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2021 NBA Draft Thread

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4 minutes ago, fan for too long 2 said:

Failure of management, scouts and coaching equals a bad team and franchise. Period end of story. Call it whatever you want intentionally or not. At the end of the day it’s just bad. 

To not want the highest draft pick possible is just foolish. But you also need to be able to evaluate talent to get players that can create a winning team. Potential is fools gold and we’ve had a lot of fools picking players for this franchise. 

I am not sold on Weham to get it done. But as a Chicago Bears fan I never thought that their GM would get a draft right but was shocked this year when they did. So, there is hope. 

Good post. I mean we can all agree that we’ve been really bad and that the previous rebuild was a complete and utter failure. I’m just curious how we are supposed to improve if we don’t do it through the draft, at least in the short-term? No one is banging down the door to play here and that won’t change until we are at least mildly competitive and have the cap space to make a true splash in FA. 

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11 minutes ago, gobucsmagic said:

It not working out for them is irrelevant to us 

The entire point is that it has never resulted in a championship. That is the argument I've been making since literally the first sentence of my entry into this exchange. Feel free to debunk that argument, but teams who didn't win it all by tanking, paired with Boston who didn't tank, isn't working.

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27 minutes ago, Justin Jaudon said:

The entire point is that it has never resulted in a championship. That is the argument I've been making since literally the first sentence of my entry into this exchange. Feel free to debunk that argument, but teams who didn't win it all by tanking, paired with Boston who didn't tank, isn't working.

So applying the standard that winning it all is the measuring stick of whether something works or not, every single team who doesn’t win the championship  got it wrong each and every season. Thanks...now I understand.
 

Knowing this, it sounds like our best bet is to sign or trade for Anthony Davis and Lebron James or perhaps any combination of 2 of the top 5 players in the league. Historically speaking, that’s 100% the right thing to do. Hell it even worked in Miami (aside from the epic failure of Mavs championship season) but they got 3 of the top 10 players instead. There’s another idea for success

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We don’t have anybody on the roster good enough to sway us away from taking BPA, so I think it’s really important we wind up top 5 with our pick. Fingers crossed for that. The drop off after Kuminga to the next tier is pretty big and I’d hate to have another Mo Bamba instead of Trae or Luka experience.

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1 minute ago, All Eyes On Me said:

We don’t have anybody on the roster good enough to sway us away from taking BPA, so I think it’s really important we wind up top 5 with our pick. Fingers crossed for that. The drop off after Kuminga to the next tier is pretty big and I’d hate to have another Mo Bamba instead of Trae or Luka experience.

I know right. I’d honestly take pick #4 right now over the chance of picking 1-3 or outside of the top 5

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5 hours ago, gobucsmagic said:

“The decision to tank 10 years ago set us on this road to futility”. That’s such a broad and bogus statement. First off, we didn’t tank by choice after we were forced to trade Dwight, we legitimately and predictably sucked. Secondly, even if we had tanked (meaning lost intentionally, not by way of having a terrible roster as the result of a rebuild forced upon us by our franchise player demanding a trade at the time) there’s absolutely no way to prove that has had any impact on the franchise, positive or negative, in the long term. You applying your opinion after the fact and saying that is the issue doesn’t make it so. 

As for your second paragraph, it’s already happening. This team is scrappy and playing hard and what has changed? Oh that’s right, we traded away our “top 3” players over the past 5 years because we finally realized we didn’t have the talent and our ceiling, if relatively healthy, was maybe a 6-7 seed if everything went perfectly. The point is we’ve lacked talent for years and even in the worst seasons we didn’t tank like we should have, particularly late in the season when the season was lost. We still fought for meaningless wins down the stretch and screwed ourselves out of draft position. 

This idea of culture change is so overstated. You can have the scrappiest guys in the league with the most positive winning attitudes and it won’t mean jack in the W/L column without actual talent. 

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.  

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30 minutes ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

I’m not saying culture change isn’t important. I’m saying you can’t have a winning culture in the absence of winning and you can’t win without talent. Moral victories by games being played by G-leaguers, rookies, and bench players in starting roles vs. teams tanking or teams resting multiple starters aren’t going to improve the culture, and potentially might cost us a shot at a top talent who could help to establish the winning culture that you’re wanting. Regardless, this current team IS going out and scraping to compete and has shown a fighting spirit even whilst being outclassed talent-wise most nights. A loss (or a win for that matter) in game 72 of a lost season isn’t going to have any impact on the culture of this team moving forward 

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Arguments or no arguments, think this management will get the decisions right for the vast majority that come up and so far they have done what a FO should do in seeing what it has without making a rash decision and treating its best players well enough and when trading them getting reasonable enough value. The worst decision appears to have been picking Mo Bamba and given he has the tools to succeed at a very high level I don't think their entire tenure here needs to be pilloried for that. Mo has let Mo down.

If we get a shot here after tonight to pick up an elite talent in this draft, all the other stuff will wash away as that will be the catalyst for change. It changes the mode. It elevates others even if it takes time. Provides foundation. We are where we are, lets just all keep our fingers crossed for some good luck for a change.

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