There are no certainties in basketball when it comes to the draft, free agency or trades. All you can do is put yourself in a position to be successful and hope for some good luck.

We tanked and wound up drafting RJ Barrett. That doesn’t mean it was a mistake to tank that year. We put ourselves in a position to get a star player but got a player still struggling to justify his minutes instead.

We’ve been accumulating 2nd tier quality players on favorable contracts and rolling out picks to eventually have the assets to add the final piece to the puzzle. Now we are one of the best positioned teams in the league to land a player like that. The plan worked fine. We have a good team, an attractive city, duplicative players, and excess picks. Just like everyone else trying to build a championship contender, now we just need a little luck.

I think he was referring to Strat, who curiously suggested that SGA might “shake loose” in the next couple of years.

OKC is ultimately going to be in a position where they can’t pay everyone. Someone good is eventually going to shake loose. Shai reminds me of the kind of player that may prefer a major city over OKC. I could see things changing in a couple of years.

I think at least one very good player is going to wind up leaving OKC. It’s just tough to predict who the that player will be and when it will happen because some of the players that stay longer term may not have even be drafted or consolidated in yet.

We need to just keep plugging away, hopefully start using our draft picks to take players and build a long term team, not trade it all for maybe 2 years of contention.

It’s kind of amusing that none of the superstars mentioned as trade targets…not Spida, not Lillard, not Embiid…have been superstarry enough to help their teams win a single game past the second round for their combined 24 years, no matter what their FOs and coaches did…yet there’s considerable faith that Leon and Thibs might figure it out

Z-Man, I think you’re being deliberately obtuse. Lillard’s Portland teams, which were 1-man top-heavy teams, lost to the Warriors 3 years in a row. Those three Warriors teams won a combined 197 games — an all-time best .800 winning percentage during that three year span. Yet you are holding it as an indictment on Lillard’s ability to lead a team out of the western conference. His “Robins” in those years were, statistically, Ed Davis, Mason Plumlee, and Jusuf Nurkic — against Curry, Durant, Thompson, and Green.

I don’t think you need to be told that a team like the Warriors does not exist in the NBA right now, and there wasn’t even a clear favorite to come out of the east before this week. Obviously it doesn’t take any magic from Thibs or Leon to get Damian Lillard into an NBA finals. All it takes is a reasonably good cast of players around him and no best-team-ever in his path. As a Knick fan alive in the 90s you should know this.

True. But isn’t that just as good of a reason for NOT making an Embiid trade?

I admit that the PTSD is pretty strong. Three years of albatross Amar’e killed me. And after that it just got worse.

I don’t know how to explain it better than I already have, but I feel pretty strongly that an all-in deal for Embiid will ultimately set us back in a similar way. Maybe the highs will be a bit higher, but there will be no championship and probably not even a finals appearance to show for it. I can’t be 100% sure, but if I had to, that’s the way I would bet.

I definitely would have preferred a Dame deal, but not by much. Also not the right guy.

In the summer of 2025 we will lose the ability to aggregate salaries in trades. Analyze every potential transaction with that in mind.

Seems to me, then, that having Dame on an expiring $65mm contract would be really good in such a scenario. Don’t you think?

So we get two years of first team All NBA level PG play, and then we get to be one of the only teams in the NBA with the matching salary to trade for a superstar. Heaven forbid we sign up for that. Too much risk.

This current team is so much better and has much more valuable, long term pieces than that team had.

What I’ve learned today is that some people on this blog just have to have a reason to fret and worry and declare that we’ve failed before anything has actually happened.

wait, you just learned that today 😳