There is no telling how the Knight/Laker pick thing is going to play out yet, as it stands its very likely the Lakers are going to retain the pick another year and then who knows where it falls next season.
I'm more concerned with what Knight is more than anything else - not bad, definitely flawed. He is young of course, his stats are good and with a better system maybe he turns out okay, so fiasco might be too strong a word. But with Deng and Rondo haunting us, are any of us sitting comfortable with this wait-and-see situation?
Outside of that move's potential to be bad its really hard to claim any of his moves have been "awful".
IT was pretty awful - not just the trade to get rid of him; should have got more - but the wholly unnecessary move to acquire him in the first place. Winning culture - meet blender.
I think our rotations have been awful, but that is on the coach. I honestly believe if Bledsoe hadn't been hurt and if Hornacek didn't have his bizzare infatuation with playing some of our worst guys big minutes and in key situations that the team would be in a playoff position right now.
If McD had placed greater emphasis on the Dragic / Frye 2 man game, and focussed on getting a big instead of IT, maybe we would have been a 50 win / playoff team last year.
And that’s the point – we probably were a playoff hunting team this season if Morris wasn’t making headlines….so wtf is he still on this team for?
Right up until Bledsoe's injury you could easily pin the heavy majority of our loses on coaching, because when you're in a game and often leading, only to have it fall apart in the final few minutes that is not a talent problem, its a coaching problem. When that happens repeatedly... and you lose your best player on top of it, things go off the rails, and they have.
This season must surely rank as one of the more spectacular falls from grace any NBA team has ever gone through – we clearly weren’t built on strong foundations therefore, so laying it all on Hornacek is a bit much. He is a main contributor of course but what we just witnessed is a cultural disintegration, going from a pretty decent team to junk, and I'd put much of that on Morris. So again, why is he still here?
But, all in all the worst thing to happen to this team was the fluke 48 win season. It was a young team that was not supposed to compete, was not built with the intention to compete, but it played way over its head and put the front office in a bind because its hard to justify blowing up a team of young players that just won 48 games but how much higher was the ceiling of that team?
It was McD’s bad luck that they did well, it was his incompetence that he couldn’t build on the success. Total ignorance of culture IMO. We’ll never know what would have happened if we’d stuck with Dragic and Bledsoe but it couldn't be worse than what we're looking at now.
Its easy to say now that they should have blown it up but I cannot imagine the apocalypse among the fan base if they'd shipped off Dragic right after that campaign.
They needed to go after someone better than Plumlee and find a better replacement for Frye than Tolliver. I know I’m reaching but Amare was bought out mid-season and if we weren’t self-combusting but playoff hunting instead, surely he would have come here rather than Dallas. More good vibes and we’re all a lot happier than we are now.
McD has a good eye for talent, he is a shrewd negotiator in trades, there are a lot of flat out idiotic GMs out there (we had one prior to McD). We've got one with some skill whom there is no reason to suspect its impossible for him to adjust to the current situation.
The funniest thing in all of this is I still think the guy might, MIGHT, be able to pull it off because he does show signs, and to repeat what I’ve said before, maybe he can 'swing a boston’. But he barely deserves the chance IMO and I’d give him one more off season to right the ship (even though I think last year I said I'd fire him by the All Star break if we sucked). Hornacek probably can't be fired fast enough but maybe he goes okay with a less aggro roster.
Here's to Jan 15 to finding out some answers.
