JJZFL

I appreciate your take, and I hope you're right. I don't think that's likely myself but I would gladly admit to being wrong on this.

No. I do avoid counting on hitting the Florida lottery for my retirement, though. Plan realistically and then if you get some luck, that’s icing on the cake. Getting a transformative player in the draft after you’ve made your team terrible is at best a very long shot, and not something I would want to incorporate into my expectations.

And I don’t believe it’s something that can be turned on and off easily. It’s not like: “We’re tanking now so go ahead and hog the ball but next year start passing “. Becoming a good facilitator takes time, practice, and a specific mindset. All of those aspects of his development have gone backwards in the “tank phase” of this season.

We agree on that. Good to find areas of agreement.

Anthony with 6 turnovers to 2 assists while chucking up 25 shots. We’ve seen a pattern developing towards the end of this season where he facilitated more and more poorly. Given that he’s supposed to be a point guard it’s definitely something to be concerned about. It’s the kind of negative development I worry about when the team stops caring about winning and everyone focuses on their own stats.

Hope we get what you’re looking for because I sure don’t expect it to happen. Preparing myself for a 20-30 win year next season and early calls for tanking. Once the tanking disease starts, it’s very hard to get over it.

Wow. Kind of like a time warp where we’ve gone back 10 years without the benefit of hindsight. Same tired old arguments we were having then. As a reminder, we chose to trade away all the veterans and go with a very young team and a terrible coach. For three years, we had the very worst cumulative won-loss record in the entire NBA. Never in Magic history had we gone this route before. Instead, we had made the best of what we had, such as the heart and hustle team. This was a conscious decision to tank and no one following the team at the time believed any differently. We know how it worked out. I’m not opposed to the moves we made this season. I happen to agree the road we were on didn’t lead anywhere. I am opposed to intentionally trying to lose games because I totally disagree with your last opinion about culture change being unimportant. You grind out every game , develop what you have, get a break here or there with a good draft selection, make a good trade or two, and not intentionally stink unless we hit gold in the lottery. It’s no accident that several of our players have only excelled after leaving the Magic, despite what you say about culture not mattering. With the additional changes to the lottery in the past 10 years, a tanking strategy is even more likely to backfire now than it was then.

It may be a farce to say we’ve tanked for 10 years, but once again I didn’t say anything of the sort. What I did say was that the decision to tank 10 years ago set us on this road to futility, and I stand by that. Of course when it doesn’t work, the supporters of that strategy will always say we just didn’t tank hard enough. It represents circular reasoning that can never be fully disproved. I have no interest in going that route anymore. If we don’t have great talent, I want to see a heart and hustle mentality, and scratch and claw for every possible win. Develop what we have instead of focusing on losing until we hit a draft miracle. And I’m happy to leave it at that.

Focusing on losing games to get good draft picks instead of focusing on building a team with a winning attitude is how we got into this mess in the first place 10 years ago. And with the lottery odds the way they are now, you have a 50-50 chance of picking fifth or lower no matter how bad you are.

By the way, you’re putting a lot of things in there that I didn’t say. It is true that in the last ten years, only top 5 draft picks playing with LeBron have won a championship. If it’s a statement of fact, then it’s not an assertion. I’ve said repeatedly that it would be great if we get some luck in the draft; it’s just not my focus and I believe it damages the team to tank so personally I don’t pay much attention to the draft. I never suggested we trade away our picks, that we should hope for bad picks, or any of the other ridiculous stuff that I guess you thought would be a clever parody.

My focus is not on the picks at all. I don’t care about them. I hope we can get out of the tank/draft mentality next year, start to focus on building a winning attitude, and try to build with what we have. I’m not too optimistic, though. I’m wondering after how many games next season, assuming we have the terrible year that seems very likely to me, the calls will resume to tank again. I’d probably put the over/under at 30 games.

I understand but I think the whole team would look better with more unselfish play.

But Clifford has not been doing that on the offensive end. He’s not held players responsible when they hog the ball, over dribble, take difficulty shots instead of giving it to someone else, and fail to find open teammates. It’s been a consistent problem, unfortunately. The injuries and so on should not have any bearing on whether the players available play as a team on offense.

I don’t need to. We have recent posts showing that even a top five pick in the past 10 years didn’t lead to a championship unless that pick was also playing with LeBron. This fixation on a draft miracle for our salvation is terribly misguided.

Ridiculous

Missing shots on purpose would likely fall into the category of intentionally trying to throw a game, which could be illegal, given that people wager on these games.

+1. I share the exact same concern. I’ve always thought Cliff was a good coach but then I see the same dysfunctional stuff from multiple players on offense again and again.

Is there a track record of seventh pick being a lot better than ninth pick?

Agree. It’s not so much that he has cold nights where he misses shots. That’s true for everyone. It’s that his generally selfish play makes the other four players on the court worse.

Hampton actually showing some potential as a distributor as the season progresses, which is a pleasant surprise

Tanking effect

It’s the same old discussion as to whether it’s worth teaching your young players not to play too hard at the end of the year in order to pick 7th instead of 10th. Since I believe that the focus should always be on competing as hard as possible, and that’s the best way to develop your players, I don’t think the trade-off is worth it. We will just disagree on this.

87% chance we don’t get the first pick. I believe it’s very unlikely our draft picks will have a major impact. We are going to need to figure out how to put together what we have.

Completely agree. It’s also a matter of attitude. You can see with some of the players that on certain plays they are determined to shoot, even if they don’t have a good look. It almost like “my turn” and they shoot no matter what. That really needs to stop. With young players like Cole, it should be a high priority to get rid of that tendency before it has a chance to become established.

Cole Anthony had 18 points but zero assists. Not good for your point guard. Magic overall with 18 assists. We are 28th in the league in that statistic. You don’t have to have stars to share the ball, and we will never be good if we don’t. Would be nice to see them playing team ball going in to the break instead of everyone trying to maximize their own numbers.