Leaderboard

No, the reason we are in the situation we're in now is because of Rob Hennigan's moronic attempt to rebuild this team after trading Dwight. We stripped the roster of talent in an attempt to go young and lose a lot. Which created the culture of youth and losing we're stuck with today. At the time of the Dwight trade, this city and franchise was hungry for championships since we were not far off from playing in the NBA Finals and b2b Eastern Conference Finals. Which is fair to a point, but now 6 years later we are as far off from a championship as ever. Straight up tanking doesn't win you championships. All the teams contending for the title this year didn't tank to get where they are, this idea that you need to strip your roster down and just suck until your savior comes is just crazy because you're gambling your franchise on getting lucky on a 19/20 year old. Plus, even if your team sucks enough doesn't guarantee you the pick to get any potential star players. The only pro-tanking argument I see much of these days is the 76ers, which kind of makes me laugh since right now Philly is a fringe 8th seed who does have a lot of young talent but these talented youngsters have a lot of injuries and question marks on them going forward. The 76ers HAVE to win a championship with this core to be worth putting their fans through some of the worst basketball in NBA history to get a chance to land them. Like I said, this season is a lost cause already and the draft has good potential so I'm fine with just tanking to finish. Which Vogel won't do, we'll have to rely on our own terrible play. But going forward, please put an end to this BS.

Again, I think Skiles actually had us going in the right direction. Hennigan made some bad moves in the sped up process, but let's be honest, the process should have worked, if we'd just chosen the right players to bet on. Think about it. We had two really good players in Victor and Aaron, both of whom were playing well and developing by the end of the Skiles year. Skiles clearly wanted to upgrade the PG position, which we should have done. He didn't seem too fond of Vuc, either, pulling him for long periods during games and even bringing him off the bench some at the end of the year (something we've all wanted to see). We won 35 games (a ten game improvement from the previous season), a total that in a lot of years would put you in contention for a playoff spot in the East. We were a team on the rise, if not quite as fast as we'd hoped. But Skiles punked out, and Hennigan lost his freakin' mind, trading our best player for garbage, forcing our second-best player to learn a new position, and spending crap-loads of money on terrible FA contracts. I have little doubt if Skiles had just manned up, stuck around, we would have been a playoff team last year, and no doubt we would have been by this season. We were already headed in that direction, a Skiles team has never missed the playoffs in its second season, and - most importantly - we likely wouldn't have traded Victor Oladipo. My point is that Hiring Skiles - a win-now coach - and changing gears to win-now mode isn't why we are terrible now. We got what we needed out of the tank, two potential All-Stars. We needed to switch to trying to win. Our management just failed the win-now switch on an epic level. We did everything you aren't supposed to do in that situation. Instead of building on what we'd already done, we panicked. Hennigan thought he was smarter than everyone in choosing Evan over 'Dipo. Vogel thought he could go against the league in playing a massive lineup with two guys who weren't shooting well. Again, we had the talent to switch gears, we just traded half of it away and ruined our cap flexibility.

Sure, we can think that now. But people say that every year, to an extent. This past year was a crazy deep draft for star potential, everyone saying that you could get a potential star in the top 8 or 9. Who's the best rookie of this class so far? Donovan Mitchell, pick #13, who no one thought would be this good. 2009 was the year of Blake Griffin and then no one. Except Steph turned out to be Steph. No one saw that coming. 2010 was the John Wall Sweepstakes year. Except PG was picked 10th. 2012 was AD and no other stars, remember? except Beal and Drummond are great. There weren't supposed to be any stars in 2013. Oladipo, McCollum, and Giannis came out of nowhere.

Except your facts are wrong. Unless you think year 3 with Vaughn/Borrego was not tanking.

We were 19-13 going in to January when Skiles quit on the team in London and stopped coaching and the wheels fell off. He deserves more blame than credit for creating the losing mentality

As opposed to the two fantastic coaches Rob hired? Seriously, the desperate need to take shots at Skiles is getting silly.

Weren’t they starting 2 way point guard Mike James when we played them last? Remember when they had Isaiah Thomas, Goran Dragic and Eric Bledsoe at the same time?!

The anti-tankers apparently, or conveniently, forget that we legitimately and understandably sucked after the Dwight fiasco which leant itself to a complete rebuild. It's hilarious that they now poo-poo tanking when the alternative, of not sucking terribly, has lead us to exactly where we sit now. This is even more laughable considering our entire relevance as a franchise has hinged on #1 draft picks coming off of horrible seasons (sans 1993, Penny Hardaway).

At least we weren’t playing catch up from an otherwise blowout game. Call me crazy but this lineup will kick butt: Gordon/Mario/Birch/Fournier/DJ Speights/Simmons/Biz/Afflalo/Mack

No. Us being terrible at money and asset management, and not being great at drafting is why we are where we are today. Imagine for a moment we're building around Oladipo and Gordon right now, with Sabonis as a nice bench asset. Imagine we didn't give up two 1sts and a 2nd for Elfrid Payton. Imagine we didn't pay Bismack Biyombo all the money in the world. Imagine we traded Vucevic two years ago when he was still an asset people would give something for. Ditto for Evan Fournier. Imagine if, instead of Elfrid Payton and Mario Hezonja, we had drafted any one of Jusuf Nurkic, Gary Harris, Rodney Hood, Clint Capela, Willie Cauley-Stein, Myles Turner, or Kelly Oubre; any of those guys would have been somewhat reasonable picks for us, drafted within the next ten picks and would not have been considered major reaches. Would we be competing for a championship this year? Not likely. But we'd be a playoff team, young, with lots of assets to get better, and not drowning in bad contracts. We were fine at tanking. We had 3 picks in the top 5. Two have turned into really good players, one an All-Star. Unfortunately, we got rid of the All-Star for Terrence Ross, we botched the 3rd top 5 pick, and we spent all our excess money on garbage.

He said Payton and Gordon will get a similar contract in the offseason

When you buy a new car for $20k and after 4 years you don't like some of the features and its more sluggish after time and you need new brakes you can't turn around and sell it for $20k

Yes it's was all Payton's fault. See we just blew out the bucks. Oh wait.

Cabinets are superior to Payton

We are so much better without Payton and Vuc.

Augustine is superior to Payton

Or just maybe we have a really poor coach

Gordon - Harris - Hezonja - Fournier - Dipo Championship. Henny could have been a god. It’s Skiles fault. Only his. No one else’s.

Please explain why. Did we really need another second round pick? I really don't get the point. Let him play and if he gets an offer we don't want to match, let him go. I can live without another second round pick that we probably don't use and kick it down to 2030.