2/5 - 2/14 Games Discussion Thread

[cima]

Quote: Originally Posted by ojandpizza

Never heard of a player who's complained about Phoenix either.

The obvious thing would be that it's really hot in the summer. That's why Josh Jackson got rid of his fro and that's the closest thing I've heard to a player complaining about it in PHX, lol.

[cima]

Quote: Originally Posted by ojandpizza

Could you imagine having 5 picks in the top 5 and turning that into a starting line-up of Conley, Mayo, Gooden, Swift, Thabeet? lol

I see your 5 and I raise you Kendall Marshall, Alex Len, Dragan Bender, drafting a guy named Georgios Papagiannis and then trading him a long with an actual good pick in Bogdan Bogdanovic and trading them for Marquise Chriss.

I still theorize that Georgios Papagiannis was only drafted because he was from Greece and had giannis in his name.

[TMagic]

Quote: Originally Posted by King_B_Mack

I don't think this is one of those, everybody can be right scenarios. There very much is a right and wrong way to build a team in the NBA depending on your team's situation. Telling me that the Bulls, sitting at 14-44 at the All-Star break shouldn't be playing guys like Otto Porter limited minutes to keep things like last night from happening because you believe your team should always be trying to win is not a viable strategy for the long term future of THIS team. They've already traded for Porter and took on his money and shrunk their cap space for the summer down to about 15-19 million dollars. You can't land a superstar player for that, not that any of the superstars were going to sign here anyway. But that brings up the problem. The league you have to have multiple stars to win now, it's unfortunately the way it is and when you're an NBA team that none of the superstars will sign with, you have to draft one and the best way to draft one or at least trade for one is having top 5 draft picks. Especially in the case of the Bulls where all they've done is put together the group of try hard guys year after year who'll win a lot of regular season games, get to the playoffs and get their heads kicked in by the teams that have stacked 3 superstars and a couple stars together. Zach Lavine, Kris Dunn, Wendell Carter, Otto Porter, Lauri that's a recipe for mediocrity in this league when they're drafting 10-22 for the next 10 years. Already been there and done it, tired of that movie.

Well no one is condoning front offices making bad team decisions at all. Dead end moves are obviously dumb. No one is debating that.

The overall point is that tanking is no guarantee of anything and that it's just as likely to lead to years and years of failures as it would lead to success for the team. You can point to as many examples, if not more, of teams continuing to be bad after securing top picks year after year as you could find successes.

Knicks find themselves in the lottery almost every year. Even with landing Porzingis one year. He's gone now. So that's amounted to nothing.

Kings have just now had some success after over a decade of lottery picks. They landed Cousins in 2010 which is great. Until you realize it just lead to more lottery picks.

The Cavs had multiple top lottery picks that amounted to nothing except more losing seasons until LeBron decided to come back home.

Suns as Cima has mentioned year after year leading to nothing.

So that's not a bankable strategy and can not be assumed to be the best option.

It can be just as viable to work on improving from within. With improving talent, smart draft choices and becoming competitive with young players, you can become an attractive free agent destination. Or you could be creating value in your own players that you can flip for an asset/player in a trade down the road.

Again, I'm not saying one way is or isn't better than the other. Just that there are multiple avenues to improvement outside of tanking.

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[DieHardYankee26]

The Knicks finding themselves in the lottery every year is not tanking, it's sucking. [REDACTED] was drafted as a result of a botched tank, we should've been in line for the 1st pick, but THJ hit a game winner in the last game of the season. [REDACTED] then ****ed our future tanks by peaking for 2 months and then falling apart, guaranteeing us just enough wins to prevent drafting where we wanted... Knicks fans have been clamoring for Luka since dude was 16. If our organization had planned properly and actually tanked we might be in a different place.

[ProfessaPackMan]

Bye Felicia, y’all would still stink.

[DieHardYankee26]

...so the Knicks play the Hawks tonight. On the road in Atlanta, hope the guys don't feel too out of their element. They're not accustomed to playing in front of empty gyms like that other team in NY.

[TMagic]

Quote: Originally Posted by DieHardYankee26

The Knicks finding themselves in the lottery every year is not tanking, it's sucking. [REDACTED] was drafted as a result of a botched tank, we should've been in line for the 1st pick, but THJ hit a game winner in the last game of the season. [REDACTED] then ****ed our future tanks by peaking for 2 months and then falling apart, guaranteeing us just enough wins to prevent drafting where we wanted... Knicks fans have been clamoring for Luka since dude was 16. If our organization had planned properly and actually tanked we might be in a different place.

Never said the Knicks tanked. Just that you guys have been in the lottery every year.

And there seems to be this idea that the NBA is like the NFL when it is not. The worst team is not guaranteed the top pick. Not even close. They only have the SLIGHTEST of increased odds to get it. And that seems to be getting left out of the equation.

As Ive mentioned, this year the bottom three teams each have a 14% chance of landing the top pick. Which means that there is an 86% chance that it WILL NOT happen for each of these teams. No smart bettor would put their money on those odds.

Just to reiterate... The worst teams in the league are only guaranteeing themselves mere percentage points of increased chances to lock up the number one pick.

That's a very poor ROI. And is something that seems to get left out of the picture quite often.

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[DieHardYankee26]

The worst team is also guaranteed a top 5 pick.