i won't be surprised if it goes down. I'm hoping they'll trade up in the draft twice. I really like Kanter, But Irving and Jones looks like the real deal.

 

Lolwut

Edit. I guess you meant Terrence Jones?

 

Actually, the Rockets could have conceivably lost enough games to have the THIRD WORST record in the league, and if they and the two teams worse than them all completely lost out on the lottery, the Rockets would likely have ended up selecting . . . Patrick Patterson.

Morey and Gersson Rosas both were not shy in saying that they had him pegged as the #6 player on their draft board (admittedly, though, in a draft with only five potential All-Stars, in their opinion).

The way I look at the way last season and the subsequent draft played out, the Rockets got to win 10-15 more games and STILL get the guy they would have drafted anyway. Hence, the jubilation in the war room on draft night.

(Yes, I know they could have traded the pick. But most other teams agreed that after the top 5, the talent level plateaued for the remainder of the lottery, so having the #6 pick might not have been so great, since you'd just have to pay YOUR guy more money than an equivalent talent taken, say, #12 overall.)

 

Of course nobody wants to go through the losing. Everybody wants to try to take a shortcut to get back to relevance.. but I'm not sure there are any shortcuts. And if you've been following along with my post, I'm not advocating to ship out our best players for peanuts just to tank. I'd like to use them on draft day to help us move up in the draft. Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds for the two sides? I guess that could be considered a 'shortcut' -- instead of losing to get a top pick, you use a bunch of trade assets to move up. But at some point, Morey is going to have to stop using the excuse of 'what they wanted was too expensive' -- we could be saying that every year for the next five years. We need to get one of those type of players at all cost.

 

It is unlikely that Morey's top 6 matched Golden State or other teams that drated ahead of him. We already know that Golden State had Udoh at 6th and Morey had Patterson at 6th. Morey could have had Udoh at 8th and Wesley Johnson at 7th with Davis or Monroe as 5th.

 

I'm pretty damn sure that the Rockets had Patrick Patterson ranked ahead of Ed Davis. Why else would the Rockets' war room have erupted in jubilation immediately upon hearing that the Raptors had selected Ed Davis at #13. Because they were so happy for Ed Davis???

I'm pretty sure that Morey had Wall, Cousins, Favors, Turner and W.Johnson (not necessarily in that order) ranked #1-5 on his board.