Leaderboard

Bamba straight to work with Coach https://twitter.com/OrlandoMagic/status/1415345602582433796?s=20

People's comments often make it sound as though tanking is a cost-free method of getting high draft picks. But tanking has many costs. First, as you point out, you are creating a very bad team that probably won't be all that good even if you get a good draft pick. Second, as you get blown out repeatedly, you are teaching your players to expect to lose. Third, the more you lose, the more the fans root for you to lose, because that next great star is always just around the corner in the next draft, which further reinforces the culture of losing. Fourth, it's very difficult if not impossible to develop your young players properly in such an atmosphere. Fifth, you are saying that you have no control at all over your destiny as a team, that all you can do is to stay as bad as possible until you finally hit it big in the draft lottery, because the only way you can create a winning team is by luck. It is a mistake, in my opinion, not to take the costs of tanking into account and only to consider the potential benefits.

You are simply looking at the players, but you are not looking at the contexts of the teams and their success (or lack thereof) If a team's goal is to just get a superstar, then I guess the McGrady years were our peak years as a franchise, right? Getting a superstar is not the goal. Winning a championship is. There are more teams that have won championships with 0 superstars than there are teams that tanked for a superstar and won a championship. Allen Iverson - 0 championships with Philly Anthony Davis - 0 championships (or even any post-season success) in New Orleans. NO is in no different a boat now with Zion. Shaq - 0 championships in Orlando, and his one shot he had he was swept. That also isn't an example of tanking, as the team was an expansion team that was slowly building and acquiring talent through the draft, via Nick Anderson and Dennis Scott. Shaq also didn't get to the Finals with Orlando until they got a fluke 2nd #1 overall pick and turned that into Penny Hardaway. What kind of team was Orlando the year before they started making playoffs? A "medicore" middle of the pack team that had the best record of all non-playoff teams. The team wasn't tanking. They were building. Magic - The #1 pick was traded for, so Magic was placed alongside an already winning team. Worthy - Same as Magic Ayton - Ayton is not the centerpiece of Phoenix's success. In fact, he was considered to be a potential bust until this year. Booker (#13 overall pick) and Chris Paul are the centerpiece of their success. Phoenix's success came from the opposite of tanking. Embiid - The 76ers tops out at an ECF appearance the year they had Jimmy Butler. If the goal is getting knocked out of the 2nd round, then yes, Philly succeeded by tanking. But I don't think getting knocked out of the 2nd round is the goal. Literally all of those other guys except McHale and Jordan have a combined 0 championships with the team that drafted them. And like Magic, Boston had acquired another team's top pick to get McHale. They didn't obtain it by tanking. There are no examples of a team tanking, and using that philosophy to turn around and turn into a champion via that philosophy. Tanking does *not* work. It is a 0% success philosophy. It might bring you a superstar, sure, but you have completely depleted your team of any semblance of talent that there is nothing around that superstar to work with, and they have left to greener pastures by the time you are able to build up anything around them, and then they are gone and the franchise is back at square 1, having made no ground and are right where they were to begin with.

You are over simplifying it, not sure if intentional or not. My point is that purposefully sabotaging your team to purposefully be worse does not make a team better in the long run. I am saying that the logic of trading Vuc because we had "topped out" is flawed logic. If we had reached the peak of what we could be with Vuc on the roster, then that is saying that youth cannot grow and develop. Our team was not built around Vuc, it is built on the 4 lottery caliber players we have on the roster all under the age of 23, all 4 of which were injured either A. for the entire season or B. for large chunks of the season. As constructed, the offense would not have run through Vucevic, because when the team was healthy, it wasn't. It was running through Markelle. Vuc was an all star caliber complimentary piece to Markelle and the youth. The only reason this season was a loss was due to those injuries. Not for any weaknesses in our current roster makeup. Next year, we will start the season healthy, with the exception that I don't believe Fultz or Isaac are projected to return at the start of the season, but will be back at some point within the season. The roster with Vuc was already a playoff roster. Our youth core would continue to develop, and have an all-star alongside them. It's not about building around Vuc, it's about having talent around our youth. We would have had a lottery pick regardless of trading Vuc or not. We still would have had the #5 pick this year. We would be missing out on pick #8, but have an all-star center. Now, we still have those young players on our roster, but now there is no all-star to compliment them. Now we have dice rolls on a #8 pick, and whatever we use with the cap space freed up from Otto Porter's contract. My argument is that it was needless. The team had already made the post-season for 2 consecutive years after the longest drought in franchise history, only missed this season due to injuries, and when we were healthy at the beginning of the season, we had the best record in the conference. So we shook things up needlessly just for the sake of shaking things up, and we went into intentional tank mode, with fans cheering on losses and boo'ing wins every step of the way. And for what? Because we had an injury plagued season during a year that saw the entire NBA hit with an increased level of injuries? To me, that's not a reason to blow up the roster. The roster had not topped out at a #7 seed, and the roster had a lot in front of them. Now it's blown up and we have taken several steps backwards all in the name of shaking things up because the NBA had a lot of injuries this year.

It's likewise a mistake to not take the benefits of tanking into account and only consider the potential downsides, which the anti-tanking crusaders will happily do. I actually agree that the Magic probably should have kept Vuc, but these anti-tanking arguments are getting tiresome. Would you feel better if people used the word "rebuilding" instead? There are plenty of examples to support both sides of the argument, and so much of team success comes down to dumb luck outside of the draft lottery that it's really a waste of time to get all worked up over it.