All true, but when you put on a blindfold before throwing your darts, getting more darts isn’t the main problem…

The way you mitigate luck is by throwing a lot of darts, not by trading the darts for cap-space or for future darts that may not still be darts.

Most successful teams have 2-3 guys that can score efficiently in a variety of ways, a few role players that do one or two things really well on lower usage, a good bench, and very few weak defenders.

Brunson is good enough to be one of the three. But he’s not a good defender. So we heave to be careful who we pair him with and who is behind him.

We have a decent bench and a few solid role players.

We have 3 excess 1st rounders and a little more depth at the guard position than we need. Those are the assets we have over and above what teams tropically have that can be used to improve ourselves in trades, to move up in a draft, or to use a shotgun approach in the draft to find another one of the upgrades we need. That’s not enough for two more high level two way players unless we get very lucky . But we clearly have enough for ammo for one if we throw in on of our own picks. Getting that 3rd player has become more problematical with RJ’s lack of development. But even if he doesn’t work out, we should still have other picks left for drafting and trading. It would help if one of the other young players (like Grimes or Cam) breaks out a bit.

Getting from where to are to where we want to be is going to require patience, smart trades and drafting, and player development. It always does.

He does a little everything not very well.

To be fair to him, he’s still operating on a team without much space. IMO he’s a player that will do his best work with space around the rim. So it’s not an ideal situation. I rate Cam above him and even though Grimes is not shooting well from 3 so far off the layoff, neither is RJ, but Grimes is better at everything else.

It’s how you get those players. For example, the Bucks drafted two of their best 3 players outside the lottery and traded for the third. The Suns signed an aging CP3 as a free agent and drafted Booker at #13. The Heat drafted Bam at #14 and sign+traded for Butler. The Raptors traded for Kawhi and Lowry and while he didn’t make your cut, they drafted Siakam at #27.

In fact, many if not most of the teams that made the finals did not acquire more than one of their 4.0+ BPM players through tanking for their own draft pick, and in some cases never really tanked at all, or only for one year.

And you kind of tripped on your own point in our case. If you consider SGA to be a qualifying player, he was there for our taking. So was Mitchell, Booker, Jokic, and a bunch of guys we passed on in the most recent drafts who will eventually get there (see: Hali).

And if Brunson happens to be one of those guys, and you can add good players (but not necessarily 4.0+ BPMers) to the roster to the point where you can make a star trade, now you have two plus good pieces left over.

So the premise that Leon’s entire plan is based on lucking out in the draft is kind of misguided. Getting lucky always helps, but we’ve been more dumb in drafting than unlucky. We whiffed on meatballs right down the middle in draft after draft (or got caught looking…)