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2021 NBA Draft Thread

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5 hours ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

What do you suggest we do with our picks then? Should we trade them away? I mean we’re not winning a championship drafting in the top 5 anyways right?  You’ve got the proof to back that up and we all know history always repeats itself indefinitely, if not forever. Please tell us what we should be doing with these picks since your assertion is high draft picks don’t lead to championships, at least not Top 5 picks. Maybe we should hope we get screwed in the draft lottery or trade back out of the top 5? That would seemingly increase our chances of winning a championship since picking in the top 5 is useless 

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7 hours ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

I don't think is going to be salvation, but at the same time was the right decision for this season. Hope we can get two good players and have a better core to be competitive long term, I'm not hoping for a HoF.

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3 hours ago, gobucsmagic said:

What do you suggest we do with our picks then? Should we trade them away? I mean we’re not winning a championship drafting in the top 5 anyways right?  You’ve got the proof to back that up and we all know history always repeats itself indefinitely, if not forever. Please tell us what we should be doing with these picks since your assertion is high draft picks don’t lead to championships, at least not Top 5 picks. Maybe we should hope we get screwed in the draft lottery or trade back out of the top 5? That would seemingly increase our chances of winning a championship since picking in the top 5 is useless 

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.  

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4 hours ago, gobucsmagic said:

What do you suggest we do with our picks then? Should we trade them away? I mean we’re not winning a championship drafting in the top 5 anyways right?  You’ve got the proof to back that up and we all know history always repeats itself indefinitely, if not forever. Please tell us what we should be doing with these picks since your assertion is high draft picks don’t lead to championships, at least not Top 5 picks. Maybe we should hope we get screwed in the draft lottery or trade back out of the top 5? That would seemingly increase our chances of winning a championship since picking in the top 5 is useless 

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.  

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51 minutes ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

You might be the only basketball fan on the planet, particularly of a losing team, that doesn’t pay any attention to draft. We haven’t been tanking either,  if anything we’ve won too many games. Hopefully it won’t cost us the opportunity to draft a top player this time. 

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50 minutes ago, gobucsmagic said:

You might be the only basketball fan on the planet, particularly of a losing team, that doesn’t pay any attention to draft. We haven’t been tanking either,  if anything we’ve won too many games. Hopefully it won’t cost us the opportunity to draft a top player this time. 

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.  

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11 hours ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

If Cliff stays (and that would probably mean that FO/property still target the playoffs at least, like in the previous 3 seasons) I'm pretty sure we're going to try to be competitive for more than 30 games. I'm not the biggest supporter of the fit of coach Cliff in the actual NBA, but with him you'll be sure that there's no intentional tanking at all. Sometimes he even relies too much on veterans...

Also, if we will have a season of normal health at least, I'm pretty optimist about the fact we can be a 8th seed team again, even without Vuc/Fournier/Gordon. Would be a great first step for that young group.

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9 hours ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

Your assertion that we’ve been tanking or losing intentionally for the past 10 years is a farce. If anything we went all in with the wrong group of players which is why we finally had to nuke the thing and start over. In other words, we lost because we didn’t have the talent at the top of the roster (or the bottom for that matter) not because of some bs tanking culture you claim we established along the way. Most of us actually begged for us to tank harder at the end of a few seasons because it was evident we did not have the talent to compete for much more than a late playoff seed. We didn’t and it cost us draft spots which is why we wound up with Hezonja and Bamba instead of perhaps Porzingis and Trae Young 

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46 minutes ago, gobucsmagic said:

Your assertion that we’ve been tanking or losing intentionally for the past 10 years is a farce. If anything we went all in with the wrong group of players which is why we finally had to nuke the thing and start over. In other words, we lost because we didn’t have the talent at the top of the roster (or the bottom for that matter) not because of some bs tanking culture you claim we established along the way. Most of us actually begged for us to tank harder at the end of a few seasons because it was evident we did not have the talent to compete for much more than a late playoff seed. We didn’t and it cost us draft spots which is why we wound up with Hezonja and Bamba instead of perhaps Porzingis and Trae Young 

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.  

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1 hour ago, JJZFL said:

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.  

“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. 

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Yeah we never really tanked. The whole Scott Skiles hire changed everything. We absolutely tried to win that year. The Tobias trade was all about fixing the point guard situation and winning.

Once Skiles left due to the infighting with Hennigan, it's obvious Martins told our gm he wanted to win, not tank. And the rest is history. I'm still convinced Henny screwed up the Oladipo trade on purpose, you'll never convince me otherwise. We semi-tanked the last month of 2016-2017. Not sure if i have the years correct but the season before Isaac's  draft. So in short we tanked maybe 2 years total. The rest we were just real bad to mediocre. Can't win without talent. Overall, the culture has been bad as well. I think this was a good time for a change. 

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It's not even really an argument at this point. If your goal is to win championships, tanking as hard as you can for multiple seasons doesn't work. The last team to tank their way to a championship was San Antonio. And they tanked for one season. The last team to win a championship through a philosophy of long-term tanking was... nope, never happened. Maybe Philly will get it done some day soon. If they do, they will be the only NBA team to have the process actually work, despite at least ten teams trying it every year for the last two decades. OKC got three hall of fame MVP players in three consecutive drafts and didn't get it done. There just isn't a good argument to be made for a long-term tanking strategy if you want a championship. At least, not if you have any understanding of NBA history.

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