Quote:
Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II
I feel like this is a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation. If you are in that 40-win zone, you're drafting low enough that you have to get lucky to get a true impact player, but you clearly need more than just a year of development (typically) to get over the hump. So you either go all-in to take the next step...or you do nothing. It seems much easier to defend an attempt to make your team better than to defend standing pat.
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Except it's highly debatable that signing someone for big money who does not fit in with what previously brought the team success is any kind of reliable way to make a team better, or even as good as it previously was if you have to give up players to make it happen. If Milwaukee and Phoenix had done nothing this past offseason, it's very likely that both teams would be better! Even if those teams took a step back due to the league figuring them out, they'd be in the same position as they currently are but with more cap space and more opportunities to see the strengths/weaknesses of the future building blocks.
In the Knight trade, people thought Phoenix got absolutely robbed because of how overrated the value of Carter-Williams (he won ROY and averaged some amount of points/rebounds/assists, must be a future star!) and the Lakers' pick (they'll start playing better down the stretch and give away the pick, and if not they'll definitely be good enough to trade the pick away in 2015-16 - Kobe comes back and he's still good!) were at the time. Now that things have become a bit more clear, the trade had risks and benefits for each team involved, which I'd said at the time. If the #9 pick or whatever in 2017 ends up being a better player than Brandon Knight, that would be due to teams with higher draft picks really screwing up more than the Suns incorrectly judging the future value of the pick.