CBAreject

That’s a concrete interpretation of what I meant by concrete. Lol.

You are impressively concrete.

Right, they weren’t even that good at tanking and they still got a 50-win team after 4 losing seasons.

If Philly goes to the ECF this year, KB will still be saying that tanking didn't work. They could have a 3-ring dynasty in 5 years and he will be shaking his fist at their success.

Game of the night is Mavs vs Kings. Go Mavs!

Don’t tell KB. He is choking on his own bile, screaming hysterically to all that will listen that Philly is proof positive that “tanking doesn’t work”

Ok, so I can’t see us winning more than 1 game the rest of the way. Orlando has its next 5 games against teams with < 25 wins, so they should win a game. We need Dallas to win one more and that should lock us into #3.

Who should we root for in the Suns-Magic game tonight? I’d say Magic because I don’t think we will catch the Suns either way.

90% of tanking happens at the admin/executive level. The GM guts the roster and releases/trades high performers who don't figure into long-term plans. If we drop to the 6-8 level, it will be on Schlenk for not trading Dedmon and others. The other 10% of tanking happens at the coaching level, and it involves benching good players. This last part is highly dependent on the coach, and I would expect Bud to be too competitive to want any part of it.

124 pages in, we still haven't answered the question: should we tank? I vote yes.

Yeah if we’re going to do a random draft, we should just make a hard cap, remove individual player caps, and make all draftees free agents. You’d still have tanking because teams would gut their rosters trying to sign LeBron 2.0. Or we could do something like having the lottery extend to the 5th seeds and below in the playoffs with less weighting toward the top few teams. How about this? Teams 1-9 enter an even chances lottery for the top pick. After that, teams 10-14 join the remaining teams for a draw for #2. After that, teams 15-19 join for a draw for the #3 Pick. Really hard to justify a full on tank in this system. This is my current fave.

Or....OR....the broken record is your uncharitable strawman representation of the “tank crowd”. Tanking sucks, but I find it preferable to winning 40 games with an old and overpaid roster with no prospects for substantial improvement. It’s ok to disagree with me and other people who think like I do, but stop with the shallow and self-serving mischaracterizations.

Babcock was horrible and he invested lots of time, picks, and money into building a losing veteran team. BK did have to undo what Babcock did, and he got the first part right. He tanked real good. His problem was that he was horrible at the draft and his vision for the team was gimmicky. But, at the time of our 13-win season, it would’ve been correct to defend him against rash judgments.

Everything on here is just someone’s opinion, including all of your opinionated posts. It seems like you just want to be argumentative rather than discuss the Hawks.

Those tweets probably won’t age well. Quinn Cook has, thus far, been a replacement-level NBA player. He got hot for one game against one of the league’s worst teams. The difference between a “breakout” and a fluke is what happens down the road. You can only call a breakout game in hindsight.

I think we should shamelessly tank. Once we finish that, we should draft the best prospect. I reserve the right to bitch and moan about our draft slot and draftee after the fact.

Are we rooting for the Grizzlies? Another win by the Bulls puts them out of reach, but a win by the Grizz makes #1 reachable. Decisions....

Bud must have delivered a mighty inspirational halftime speech. These guys are totally sandbagging in the second half.

This is shaping up to be another clutch third quarter. You get the feeling that the team senses the importance of this game and has rallied around Bud to mail it in. Proud of these guys.

Hornets have Dwight Howard so they are, by definition, just a couple moves away from being a championship contender.

The answer is obviously to be the Lakers. That’s the alternative to the tank model.

Kings won last night, too. Huge night for us. Now let’s not go and blow it with a careless win tonight.

Huge win by the magic tonight. Things shaping up nicely for us. We control our own destiny for top 3.

Cognitive dissonance is the impetus to activate a panoply of primitive defense mechanisms, namely denial. KB simply cannot allow you to be right or else it would undercut his basic assumptions about the world: 1) tanking doesn’t work 2) having an old, mediocre, and expensive roster puts you on the path to the Finals 3) KB is intelligent and this issue is black-and-white, cut-and-dried. I accept partial blame because we did not force KB to define what “works” meant a priori. As a result, he is able to apply different standards to tanking and not tanking, such that the same outcome (say 45 wins) can be used to argue that one “works” while the other “doesn’t work”. Mea culpa.

Last night’s loss was clutch. We had a double-digit halftime lead and dismantled it in short order with just a few minutes of the third quarter. Losses like that show this team’s mettle. It will take a few more to finish what we started, but we can see the light at the end of the tank tunnel now. Do it hawks!