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2021 Off-Season Discussion Thread

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10 hours ago, ROCK LEGENDS PHOTOGRAPHERS said:

There was no better path forward and our guys did not intentionally tank. Getting rid of Vuc, Fournier, and Gordon and bringing in new players got us off the treadmill of losing in the 1st round or not even making the playoffs that we have been doing. We picked up a couple of good young players in Carter and Hampton and a handful of good picks. The anti-tankers will not have an answer for your question because there isn't one!

Of course there is an answer.  I agreed with the moves we made.  Right afterwards we made efforts to be competitive and we played very well on a tough West Coast road trip.  After that, at some point a decision was made to go in a different direction, play a lot of development league players, and not be competitive.   This was done to avoid winning “meaningless” games as you and others called for constantly.  That is tanking.  In my opinion it hindered the development of our team.  Players hopefully will never “phone it in” but they develop a mindset where they expect to lose and don’t trust their teammates.  All of this is conducive to more losing basketball in the future.  Tanking can easily beget more losing and more tanking, unless you get extremely lucky in the draft, and even that is far from a guarantee of turning things around.  
 

To develop a team properly, you need to try to win every single game.  The “heart and hustle” team is a good example of how that approach can create the right foundation for winning in the future.  

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7 hours ago, CTMagicUK said:

I'm pretty sure you can't. Not according to these links anyway:

https://cbabreakdown.com/salary-cap-exceptions

https://www.hoopsrumors.com/2018/02/hoops-rumors-glossary-traded-player-exception.html

"Non-simultaneous trades — For trades of players that occur at different times, the Traded Player Exception permits a team to take back 100% of the outgoing player’s salary, plus $100,000. Using the non-simultaneous trade rule permits a trade to initially “start” by sending out a player and then be completed down the road in a separate trade (i.e., in October, Team A sends out a player but only receives a draft pick from Team B; then Team A completes the trade in January by taking a player back into this “trade credit” from Team C).

 

Rule — A traded player may be replaced in a non-simultaneous transaction by one or more players acquired in a different trade whose salaries together do not exceed 100% of the traded player’s salary plus $100,000."

 

Hmm i wonder what i was thinking then. Maybe that's just normal trades you can receive salary back at 125% - I used to be a salary cap guru back in the dwight howard era. minimum then would Oubre would have to have a salary that our TPE could fit if we wanted him.

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11 minutes ago, Natesroom said:

Hmm i wonder what i was thinking then. Maybe that's just normal trades you can receive salary back at 125% - I used to be a salary cap guru back in the dwight howard era. minimum then would Oubre would have to have a salary that our TPE could fit if we wanted him.

Yea regular trades you can definitely go over 100% salary. 

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3 hours ago, CTMagicUK said:

At the moment you have to wonder whether it's going to be one of the Bucks assistants or Willie Green since they're all still in the finals and this is taking so long. We're coming up on 5 weeks since we parted ways with Cliff...

It’s either this or we’re taking whoever the Wizards don’t choose between Unseld and Mosley. It’s possible we’ve offered both and they’d both prefer Washington. I don’t believe at all that we wanted the search to take this long, feel like we’ve made offers that were denied or straight up were told some coaches weren’t interested.

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1 minute ago, All Eyes On Me said:

It’s either this or we’re taking whoever the Wizards don’t choose between Unseld and Mosley. It’s possible we’ve offered both and they’d both prefer Washington. I don’t believe at all that we wanted the search to take this long, feel like we’ve made offers that were denied or straight up were told some coaches weren’t interested.

It's difficult to say really. I feel like if a coach had been offered a HC job his agent could easily leak that and gain more leverage in negotiations with other teams (of course that could be going on behind closed doors anyway...) It was 6 weeks between firing Vogel and hiring Cliff so we're not in uncharted territory or anything quite yet.

 

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2 hours ago, JJZFL said:

Of course there is an answer.  I agreed with the moves we made.  Right afterwards we made efforts to be competitive and we played very well on a tough West Coast road trip.  After that, at some point a decision was made to go in a different direction, play a lot of development league players, and not be competitive.   This was done to avoid winning “meaningless” games as you and others called for constantly.  That is tanking.  In my opinion it hindered the development of our team.  Players hopefully will never “phone it in” but they develop a mindset where they expect to lose and don’t trust their teammates.  All of this is conducive to more losing basketball in the future.  Tanking can easily beget more losing and more tanking, unless you get extremely lucky in the draft, and even that is far from a guarantee of turning things around.  
 

To develop a team properly, you need to try to win every single game.  The “heart and hustle” team is a good example of how that approach can create the right foundation for winning in the future.  

We played 12 games after the trade where some combo of Ennis, Birch, Ross, and Porter Jr. played big minutes (Ennis was the only player healthy or still on the team for all 12,) and went 3-9. The 3 wins were- a nice one over the Clippers, in OT against a Pelicans team who sat everyone, and Chicago. Of the 9 losses, we were blown out in 4 by the Jazz, Wizards, Bucks, and Spurs, and lost by double digits in 2 to Denver and Toronto. The closest loss was 93-96 to the Lakers without LeBron or AD. After that 12 game stretch, those vets were usually listed as injured (wether they could’ve played or not is speculation by us,) and we slowly started signing 10 day guys. My point being- the best version of our post trade team was still getting smoked by average/good teams. I do however get what you’ve consistently said about competitive mentality and trying to win, and I think the guys we put out there *were* trying to win, regardless of who they were playing with. If any of them are irreparably damaged in their development by not playing with Ross, Ennis, and Porter for a 20 game stretch, then they probably aren’t worth much future investment anyway. 

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18 hours ago, O_SteveO said:

Rewind to this team before the midseason trades- what should we have done? I don’t care what we *shouldn’t* have done, I’m curious what you think the best path forward from that point would have been. 

We were a playoff team the 2 years prior.

We had an all-star center that we could build around.

We had young, up and coming talent in the form of not 1, not 2, not 3, but *four* lottery caliber picks all under the age of 23 (Markelle Fultz, Jonathan Isaac, Cole Anthony, Chuma Okeke)

Before the injuries, we had the top record in the Eastern conference, and young players like the ones I mentioned above were either starting (Fultz), or getting *very* significant minutes off the bench (Cole, Chuma), and there was very little drop-off from our first unit to our 2nd unit.

This was a team that, at full health, would have been a very competitive team in the Eastern conference.

What should we have done? Kept Vucevic. Let the year play out, and come back next year re-tooled and at full strength with Fultz and Isaac coming back at some point next year. I would have said keep Fournier and let him expire, because his biggest value was letting his contract come off the books (not trading him for more mediocre talent and keeping the salary on our books), but the front office was able to deal him for draft picks and no returned salary. So I'm fine with that.

I'm even fine with the trade of Gordon, because he was probably gonna get flipped eventually anyways. I liked Gordon, but he didn't seem to be surpassing the level he had reached.

But trading Vucevic and going into full blown intentional tank mode was a step too far. This was a playoff team already, and we had a huge youth core that was already improving, and only going to improve even more. They would have had a legitimate all-star on the roster with them to play alongside, were already proving to be competitive, and already had playoff experience. The roster, as it was constructed, was not a roster that would "peak at a 7th seed and lose in the first round". If the roster is as good as it was ever going to get, then that means you are saying that young players can't and won't develop, and if that is the case, then there is no reason to trade away for multiple draft picks anyways, because they won't be given an opportunity to develop.

But young talent does develop, and already was developing. Fultz was showcasing leadership skills. Cole and Chuma were showing good skills off the bench. We had a roster spot opening up with Fournier's eventual departure for Cole to slide into the starting spot. With Gordon leaving as well, there was even a spot open for Chuma to slide into the starting spot. We could have retooled those bench spots with our #5 pick that we would have had regardless, and paired it all around a legitimate all-star to help guide us to even loftier goals and heights. There was no reason why this roster as constructed couldn't have and wouldn't have competed for high playoff positioning in the Eastern conference. They already were, and the only reason why this season was lost in the first place was because Fultz and Isaac were lost for the year, and Gordon, Fournier, Cole, Chuma, and many others were out for significant periods of the year. We were playing with D-leaguers for good chunks of the year, but this fanbase and the front office put the blame on the roster construction.

Instead, the front office went into full tank mode, traded away our best asset, and now have put the entire burden of this franchise on the shoulders of a bunch of 22 year olds, with no indication of being any good any time soon. We've set ourselves up for at least another half decade of failure by embracing the tanking route and I don't see any path out of this anytime soon.

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50 minutes ago, CTMagicUK said:

It's difficult to say really. I feel like if a coach had been offered a HC job his agent could easily leak that and gain more leverage in negotiations with other teams (of course that could be going on behind closed doors anyway...) It was 6 weeks between firing Vogel and hiring Cliff so we're not in uncharted territory or anything quite yet.

 

Yeah. And I guess we didn’t plan on it this time, Clifford leaving wasn’t expected. I understand being thorough, just hard to stay patient

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11 minutes ago, All Eyes On Me said:

Yeah. And I guess we didn’t plan on it this time, Clifford leaving wasn’t expected. I understand being thorough, just hard to stay patient

I'm with you on staying patient. I'm checking twitter hoping for news far too often at the minute. (I've even got Woj and Shams notifications for when they tweet and I still check anyway).

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4 minutes ago, Jay Magic said:

 

I get the support for our guys... but our bar has fallen to subterranean depths if two 3s and a dunk is our new standard for "untouchable".

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