17 wins and all I got was this cam reddish t-shirt

His Knicks jersey will be a collector’s item by 2022, when he’s a reserve SF for the Sioux Falls Skyforce.

yeah I don’t generally gamble, but – if I did, I’d be all in on betting we get the 4th pick…

The odds are real, real certain that the #5 pick is what you should place your money on.

So…unless they can get the equivalent of LeBron or Zion Williamson, teams shouldn’t bother making any moves? I mean, according to this logic…

As already mentioned in this thread, the incentive structure in this market is totally fucked. The agreement on bilateral price controls (i.e. the NBA and NBPA’s co-endorsement of max contracts, vet’s minimums, MLE, rookie-scale contracts) create inequity in virtually every area that affects wins and losses. It is damn near a requirement that a Finals team gets surplus value from multiple max/rookie-scale players (Curry and Durant; LeBron and Kyrie; LeBron and Wade; Shaq and Wade; Kawhi and Duncan; Duncan and Manu/Parker; et al.) to be successful. To be successful in the playoffs, your team needs to be capable of winning 55+ games with a high SRS. This isn’t the MLB, where playoff win expectancy depends on whoever’s pitching that night, nor the NFL, where the 60-minute sample size leads to high win variability. In the NBA, the better regular-season team most often wins the series.

It’s not that you shouldn’t “make moves.” It’s just that you shouldn’t make moves that take on “project” players who are being paid handsomely but have yet to show that they can reach the leaderboards for our dreaded all-in-one stats that are pretty good at approximating value.

Instead, you should be looking for the diamond in the rough via keeping roster slots open for tryouts and the draft picks plentiful, and then pouncing with a team-friendly contract before the player’s reputation catches up with his actual production.

It seems that there’s a strawman at play here: that simply because you shouldn’t make big-money moves (until you have your high-yield stars) means that you should make no moves at all. This is silly and disingenuous. It’s overwhelmingly obvious that flexibility and prospecting should be the priorities of any team stuck in the lottery.

I have a very strong feeling that about 90% of the folks whom post here, think the same relatively deflating thing…

17 wins and all I got was this cam reddish t-shirt

Come on, dude. You’re misstating my position AGAIN. I said that in 2015 they got the same reward “in the draft” that they would have gotten if they had taken a full Hinkie approach.

If you’re only talking about 2015, you’re not doing anything to defend Strat’s point at all. The point he made that started the discussion is the one I just posted, in which he says that after three seasons of a “rebuild” in which the Knicks had the 4th, 8th, and 9th picks, the fact that they’re still bad shows that rebuilding is flawed. So he’s talking about all three seasons (i.e. not just 2015).

The reason he’s hilariously wrong is because Phil Jackson did the opposite of trying to maximize the expected return on those picks. He tried to make those picks as bad as possible. The only reason they were somewhat high was because he was god awful at trying to determine which players help teams win basketball games in the present.

@50 Kadeem

What we should be debating now is our draft ranking of 2 thru 5 (with emphasis on 4 & 5, where the Knicks feel like a lock to end up).

As of this moment with last night’s game fresh in my brain I’m thinking:

2. Morant
3. Hunter
4/5. Barrett/Clarke

Culver is out of my top 5. If KD then Clarke @4, if no KD, Barrett.