Just my opinion. I think Spurs and Jazz are the no doubter bottom 2. I think Pacers can join them at the bottom with trades, but if those trades don’t materialize early enough they might win a few too many. After that I think there is a group of Rockets, Thunder, Magic and Pistons where the finishing order could go in any way and I wouldn’t be surprised. I think bottom 3-7 is in play for us.
Yes this! And, yes and, I would say it's not even about tanking at this point. Shouldn't be. We are loaded with young talent, draft picks, and cap space (future). We should build a culture of winning as much as we can and be patient. Shoot our shot when the conditions favor us and not before. But no more tanking if we can help it. If we lose we lose. But I hope that if we lose it's not without a fight. If we want to have a team to cheer on to tank I would say it's Brooklyn right? Isn't their first rounder unprotected? Wouldn't that be fine if it's true and we landed one of the top two anyway while competing for the playoffs!
The starting 5 we have in game 1, will be the starting 5 we have in game 82. Young and fired up, so they will play the same way and the score will take care of itself.
OKC without Chet? Yeah. Possibly. But SGA is still leaps and bounds more developed than anybody on our roster. The Pistons? That seems a little crazy to me. Cade Cunningham looks great. Saddiq Bey had a 50 point game last season and looks very solid. Isaiah Stewart is a beast. Marvin Bagley looked like he could fit with Cunningham. And then they added Jaden Ivey, Jalen Duran, Nerlens Noel and Bojan Bogdanovic in the offseason. They are at least on par with us and might be ahead currently. As for the Magic, if Paolo is as advertised, he and Franz are going to be a difficult pairing. And they really need only one of Suggs, Cole Anthony, and Markelle Fultz to take a leap. I feel like at least one of those guys is going to do it. And to point out the obvious, all of those teams have been better than us the previous two years and they all added talent. To me, the Spurs and Utah are the only teams that are 100% guaranteed to be worse than us. They just started their rebuild so they don't even have any promising guys ala Jalen & Jabari, Giddey & SGA, Paolo & Franz, Cade and Ivey, etc.
Let the kids play - period. Build the culture now - so hopefully you're in a position to win in the next couple years... Rookie contracts are ticking... If an opportunity to grab a potential star presents itself - you grab it... If the opportunity to move Ego or anybody that's not in the future plan (KMJ) - you take it... otherwise, you dont worry about upgrading anything this year... let the kids have the minutes... then you hit next offseason ready to spend in free agency - plus a hefty war chest of assets... then its swingin for the bleachers time!
Coach Sil@ss is still our coach…….so I don’t expect anything different from him. If we catch fire it’s because the youngsters are balling. I say let them ball till they cool off
I don't see the Rockets going to fall in the top 5 pick in the draft next year. They're going to be at 13, or 14. They need to start looking who to trade to build a good team like Morey did. Me personally they need to trade Eric Gordon and KPJ. I think they can get something good in return trading those 2.
It's just not going to be easy to lose enough games to get a top 2 pick. You can dump Gordon. Then what? What if they win 30-40% of their games after trading Gordon and are improving every 10 games? It's a waste of time. If we are doing that miraculously well, our remaining picks are enough to form a dynasty even without our cap space. You gotta take a sh*t or get off the pot at some point. We can't punish ourselves with artificial losses because we drafted well, that would be crazy. The whole point is to have a core than is better than all its peers and then nurture it and add to it. If you have that and a Lebron becomes available in draft (which Victor is certainly not, he's more of a Jokic type impact) then do you smash the core or go for the one best player? Steph Curry has won as many titles as Lebron James. It is dumb to sacrifice a guaranteed hyper overachieving core for one draft pick who might or is likely to be as good as Lebron James. Great teams are the only ones to beat a Lebron James. The scenario you're describing btw is exactly how the Warriors started. That season they won 40-something games, no one thought that was going to happen and no one knew what it meant. Teams don't double their wins with mostly youngsters unless there's a stunning core. Lebron James needed vets around him to succeed.
If we start hot then we hope for a Brooklyn implosion because we got a pick swap with them this year….but hey - we aren’t going to finish anywhere close to a play in. We are still young and prone to execution mistakes constantly. Our goal is to encourage the team to learn from those mistakes this year and build on it for next year. Putting vets in to help win close games doesn’t help out near as much in the long term - don’t need a few extra cheap wins this year when we see building towards a future led by our young guys.
You are misremembering that Warriors scenario. They won 23 games in 2012, but it was a shortened 66 game season and their best players Ellis and Curry missed half the season. 28.5 game pace Their over/under total for the 2013 season was 34.5. They ended up winning 47 games and 4th year Steph did lead them in minutes and win shares, BUT 29 year old vets David Lee, Jarret Jack and Carl Landry were 2nd, 3rd and 4th on that team in win shares and were top 6 minutes getters in their rotation. That situation isn’t really like ours at all.
So they jumped from 28.5 to 47 wins and we know now from the history that the irreplaceable parts of that formula are: Dray, Steph and Klay. Everyone one else was replaced during a championship or another successfully. I don't believe in win shares. We know the actual wins. Win shares is a comparison against a random expected win total so the in-team comparisons are heavily flawed, and the cross-team rankings for it are much more horrendous than that still. It's now going to convince anyone that Curry, Klay and Dray are not the 3 key components of that dynasty. The jump was real, vets from the 28.5 season to the 47 win season were all easily replaceable. They outperformed their over/under by 36%. That's a good number to keep an eye on. The Rockets would win 32 games if they outperformed theirs by 36%. IMO with 7 rotation players under 22 yrs old (a WAY younger team than the Warriors rotation) if you outperform your number 36%, then you are sitting on a historic gold mine.
What the anti tankers don't realize is that if we dump Gordon and the kids have a very good record... that means we found foundational pieces. That is the point of tanking. If we win with the kids we don't need to continue tanking. If we are .500 with veterans we'd be better off tanking.
