News & Blogs
Game Thread: Knicks at 76ers, February 11, 2026 – Posting & Toasting
How to watch Knicks vs. 76ers: TV channel and streaming options for February 11 – The New York Times
According to Phil Jackson, the Knicks aren’t title contenders after latest bad loss – The New York Times
Knicks 138, 76ers 89: “Largest point margin ever against the 76ers” – Posting & Toasting
Knicks Injury Tracker: OG Anunoby to miss fourth straight game; Mitchell Robinson available vs. Sixers – SNY
Former Knicks center Amar’e Stoudemire named 2026 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame finalist – SNY
Jeremy Sochan reaction and Jose Alvarado praise | The Putback with Ian Begley – Begley Putback
How Will The Knicks Use Jeremy Sochan? | KFS X’s & O’s | Knicks Film School – Knicks Film School
Strick & Roll Episode Patreon Preview 77: Trade Deadline Winners and Losers – The Strickland
Knicks Steamroll 76ers | Pacers too Much | Westland Distillery – Knick of Time
The Knicks Sign Jeremy Sochan & Get A Steal For Their Roster! | KFTV Reacts – Knicks Fan TV
YT News
92 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.02.13)”
That doesn’t seem to add up. We paid Precious Achiuwa $6M after a stint that didn’t go horribly right. The Lakers gave Deandre Ayton $8M after a horrible stint in Portland. Hell
Detroit gave Marvin Bagley $12.5M after a very unimpressive stint.
Young guys with draft pedigree typically find a team willing to offer them more than the vet min at least once based on potential, not performance.
Ousmane Dieng finally showing what he can do. It took him a while. Probably just needed a change of scenery—he wasn’t ever going to get any real playing time in OKC. Didn’t we draft him at around #10 a few years ago?
I think that Sochan will be a true free agent after and we will be able to pay any salary that he agrees to.
That would be the case IF we had cap space.
I hate that we have to wait almost a week through all this useless (although I hold out hope that the country/old/young format helps) All-Star stuff before we can see Sochan in action for us. Of course, depending on how Mike Brown decides to deploy him, it could be longer than that.
For giggles, here is how ESPN has our new depth chart:
PG: Jalen, Alvie, Kolek, Clarkson, Deuce
SG: Josh, Shamet, Clarkson, Dadiet, Deuce
SF: Mikal, Clarkson, Shamet, Josh, McCullar
PF: OG, Mo, Sochan, McCullar, Josh
C: KAT, Mitch, Huk, Sochan, Jemison
LeBron became the oldest player ever to record a triple-double last night. That’s pretty cool.
Between the unresolved Clippers case, the worst tanking crisis ever, and a game no one cares about with a format no one understands, all star weekend in LA is really going to be a showcase for how bad a job Adam Silver’s doing.
But hey at least basketball is thriving in Oklahoma City and San Antonio. Gotta make sure those small markets can dominate the NBA because that’s great for everyone.
Dadiet is a shooting guard and McCullar a small forward
?? (Per the ESPN depth chart quoted above). It seems like it should be the opposite
Something to watch
@DJAceNBA
good job mister doogie talking jeremy sochan in to existence for us…nice work…
time for a bit of a basketball break…
and, yes many of us our still holding out hope for some kind of one on one all-star basketball tourney one of these years…
He sure didn’t help Towns. 🙂
I’m happy we added Sochan, but I think fans are overrating the impact of this signing. He may be a lot better than Yabu defensively and fill a potential need some nights, but remember, he was just released by the Spurs because he couldn’t make the rotation and they couldn’t trade him. Expect little but hope for more. We need defense. That’s a plus.
lol Strat Towns’ .522 eFG% is pretty bad but he actually posted a good shooting box score the other day. One of the few good ones he’s had all year in the shooting column.
Pretty unbelievable that he’s an all star when he’s been maybe the 7th best Knick and probably our 2nd best center (note to Raven: I’m implying Mitch, not Huk, has been our best).
I hope some time with the stars will do his confidence some good because if he ever actually pulls his head out of his ass and reverts to the mean we could be special.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 🙂 He may not have fit into what the Spurs are doing, but he may fit into ours.
Or maybe not. Excited to find out.
interesting situation with adam silver fining the jazz ($500k) and pacers ($100k) for tanking…
we’ve had the tanking discussion here a bunch in the past…
for me it’s simply cheating in reverse…
and no, i don’t have an answer to prevent the situation…if I were to try and fix the competition issue i’d address the system’s construct before simply punishing folks for trying to maneuver around a faulty system…
I think people are hoping he helps on defense and see if a change of scenery can help his shooting a little. I don’t need the guy to be a starter. Just needs to help and his skillset can be an improvement over what we had
still very cool you latched on to the idea pretty early sir 😊
I’m going to do my best to give up hating KAT and I hope I will let go of my resentment when I give up basketball for lent again. But man I just find him so fucking hard to like. We were talking about how much edge Alvarado brings to the team and I couldn’t help but remember how full of that edge and toughness we previously were with Randle and Donte.
We used to be “a band of MFers”. We were as tough as (and more talented than) Detroit. KAT’s perpetual softness and constant crying (on the court and off) has almost singlehandedly changed our personality. He’s the most un-Knicks-like player I’ve ever seen. Whether your standard of the Knicks is the smart teams of the 70s or the hard-as-fuck teams of the 90s, KAT is the polar opposite of everything we’ve always loved at the Garden.
I get why some of you guys didn’t want to trade him this season. I honestly would have gone as low as a Vucevic-Dosunmu package from the Bulls just to get rid of him. I think that would have made us a better team. But I can also see Director’s case, that this could be the crucible he needs to go through to be there in the playoffs.
It better be. I have a feeling that if KAT does not have a very good playoffs he’s gone, and probably not for very much. And by very good I mean a lot better than last year, where he only showed out a few times.
Unless Silver has some smoking gun, he actually fined Utah for being uncompetitive in a game they won. This piecemeal approach of minuscule arbitrary fines with no set behavioural goalposts seems doomed to failure. And possibly worse. So I agree with you geo.
We gave Precious that money specifically because we wanted more matching salary in the event of a trade. As for the other guys, there are profound differences between their situations and Sochan’s (including the Bagley contract being offered prior to the most recent CBA), but sure, there’s a risk that a different teams deems Sochan to be worth more than 120% of the minimum.
Maybe he gets offered the BAE or even the TPMLE, but I maintain that if that happens he almost definitionally proved to be worth more than a minimum salary in the second half.
Sochan averaged 16/9/3/1/1 per 36 last season, with .525 FG/.589 TS/.565 eFG.
Of course, it looks like it’s OKC pressuring the league to punish Utah. The gall. Presti really is a scheming villain.
ZMan brought it up yesterday but I am curious about something in regards to minimum salary vets. I know it was a lot more prevalent during the “Pre-Apron” times but can we simply add/drop the Clarkson’s of the world as we see fit or are we pretty much set for the year (outside of injury replacements or the 2 way guys of course)?
We should be able to cut Clarkson towards the end of the season and sign a player to a minimum contract. Exactly when depends on the official signing date of Sochan.
How about making that $500,000 fine $25,000,000 and throwing in a suspension? These seem like good places to start. They sure didn’t have a problem doing it to the players who left the bench last week.
I also find it hilarious that a million ideas have been floated so far in the media and not one person has mentioned tying the odds to a 3 or 5 year average record instead of one season. It wouldn’t fix everything but it would damn sure change the math.
Every idea they come up with just changes which teams tanks and when, in a very predictable way. Let’s say, for instance, they did the whole “freeze the standings on March 1, then make wins increase odds.” You don’t think teams will just make up bogus injuries in November instead of March?
https://x.com/TheDunkCentral/status/2022298363639497045 Wonder if Dolan has said anything about the Wizards pick
The Jazz aren’t even bothering to make up bogus injuries. They just empty their bench at the beginning of the fourth quarter regardless of their lead or deficit and don’t call timeouts when any other team would. Points for finding loopholes, but yeah, of course I hate it.
Bagley I get but how is DeAndre Ayton profoundly different? More specifically, how is his $8M salary definitional proof that he vastly outperformed a minimum salary slot in Portland?
I get your concept, and I think it would be true in the case of Landry Shamet or Jordan Clarkson. But Sochan’s got enough potential and pedigree already that even if he did nothing for us I’m pretty sure a lot of teams would outbid 175% of his minimum just to see what he can do.
(Side note: I’m talking myself into the possibility that if he does outperform we can make some maneuvers to access the TPMLE, and if he outperforms that, then I agree that it’s proof.)
Did anyone mention the possibility of acquiring Sochan prior to this? I would think that he wasn’t considered as a possibility until he fell out of the Spurs’ rotation….I weighed in the next day saying that this would be an excellent development, little did we know then that we could get him for nothing!
Political post: Stephen A. Smith is getting closer to planning a run for President. Good thing he’ll never win. Wait, when did I say that before?
I have made it one of my (minor) life goals to never watch Stephen A Smith at anything at all. So far I have been 100% successful.
I have heard him utter a word or two now and again before I can move on, but that just assures me that my life goal is the right one.
Tanking will never go away in this league simply because of the nature of the sport, it’s 5 on 5 game where a single star playing 90% of the minutes has an insanely disproportional impact on any given game. Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of the league has to hope to draft a guy like that because there’s no real avenue to ever finding one of those guys any other way, and teams are always going to punt on seasons for draft picks. Then there’s the fact that every year 90% or more of the players picked in the first round are not even close to guaranteed high level players, so anything outside the top 3, and some years not even that, lands you a transformational guy.
It’s an impossible problem to solve, you try flattening the lottery odds and you get teams like San Antonio and Dallas landing generational guys while legitimately bad teams that would be in the bottom of the standings anyway like Washington or Charlotte picking 6th and getting fucked.
The one thing I wish the NBA removed is pick protections, that stuff is half the reason some teams are tanking so shamelessly. You trade your pick, it’s traded, gone.
the thing that sticks to mind most about sochan was his relationship with pop…it totally caught me off guard…
castle, vassell, harper, and wemby have cleared the situation up considerably…
at the time though it left me wondering why this, what i thought at the time, highly regimented rules and routine guy who used to regularly blast tony Parkers out in the court would suddenly turn in to this bill walton tie dye hippie and turn over the keys to the team to jeremy freaking sochan…
for some reason, for like some years, I thought he was brazillian and just had never really played much organized basketball growing up…
turns out, that’s not his story at all…
very interested to hear him hit the mic, see how he speaks/thinks…
pretty sure this is gonna push mo even harder to improve faster…I like that…
Bruno!
Good to hear from you. And I’m totally with you on pick protections, that’s just a no-brainer. (Not to mention it hurts my brain way too much to try and work out what it all means going forward with all this conveys to two seconds with rye toast stuff…)
But — and I’m yelling at the world here, Bruno, not you — TANKING TEAMS GET ALL OF THOSE GUYS, to the point that THERE’S NO REAL AVENUE FOR ANYONE ELSE to get them (other than the Lakers, who operate in a bubble).
As we’ve seen here for the last 40 years, you’re fucked if you don’t tank.
What problem are we solving here? Shaq left Orlando, Durant left OKC. That’s it. (Miami is not a large market.) We’re giving every star in the history of the sport to a team that tanked because two fucking guys left small markets.
At what point does everyone wake up and realize that the real problem we need to solve is not “how do small market teams get stars” but “how do non tanking teams get them?”
I’m going to say this twice so it’s not at the end of a rant everyone probably skipped:
At what point does everyone wake up and realize that the real problem we need to solve is not “how do small market teams get stars” but “how do non-tanking teams get them?”
I think you need to capitalize that, hubbie.
(I generally agree).
Forfeiture of the pick is the only effective remedy.
I’m on one today…
Look at the Chicago Bulls. Historic franchise, great city, doing the right thing for years. How were they supposed to get a star?
So they just quit. They literally put out a press release that said “there’s no way for us to get better while trying to compete, so we give up and join the tank parade.”
Adam Silver’s undying devotion to the preservation of tanking just turned the Chicago Bulls into the Washington Wizards. Is there ANYTHING that needs fixing more than that?
ditto on removing pick protections, unnecessary complications to a never balanced system…
Base lottery odds on a weighted average of record over a span of time??
Or keep the lottery odds a secret altogether??
Have a black box matching system of draft-eligible players to teams??
I like the wheel option. If it turns out the best team in the league lucks into a generational superstar, so be it. The odds are low anyway.
The fans would go crazy if that happens ala Frozen Envelope.
Kind of a sad epilogue to Chris Paul’s 21-year career. He deserves at least a little bit better.
Flat odds for every team that didn’t make the Conference Finals… or whatever.
Isn’t all of this a pretty damning indictment of the “hybrid method?” I thought there were supposed to be better (or at least other) ways of winning besides tanking?
This has been my argument since day one. It’s way easier to build through the draft and an asset haul approach than it is to build through a “win trades” approach.
Leon Rose did a damn fine job of hybriding, better than I thought he was capable of doing. He deserves a lot of credit. He’s still likely to fall short and get beat by teams that tanked.
Tanking isn’t a foolproof method of winning, simply because most smart teams have realized the efficacy of it, so you have to compete with the other tank-powered teams. But it sure seems to be a better way of winning than not-tanking.
This is the truest motherfucking thing I’ve ever read.
Bravo, Hubie.
Tanking is definitely easier than consistently ripping teams off, JK, but the Celtics are undeniable proof that you can build championship teams over and over and over by just winning trades.
I think it’s hard to build either way, and for some franchises the operational costs (of, say, running MSG) might just make it unpalatable to tank for 4-5 years.
My problem with the “tanking is the best way” argument is that it tends to focus on tanking successes. There are so, so many cases of failed rebuilds through tanking, and we just never talk about them. If we are kind, there are 6-8 teams that are really tanking this season. How many of those are getting a real star or great player out of the draft? Probably 2 if that? Look at what Charlotte and Washington have to show for being bad to terrible for so many years. Some good players, but no generational star.
This version of OKC had only 2 bottom 4 finishes, and never bottomed out completely, for example. They built through the draft, but not through year after year of tanking. It was recognizing (and lucking into) SGA potential that transformed them into a contender. Remove SGA from OKC, and I’m not sure you even have a great team there. Maybe a 4 seed in the West?
There’s no definitive team building approach. I think the most foolproof way has been for good teams to recognize that their decline phase is upon them and commit to trading their good players for multiple assets, and having those assets pay off (via draft picks or development). Boston and OKC are the best case scenarios surely. But even then, you have Utah, who have very little other than Makkanen to show from the Mitchell and Gobert trades.
The problem with the wheel is you kinda have to commit 30 years to it. You can’t really scrap it 10 years in if everyone hates it.
I’ve always liked the idea of an auction (with cap space) instead of a draft but the optics are admittedly terrible.
OKC is really the quintessential win trades team.
They got Chet from tanking but literally everyone else came from Presti ripping someone off.
I’ll just remind folks that drafting is not always a great way to team-build, either, with our very own NYK as the showcase. Our existing two hits were wildly unlikely second rounders, we’ve whiffed consistently on high-end draft picks (Frank and Kevin, anyone?), and two others did serve us well in getting OG, so I guess that counts for something…
(I also forgot that IQ wasn’t even our pick, we traded for him from OKC before the season started.)
I would also contend that our own NYK are a great example of a hybrid working, as we are considered one of the top teams in the NBA, with two draftees manning our second unit and the rest of the main rotation acquired by trade or similar fashion (e.g., JB).
– Jokic drafted in 2nd round
– SGA acquired in trade
– Kawhi acquired via under the table payments
– Luka Doncic acquired in trade
– Giannis was drafted 15th, i.e., not a lottery pick
– Donovan Mitchell via trade
– Brunson FA
You can acquire stars by other means.
Indy went 7 games with OKC and acquired Siakam & Hali through trade.
But see, even if they had received Shai and, say, 2 first rounders instead of 5 for Paul George, they’d be in the same place. They are elite because of Shai. Sure, Chet + JDub is a nice core, but not a transformational one.
Also worth noting that Presti has gotten good players out of the draft, but also made his share of epic mistakes: trading Segun, swapping/trading picks to move up to get Poku (one of which became Jaden McDaniels, the other became our very own Immanuel Quickley).
His drafting for the original Durant Thunder imo was much more impressive than his drafting for the title winning Thunder.
They won the trade. We’re just negotiating over how much they won the trade by.
They played a numbers game, and it eventually worked out. The extra picks were important because they didn’t know where their good players would come from, only that they would eventually come. Presti didn’t care if he burnt a ton of them because he still ended up with too many players to roster.
I’m not arguing that. I’m just saying that ultimately the picks they accumulated were not the difference maker in their rebuild. It was Shai (Chet, who they got for their own pick, is a remote second most important part of the rebuild).
This is also why I think the Mikal package gets overblown. It was a picks-only deal. Yes, too many picks, but still, no good young players.
Yup. OKC is not an example of tanking. If the Clippers didn’t throw Shai in, they would not be a championship team.
What OKC did was something different. Which was selling high on their all-star assets. This is tanking adjacent but it’s not tanking.
Yes, you can fleece someone (Luka, SGA) or experience generational good fortune (Giannis, Jokic, Brunson). Those are the only avenues you have outside of tanking. Not the easiest things to pull off.
Speaking of bad small market teams and their ability to access stars, I had forgotten that Charlotte originally drafted Shai at #11, and traded him to the Clippers for Miles Bridges and two seconds.
Pretty simple fix at least for the worst offender-immediately replace your coach with Thibs for the next 20 games or forfeit a pick.
SGA has to be in the category of generational good fortune, not a fleece. He had some pedigree as a #11 pick, but didn’t have an amazing rookie season (55 TS%, -0.5 BPM). There’s no way they knew he was going to be this good. Nobody did.
It’s kind of like the Knicks getting Brunson (he didn’t have the pedigree, but was much more established by the time he changed teams, and nobody knew he was going to be this).
When you look at the actual list of champions this century winning trades stacks up pretty well with tanking.
2024-25 — Oklahoma City Thunder – won trades
2023-24 — Boston Celtics – won trades
2022-23 — Denver Nuggets – mostly blind luck (Jokic) but Murray, Gordon, KCP were all trades they won
2021-22 — Golden State Warriors – tanked
2020-21 — Milwaukee Bucks – strange team… definitely didn’t tank but didn’t win many trades either (other than Middleton)
2019-20 — Los Angeles Lakers – who cares it doesn’t count
2018-19 — Toronto Raptors – won trades
2017-18 — Golden State Warriors – tanked + stole Durant in free agency
2016-17 — Golden State Warriors – tanked + stole Durant in free agency
2015-16 — Cleveland Cavaliers – tanked hard
2014-15 — Golden State Warriors – tanked
2013-14 — San Antonio Spurs – tanked
2012-13 — Miami Heat – neither (free agency)
2011-12 — Miami Heat – neither (free agency)
2010-11 — Dallas Mavericks – won trades
2009-10 — Los Angeles Lakers – won trades (Kobe, Pau, Odom)
2008-09 — Los Angeles Lakers – won trades
2007-08 — Boston Celtics – 50 /50
2006-07 — San Antonio Spurs – tanked
2005-06 — Miami Heat – 50 / 50
2004-05 — San Antonio Spurs – tanked
2003-04 — Detroit Pistons – won trades
2002-03 — San Antonio Spurs – tanked
2001-02 — Los Angeles Lakers – neither (free agency)
2000-01 — Los Angeles Lakers -neither (free agency)
1999-00 — Los Angeles Lakers – neither (free agency)
Everyone in the 90s (Chicago, Houston, San Antonio) – tanked.
Everyone in the 80s (LA, Boston, Philadelphia) – won trades
OKC had a ridiculously massive stack of assets to trade away. That’s how they “won trades.” They were able to trade out draft picks and young players like candy, because they just had a bunch more candy.
Yeah, and they got those assets by winning trades.
lol so SGA and Kobe were both drafted by Charlotte.
I’d argue that’s the majority of elite players in the league. How many elite superstars are top-5 picks on their original team? Embiid, Wemby, Cade?
2019-20 — Los Angeles Lakers – who cares it doesn’t count
😊
I feel like you’ve shifted the goal posts slightly, EB. We started off talking about those 4-5 tentpole guys who win all the championships. Brunson and Mitchell are great but they’re not the guys people are tanking for.
Almost all those guys are with the team that drafted them except SGA, largely because he was a surprise, and LeBron.
Happy Valentine’s Day this weekend to those who celebrate it.
There is pretty much only one way to do an asset haul: trade away the things of value that you control, and convert those things of value into things with future value, in the form of draft picks out the wazoo. Basically, what we should have done once the Melo/Stoudemire team ran its course. We could have done an asset haul then, but instead Phil Jackson happened.
Forget about the word “tank.” OKC and Boston both did asset hauls, strip-mined their teams to collect draft picks and young players with upside. That’s a concerted strategy that isn’t just “win trades.” Boston got Tatum and Brown this way, and OKC got their whole team this way. Both of those teams built exactly the way I would have preferred: they realized they weren’t gonna win titles with aging Pierce/Garnett and a core of Harden/George, sold those guys off in a way that ensured they wouldn’t be competitive for a few years, then got good again.
Or, you can be like Jerry West and recognize other worldly talent in a workout and do what needs to be done to select Kobe at 13 when he didn’t have a pick better than 25.
Since when is winning a championship supposed to be easy?
Like, they’re generational talents for a reason. I get that every team wants to get one of these players but getting them takes so much luck beyond just getting the number one pick in the draft. You have to get a top pick in a good year and then you have to not fuck it up when they’re on your team. So many of these top picks could have been all-stars but stop working once they get a lot of money. Being able to guess who is going to keep working to become the best of the best on top of having that ability to keep improving and not suffer injuries that stop that development? It’s a lot of luck.
What needed to be done was fleecing the Hornets.
Yeah but neither would have worked without winning the trade in overwhelming fashion.
Scott Perry did an asset haul, too, with Melo and Porzingis. But he just got a good return. He didn’t overwhelmingly win the trades.
We had one real opportunity to do something like that, and I screamed for it at the time: after the 2021 season, when Julius Randle made second team all NBA and was on a dirt cheap contract, and Portland was a desperate sucker trying to keep Damian Lillard happy, and the ’21 playoffs proved we were nowhere near championship caliber. Leon should have traded Randle to Portland. They ended up paying Jerami Grant a small fortune, that’s how desperate they were. That was our opportunity to really win a trade / do an asset haul.
Plus I’m not sure how one considers GSW 4 titles through “tanking”. Baron Davis left as a FA and GS made the wise decision NOT to give him a 4 yr extension.
This propeled them into the 7th draft slot where the got Curry because Donnie Walsh didn’t have the sense to include Wilson Chandler into a trade up with Minn for the player he supposedly loved.
They got their core pieces 7th, 35th and 11th in the draft wisely, not fighting for the bottom slots.
Melo was washed when Perry traded him. He was 33 years old and as a result they got mostly garbage for him. The best asset they got back was a second round pick (Mitchell Robinson). There’s no way you’re gonna “win” the trade that ships out the last dying fumes of the Mega Max Melo contract. Mitch ended up panning out, Enes Kanter and Dougie Buckets not so much. We got Porzingis because we accidentally tanked. Phil for the win!
The time to trade Melo for an asset haul was when Phil Jackson was hired, but instead Phil did a bunch of dumb shit and we continued sucking for a while. We could have traded Tyson Chandler for some draft picks but Phil thought Jose Calderon and Sam Dalembert were a better idea because triangle.
So were KG & Pierce when Ainge turned them into one of the greatest hauls of all time by overwhelmingly winning a trade.
They at least had championship pedigree. Melo was seen as an inefficient chucker by that time. It’s only 4 years between the Pierce/Garnett trades and the Melo trade, but the NBA had become much more analytically oriented.
Speaking of Dougie McBuckets, does anyone realize that he is in his 13th year and still toiling away in Sacramento making $2.1M?
I thought Perry did very well in the Melo trade. And the Porzingis trade, too.
But he got 1X. Maybe 2X for Melo, who was a bum that point. Whatever KG and Pierce were worth, though, Ainge got 5X.
The point is you can’t just “do an asset haul like Boston and OKC”. You gotta get the miraculous return, too. They’re the asset haul equivalents of winning the lottery in a year with Wemby.
And frankly Ainge did it again in Utah, and it hasn’t worked at all. So it’s not like that method’s perfect, either.
Speaking of Perry, I thought that trade history would mean he would at least make good value trades for the Kings. That doesn’t seem to have been the case so far. I’m wondering if Kings ownership is pushing for what they think are “useful” players as trade returns rather than future benefits like cap space and picks. Dennis Schroeder and DeAndre Hunter are examples of what ownership might be thinking of as “useful” players.
People say when the Kings make a move it’s usually their owner, not the GM, making the decision. But by people I mean Zach Lowe and Bill Simmons, so who knows.
Wow, I think I set a personal record for most time spent in the office with no work done today. Amazing. That’s what happens when you have an 8:30pm flight and have already mentally checked out. Have a great weekend, folks. I will rise again on Easter.
That makes sense.
It’s possible Hunter will be good for them and the trade look reasonable in Hindsight, but even so, it’s not the sort of vale they should be trading for at the moment.
Well, I did say on the draft thread that we should take him instead of Mikal because his upside was “franchise player,” even if his floor was lower (lead guard who can’t shoot). Which isn’t to say I’m amazing, but that people can and do know such things – Jerry West being a great example. The true best way to build a winning team is simply to be able to see what others can’t – with Kobe, Kawhi, Giannis, Steph, SGA, etc. Whether through draft or trade, they all were highly undervalued players except by a very small group of people. You don’t have to get it right every time, but you have to get it right often enough to find a cornerstone in the window where you are tanking or have cap space. Otherwise you have to thread the needle in the hybrid method, with established commodities, which is much more difficult.
An example of what I’m saying is the recent draft for the Blazers and Pelicans. Dumars saw what Queen could be and made a (terrible) trade to get him; it appears he was correct that he was a player worth moving up for. Whereas the Blazers thought they saw something no one else did with Yang, when no, that probably was a mistake.
In other words, the method seems to matter much less then whoever is making the decisions. Leon has, somewhat surprisingly, been OK. But few are as good as West at seeing what no one else can see.
Correct. This is why “win trades” usually involves trading an established asset for future assets. You win trades by trading the thing that is likely to decline in value for the thing that is likely to appreciate. It happens— once in a blue moon somebody trades Luka Doncic for a pile of magic beans— but in general you’re “winning” the OKC SGA trades and the BOS Tatum/Brown trade because you’re hopping off the win curve and cashing in your aging stars for lottery tickets. You need to have the wisdom to know when your core needs to be liquidated, and not do things like Phil Jackson did.
These are interesting musings. What should have Leon traded Randle to Portland for?
The weird thing about this discussion is that it is so blatently obvious that “win trades” actually is a strategy, if you are only the least bit amenable to putting into place all of the tactics that make it more likely that you will actually win trades.
OKC’s strategy of “win trades” works because Presti is a master tactitian, not a master strategist. His tactic is “do whatever you can to outflank your opponent; in other words, evaluate talent better than the other guy.” He puts into place whatever he has to in order to get the best value for any asset he has. By the way, trading in a draft pick for a player is actually a “trade” or a transaction that is either “won” or “lost.”
Motr generally, a “trade” really means a “transaction,” where something of value is exchanged for something else of value. This applies to exchanging players, picks, cap space, etc. for something of value, at least theoretically. “Winning” such trades can be a strategy, meaning, that you put into place a structure that will maximize the value of each and every transaction.
Even more generally, opportunities for “transactions” materialize in many different ways. So being married to a more narrow definition of “strategy” such as “tank and rebuild through the draft” can be degraded by passing over opportunities that fit in with a diffent “narrow’ definition of strategy, such as “use fungible assets to acquire stars”.
A coherent “strategy allows for a variety of tactics to accomplish it.