But we weren't the 8th seed, and being the 8th seed means squat. How many 8th seeds have even made it to the 2nd round? Then if they do, how many make it to the third round, then after that how many go to finals, and how many win it? You have about the same shot as winning the Powerball. I don't like it, and I definitely would root for us and hope we win it, but if you are a GM you can't play that sort of hope-y kind of stuff. Especially when you are talking about the past like it's the future. You're confusing the two.
You see you are assuming way too much with this. Had this gone right and that gone right we might have gotten this guy. The problem is, it didn't happen, and thus the snowball effect never was an option to happen. It would of been great, but it didn't happen and we can't make future decisions based on things that never happened.
8th seed / 9th spot – whatever, we had a decent team that was there to be built on. Bledsoe and Dragic in the back court, Alex Len in the front court – they’re not assumptions. Picking up Stoudemire is reaching a bit but he did get bought out and he did go to a 6th seed moderate-only contender in Dallas. That easily could have been us – assuming we kept the team structure as it was last year and brought in anyone other than IT.
I understand that he isn't really old, but the fact is guys like Nash are a rarity. Players in their 30's of any sport decline physically, and it's up to their mental aspects to keep them going. It's not just about age, but also cap hit. Basically in the NBA unless you have a top team, you might as well just keep reloading. Because if you sign yourself up for the long term with guys who aren't getting any better, your team is not going to get any better. Thus timing is very important in the NBA. Once you sign your guys to big contracts and lose capspace, and you can't get a top pick, then you are stuck in the middle.
1. Dragic isn’t old and hasn’t got the burn of most guys his age. He’s had two and a bit seasons only of playing heavy minutes, and they aren’t even that heavy – 34per game mins is relatively small.
2. If Dragic is any good as a play maker he’ll adjust his game as he gets older – we won’t know until he gets there if he’s capable of it, my guess is that he will. Slin kindly pointed out that he should have adjusted this season, but how? He’s a playmaker that needs ball in hand which he wasn’t getting.
3. $20m is a stretch and I wouldn’t want to pay that but, as I’ve pointed out before $20m for Dragic plus $14m for Bledsoe – against a suggested cap in two years’ time of $90m and the % of the salary cap that this would take up is 38%. That’s not debilitating assuming no injuries.
McD is churning the roster, and keeping us right before that point, where he is amassing talent and options and once he finds what we want...THEN we go over. Also don't mistake my comments about age to just be negative, it's more told from the perspective that upside when you are barely 23 is much more then someone closing in on 29. Dragic is not going to improve much, while Knight could still get a whole lot better. Remember how raw Dragic was at 23? See how much he grew? If Knight grows half that much he would be clearly much better then Dragic ever was. Overall we had a guy who would be exiting his prime right as our other guys are entering it. That's not ideal.
You make it sound like RMcD has a grand plan with ‘roster churn’ and ‘asset allocation’ – he ruined the roster in the off season so his track record so far is not good. His make up play is pretty good however so let’s hope he’s learned the lessons. But I just can’t justify destroying chemistry like that; every ball club wants it but can’t get it, we had it and threw it away like a piece of trash. Damn.
But we aren't. Even 6th seed is crap. If you don't have homecourt, you aren't likely to win, and the only time you really have a shot to overcome that is if it's say 1 vs 2 or 1 vs 3 or 2 vs 3. I don't like this, but this is reality. This isn't college basketball march madness one win type situation. I don't bet, but if I wanted to make some easy money by betting I'd bet homefield in the playoffs across the board and win every year more then I'd lose.
So you’d rather be where we are now, with god knows what sort of team on our hands, than fighting for a competitive spot in the playoffs, with a team that plays well together, is greater than the sum of its parts, has sentimental Stoudemire on board, all the while not pi$$ing off the fan base through another year of missing out and potentially being attractive to free agents? C’mon. The only thing this scenario depended on was a competent FO.
You also forget that just because you have the 6th pick or even 1st, sometimes it doesn't matter. We did give up a potential for a good player, and we gave up likely a middle pick who might be a nobody or a decent player. The pick is only as good as who is available and what we would have selected. If there is a player we really want, and he turns out to be good, then we missed, but odds are both of those things aren't going to happen, and if they do, we buttress it against whatever Knight turns out to be.
That’s too broad a discussion – we gave away a first rounder that could come back to bite us. Deng and Rondo hurt. Great track record we’ve got there.
So the real question is, when that pick comes up, who is available and are they better then Knight? Until then we didn't lose anything, and such a determination might still be years away...potentially 2017.
We have Knight now, and if he's not the guy, we can trade him for something as well. But we then had a chance to see if this guy works for us and still could get other picks or players for him. So we gave ourselves more chances to succeed at the expense of maybe missing out on the Lakers pick, which does have a shot to not being very good.
You’re painting everything in a positive light – fact; incompetent management forced us into the market where we’ve turned good assets into questionable potential while setting us back at least a year. Maybe longer – I won’t be convinced that 6th seed was out of our reach had we built, not destroyed, from last year..
Heck there is a shot we end up with a better pick then the Lakers pick from trading Knight and even get to pick it BEFORE the Lakers pick even gets awarded to whoever we traded it to. That is a very real possibility that you are ignoring. At the same time we get to judge whether or not Knight fits.
Speculation
Except you are missing some important points about this all. This hasn't been a long term situation. They started running the henhouse and McD shipped them out. You seem to want to blame McD for the actions and personalities of grown men. At some point it's not the teacher who is at fault, but the students who want to act like morons. We shipped them out, and didn't wait long. 1/2 a season for IT. Plumlee just getting demoted. Dragic going public 48 hours before. There's a fine line between being authoritarian and too lax.
RMcD trashed team chemistry with boneheaded acquisitions and draft picks so this team got what it deserved. Good makeup play from him but again, treating good chemistry like that is reckless IMO and I’m pretty sure we’ll see nothing like it again in a hurry. And who do I thank for the chemistry in the first place? Dragic, our best player and playmaker, and he’s gone.
As soon as the Suns saw that it got out of hand, they shipped them off. That's not mismanagement, that's actually good management. Some teams wait years. We didn't. I think you are assuming WAAAAYYY too much, and overlooking these basic facts. It's ok, it's not a big deal, but try to think of things like this, and as everyone already knows, with $arver, I'm always expecting him to somehow screw stuff up. In fact part of this still rests on him, since he was the one who anointed Dragic while McD, the actual GM, just firmly took control and made a different decision. Perhaps if $arver hadn't promised him the moon Dragic wouldn't of acted so unprofessionally.
It’s a decent make up play; Mismanagement is what got us there in the first place. RMcD’s trading ability; Good – player selection; Bad.
They didn't really do ANYTHING to dragic. They simply added guys and this irked him. You can understand it causing frustration, but he acted like a total d-bag by airing the dirty laundry. Remember all we did FOR him, even signing his brother, but it's not like he's oppressed. You seem to be thinking that we massively wronged Dragic. We didn't. But Dragic did wrong us. Like I said it's partially understandable, but acting crazy is still acting crazy, and ultimately it was Dragic who decided on this course of action.
They didn’t wrong Dragic personally, they wronged the team and the fans by taking him off the ball. That it was taken personally by Dragic is totally understandable. Coro said it on the podcast that the FO thought Dragic would complain the least with a different role – what a strange way to deal with your best player and playmaker.
About his late trade demand – this probably should have been done earlier. But I’d like to know why he did this as he’s been nothing but a team player his whole career. With the management incompetence we’ve seen to date, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that it was a function of circumstance but I’m holding judgement until I know more.
And at least we got something for him - he would have walked for nothing in the offseason with the way things were going.
6th seed was a realistic aim, but it wasn't going to happen. As reality is playing itself out we're going to end up with 9th-10th most likely. What you don't understand is, this is true with Dragic, Plumlee, and IT as it is without. We were heading into a dead end. By now we should of figured out we didn't have enough talent to compete in the West. Changes have to be made. Should we have waited until after we gave all these guys their dream deals?
You keep assuming things that aren't going to happen into your equation. Taking the past for the future and it's all twisted. It doesn't work like that. I'm saying this with all due respect. It's complicated and stuff, so no problems. But your logic is faulty.
I’m not assuming anything other than a competent front office that wouldn’t dream of killing what Coro called some of the best chemistry ever seen. But they did, and that’s why we’re only looking at 9th or 10th. To iron out your confused understanding of my perfectly reasonable logic:
If management had just kept the structure how it was with Dragic and Bledsoe from last year, not gone and ass rammed the roster, worked Len into the rotation and picked up a player in the mid-season trade period like a Stoudemire, then 6th seed would be an entirely realistic aim. The only assumption made is a competent FO.
Knight and future picks IS better then Dragic leaving for nothing and not having these extra picks and our team getting bounced out of round 1 with the experience of losing in likely 5 games is not worth anything. It sounds like you keep thinking like we lost something special. We didn't.
See Coro and his comments about the depth of our chemistry. That was special. And had we built from last year, it’s unlikely Dragic would have walked at all.
You see Dragic was gone, and Plumlee was going to be. IT was unhappy. Good management realizes when things don't work out and is able to reclaim what they invested and even more. You keep talking about what we had as a sure thing, or it would of set up other things, but the key thing to understand is, we weren't going anywhere, winning the lottery is more likely the more tickets you have. Having more assets is better when someone comes available then not. Having more cap space is better then not. We were about to lose some of those tickets. Asset accumulation is better then going nowhere and the having asset depreciation or outright loss. It wasn't worth losing assets just for a shot to lose in the first round, and with OKC behind us, and who else the Pelicans???... we almost assuredly would of ended up 9th or 10th place had we stood pat.
We had a good team at least a year ahead of schedule now we don’t know what team we’ve got and we’re behind schedule. I acknowledge we did the best thing considering the situation but we shouldn’t have been here in the first place.
Conclusion:
Embarrassing mismanagement got us into a mess and it’s cost us a reputation hit and our best play maker. There are huge questions being asked about FO’s ability to deliver for this club however RMcD’s trading ability, clearly a competitive advantage, is evidence that we have some hope and he’s surely learned his lesson on the IT trade. Our roster as it stands is intriguing in that all starters are of a similar, young, age but I find it hard to believe we haven’t been set back by these events. The next few months will give us an idea about what we’ve got and what we lost in Dragic. Who knows, maybe this will prove to be a good thing for the club avoiding a potential $20m salary on an ageing player. But that's what Dallas said about Nash. As always, I'm looking forward to what happens next.
