CBAreject

Whoops, another non sequitur from you. You’re a caricature from a logic course who commits every fallacy in the book.

Because their argument is an emotional one. The tankers argue from a position of calm pragmatism. The anti-tankers argue from a position of apoplectic rage.

KB mocked me for calling the 6ers a 50-win team when they were on pace for more and already had like 46 wins. He also mocked anyone for saying they were any good right up until they didn’t get bounced in the first round like he predicted. Then it was goalpost moving. He needs the 6ers to fail to prove his point and be right. Their success is very inconvenient for his argument.

ESPN finds the Mavs to be the clear winners of the draft. They believed Doncic was the best player in the draft and we made sure the trade came with zero risk for the Mavs. How generous.

I don’t know enough about Doncic to be mad, but I think we had Dallas by the balls and could’ve demanded no protection on the pick. Makes me think we were a little desperate to get out of the #3 slot.

Spellman seems like good value there. A wide-bodied stretch-4 who can rebound and block shots?

I don’t know anything about Doncic except he was sought after. What I do know is the last time the Hawks had a chance at a generational Euro player at #3, they traded the pick (Gasol). He’s a hall-of-famer. Again, I don’t know about Doncic, but if he was so sought after to have multiple trade offers, we were in the driver’s seat and did not have to give protection on the pick. If Dallas believed he was a franchise talent, they would’ve done whatever we asked—those players are invaluable. We let them dictate the terms to us. Look at what Ainge did to the Nets. That is how an alpha-GM bargains.

@KB21 and @Peoriabird I specifically said in my post that MLB and NBA are different. The point was not that the Braves’ and Hawks’ rebuilds are similar in any way or should be so. The point was strictly that I’m excited about the Braves and wish I could be excited about the Hawks. Full stop. And what does @KB21 do? Starts his rebuttal of the nonexistent straw man he made up with “if you want to draw a direct comparison between the Braves and Hawks”. Well, I stopped reading right there, because if you aren’t going to bother to read my post, @KB21, I’m sure not going to bother to read yours.

The Braves have the three youngest players in baseball, one of which leads the league in homers. And they’re in first place so far. They also have the top minor league system. Today at AAA Gwinnett, their top pitcher Allard pitched an 8-inning shutout and the third baseman, Riley, hit 3 homers, went 4-5, with 8 RBI. Baseball is very different than NBA, but the experience of having potential to be excited about is something I can’t recall experiencing with the Hawks. The last time I was really excited about a season was the year we signed Mutumbo. That’s sad. If it gets us half the potential the Braves have, the tank will have been worth it.

@KB21, not even in playoff contention? So you are saying that they will not even come close to making the playoffs until the 2022–23 season? Or is it 2023-24

That's an interesting hypothesis. What evidence do you have to support it? What other hypotheses exist and why are those wrong? Or do you just argue with blind emotion?

I get your points @TheNorthCydeRises and @parfait I just have a few remarks: 1) I don’t see what difference the substitution of gender for race/ethnicity makes in northcyde’s example. The implication is that sexism matters to people but not racism, which I think is a faulty assumption and why the example will fall flat. Both of them matter very much to me and to most people. But reading a racist or sexist comment in a forum where full disclosure of sourced comments was expected would not suggest to me that the reader, himself, was a bigot, only the source. 2) it is NOT the equivalent of telling a racist joke, even if the teller heard it elsewhere. That would be a clear indication that the teller was racist or at least racially insensitive. It would be more like quoting the teller of a racist joke in a legal deposition where it isn’t seen as an endorsement of the joke. Is everyone at ESPN who wrote about Donald Sterling’s comments a racist for reporting them? 3) Even if one argues that in reading verbatim quotes (which apparently was the expectation of him), Ferry should have paraphrased this one in particular, and in not doing so, he exercised poor judgment or a lapse in “professional decorum”, how does it follow that he should then have his career ended as a result? And please don’t respond with “you can’t expect to do that and survive”, because that much is apparent. We live in a world in which a lapse in judgment will unleash an intolerant Twitter mob that will call for your head. That doesn’t mean you or I have to be part of it. I prefer a world of grace, forgiveness, and second chances. I genuinely hope that none of us is ever up against that.

A couple of problems. Teams that draft at the top of the lottery several years in a row tend to be teams that have bad GMs and losing cultures. That's a major confounder. Studying whether those teams tend to succeed isn't the same question as whether a capped-out, aging squad with a negative point differential should rebuild, i.e., tank. To put it in doctor terms, what if I tell you that people who take Plavix have more heart attacks than people who don't take Plavix? Are you going to be a terrible doctor and prescribe Plavix if it's causing all these heart attacks? Of course you are, because you know what "confounding by indication" is. The other point is that "winning culture" isn't something that comes from winning a certain number of games--it's about having the right GM and coaching staff. Now, if we do lose Bud because we tanked, that will actually hurt our capacity to have a winning culture. Hanging on for dear life to a horrible roster wouldn't have. To that end, the first step in the destruction of the Hawks' winning culture was firing Danny Ferry because he read something out loud that someone else said and replacing him with a talentless, ineffectual hack because he endorsed politically correct opinions and made the ownership feel good about itself.

You’re assuming that we wouldn’t have resigned THJ and Millsap to put us over the cap? We would’ve thrown good money after bad and wound up with very little cap room when Dwight came off the books.

Hate to be a broken record, but once you spend over half your cap on declining Dwight, a shooting guard who can’t shoot, and a point guard who won’t pass, you are committed to a ceiling of mediocrity. Bud was instrumental in all those decisions. True, that didn’t mean we had to tank, but it did mean we weren’t winning anything until we rebuilt.

Yes, I would choose to lose 60 and get a top 5 pick and cap flexibility over winning 38-40 games and being capped out and declining with no hope to improve. Why is this hard to understand?

Ok, keep thinking that posting a negative scoring differential with a capped-out veteran roster, getting embarrassed in the playoffs, and then crossing your fingers that the same crappy roster can back into another low seed and another playoff annihilation is a strategy that defines working. I can barely contain my excitement over Dwight half-assing us to 38 wins.

A “straw man” is when someone represents your argument with a caricature that is easy to defeat, like a straw man would be in a boxing match. The irony here is that in saying “you think the 76ers are the posterboys for tanking,” you are creating a straw man argument for everyone who thinks the Hawks should have “tanked”. Nobody said we can emulate the 76ers or should expect to repeat their success, but what has been argued here is that “tanking doesn’t work”. That is no strawman, it is a direct quote from @KB21. To defeat that argument, we only need to show that it can work or has worked. The 76ers are a useful case for that.

Bet @KB21 mad as $&@% about the Sixers winning today. I guess you can always hope for injuries.

I’m not sure the Braves tank “worked”. None of the high draft picks they got from tanking has played a meaningful inning of baseball yet. All of the core players on the team were either on the team in 2014 or were acquired through trades of players on that team (Gattis/Heyward/Simmons). I am bullish on the Braves’ future, and they do have the best minor league system as a direct result of the tank, but we won’t know where it will take the major league team just yet. Would they have been better off just keeping Kimbrel and Simmons? We sure could use them now.

Bud committed over half our cap to Dennis, Baze, and Howard, and that committed us to this tank. Lord help us if he’d been able to sign THJ

KB isn't bound by your silly rules of logic and argumentation. He can move the goalposts around at will and equivocate whenever it suits him. In the end, it all adds up to him being so right that you can't stand to admit it.

I’m going to enjoy watching you try to mash all your prior reasoning into this. You know, the stuff you said about how FA want to join a winning culture, and Bud wanting to join a winner, and how PHX, a team you have used as a poster child for why “tanking doesn’t work” is now “in a great position” because of the cap space and talent they have due to tanking. Lol. LOL.

KB you were right all along. You said Bud would leave the Hawks to coach a winner, and here he is interviewing with the Suns, a 60-game winner. Why did anyone ever doubt—oh wait, they lost over 60 games? Yes, then what were you talking about exactly?

And we had a negative point differential in the weaker conference with those guys when they were a year younger. Amazing how some fans think we could’ve stood pat and actually improved with an aging, mediocre core that probably overachieved by playing over .500. Ooh yes, I long for the days of getting out scored for the season.