I’m sure this reaction is a bit emotional on my part – whoever said earlier he should not step foot on the court again until summer league (maybe pre-season) is a 100% correct…

bosa made the exact right call last year when he suffered his injury with ohio state…

doesn’t seem in his nature to do it on his own, hopefully there are enough wise people around him to steer him in the right direction…

I agree that they did, but the current Knicks situation is also very unique. When Danny Ainge had the opportunity to go for a big 3 around Pierce, he went for it. The Raptors and Bucks never had the cap space to do moves like that, and they aren’t destinations for big free agents generally in the first place. I think most good teams build their pieces gradually because that’s how they’re able to do it, so in that sense I agree with you that it’s difficult to pick up multiple stars at once, but more so because most teams won’t ever have the combination of assets + cap space + guys actually being available at the time they’re making the moves. The only teams who actually fit that criteria are the Heat, via cap space, and the Celtics Big 3 via assets (and the obviously lopsided KG trade).

@86
I never said tanking was easy, it’s just relatively easier than the other alternatives when you’re a terrible ran franchise who’s not able to either draft well enough for position to not matter / make smart incremental trades / attract top free agents.

Philly took 4 seasons before they became good, but people conveniently forget that they were an example of absolute mediocrity in the league since damn, Iverson left. They won 56 games on the year they went to the finals, 01-02, and then it took them literally until 17-18 with Embiid and Simmons for them to break 50 wins again. They were stuck in this mediocrity loop since the Iverson team fell apart and kept trying to build teams around him and Iguodala later with no success at all.

Would you really rather be the Sixers from 02-03 until 13-14, winning 35 to 40 games every season and never having a chance at anything?

There's obviously a bias towards youth in the draft, and I think in a few years a lot of teams will be kicking themselves for passing on Brandon Clarke. I think he's one of the safer 1st round or even lottery picks in the draft given his two way potential.

his shoe blew out?!?

My thoughts and prayers go out to Zion Williamson, the tremendous superstar basketball player from Duke. His injury isn't surprising though once you realize Obama was at the game. Everywhere Obama goes nothing but disappointment and pain follows!!!! Sad!!!!— DonaId J. Trump (@SportsTalkBarry) February 21, 2019

I didn’t suggest that adding more than one star at a time doesn’t work. It clearly works. It is just so difficult to do that most teams that get good, for example the Raptors, the Warriors, the Bucks, the current Celtics and so on get their great players one at a time.

Tanking is supposed to find you one, maximum two, real superstar prospects. Then you build around it. Strat has been throwing this garbage around about people wanting a Hinkie tank which won’t work because of injuries bla bla bla, but no one advocates for that.

Currently there are currently 5 teams tanking. After that, there’s a number of teams that are really bad but aren’t quite tanking. Of those 5 teams, the most likely draft position of the worst one is fifth. The lottery chances get worse from there. The Knicks have nearly a 50% chance to draft 5th or 6th. It is not easy to get a true, franchise-changing player at 5th or 6th. There are no Zion, Durant, or LeBron surefire picks at that point.

Instead picking near, but not quite at the top of the draft is more likely to get you KP. Is KP going to change your franchise? Not yet clear, probably not. The only way we put together a viable tank is KP’s injury. Otherwise, Tim Hardaway and KP play mediocre enough to put us in that bad, but not quite bad enough territory. It doesn’t take Zion to be out of the tank race, it takes not playing three of the worst players in the NBA significant amounts of minutes.

So, if KP doesn’t get injured do we play him and get a mediocre draft pick? Do we mulligan him away for Dennis Smith? Do we sign him to a max contract?

What about Tim Hardaway if we didn’t trade him away? Should we have resigned him in that scenario? Do we mulligan him away? How many mulligans does it take to tank long enough to get a franchise player? Players who, almost definitionaly, come around only once in awhile. It’s not clear that works well.

The 76ers had to tank in how many consecutive years before they secured their franchise players? Embiid would not have been there at 3 if he didn’t get hurt. Even then, he took 2 years of injuries before returning. He still has not played a full season. Oh, and he just got hurt again.

They picked up Markelle Fultz,…

It is, but we have no data whatsoever to determine whether that’s a valid and replicable strategy because it happened so few times, and 2/3 of the times it happened it included LeBron.

That was more of the point of my post, if you simply look at “teams adding more than one star at a time” lately, like the original post referred to, the record is a resounding success, and there’s only been one instance of it happening without LeBron and it had great success. So it’s obviously not enough to determine the strategy works definitely with other stars, but also clearly not an indication that it doesn’t work, you know.