CBAreject

This shows how absurd the premise is. Dwight please show me how to sand bag and lose by 30 to a lottery team—I’m just a rook.

Ten years of embarrassing playoff exits. Even our ECF season was embarrassing—we had way too much trouble dispatching a bad Nets team and then meekly took a historical beating from the Cavs. The worst out of those appearances was the historical beating from #2 Orlando when we were the third seed. Then there were the numerous other sweeps by the Cavs. Every year, the narrative was that we were no more than a speed bump for a real team.

I admire your patience in this discussion. I think most fans refer to the team as “we”, even in other countries. It’s hard to imagine being a sports fan and frequenting sports fan forums and not encountering this universal colloquialism. It’s also just damn funny to talk about losing like it takes some sort of concerted effort. My original post was mostly tongue-in-cheek, though it is true that “we” do need to lose the rest of our games for posterity. Dark humor is what helps me cope with having an embarrassment of a basketball team that I follow.

This is common and accepted fanspeak—to refer to the team we root for as “we” vs the opposition, “they”. Most people know it isn’t meant literally, as if the fan were to believe they are part of the team.

Where did I say that we control wins and losses?

Clutch loss, squawkers. We need to take it one game at a time now and not look ahead to Orlando. You don’t want to take any of these games for granted between now and then. You’ll come out flat and screw around and inexplicably beat the Jazz. This has to be a team effort. We can run the table!

Nobody said that. Almost every champion has drafted one or both of its best 2 players in the lottery. The exceptions have traded lottery picks or lottery selected players to build their core. That doesn’t say that you have to tank to get those lottery picks. But good luck trading Dwight Howard for one...

Do you understand that difference between necessity and sufficiency, I.e. something can be necessary but not sufficient for something else?

KB’s straw man generator. He’s become a caricature of himself.

The thing that strikes me about the debates in this thread is that the two sides are having different conversations. The brutal FACT is that the Hawks as constructed in early 2017 could not have won a championship. We probably will not win a championship by tanking either, and based on the standards of the anti-tank crowd, even if we win a championship 7 years after tanking, it still won't have "worked". The reason is simple--they have a different expectation and hope for the team. The anti-tankers want to "compete". I suspect they delude themselves a bit into thinking that if you just compete hard enough with a 45-win team year-in and year-out, you'll eventually get a ring with enough gumption. But whatever the case, what they want is a team that has a chance to win most nights in the regular season. The tankers want a championship, and they generally realize that's a long-shot. They also realize it's a no-shot if you have a bunch of mediocre players. They watch the titles go to teams with superstars and think that we may as well gamble and get one of those. All championship teams are built on lottery picks or the trading thereof. There is one exception--the LA Lakers. Nobody believes we have the ability to sign the best player in the NBA on the strength of our market, so we don't bank on being that exception. Tankers have grown tired of being mediocre and want out. I don't think either of these is an invalid way to be a fan. I think either strategy can "work", but only one has a shot of resulting in a championship for a non-LA or NY team. Carry on.

Because NBA careers are long and the players seldom switch teams. The graph shows that the elite teams of the NBA tended to be good each of the prior 4 seasons, though there were a significant percentage who were not. That doesn’t prove that tanking doesn’t work. The teams that strike gold tanking become good teams, just like Cleveland and GS that then stay good for years. Now how does an aging, mediocre, capped-out 40-win team with effort issues move into that 55+ win territory?

Heartbreaking win

Yep, that 8th pick is as good as ours

Would you rather eat turds covered with candy sprinkles or pizza sprinkled with sand? OH SO YOU PREFER EATING SAND TO CANDY SPRINKLES?!? I won’t be surprised if this analogy is lost on you.......

This is the most important regular season game the Hawks have played in years. Yep, prove me wrong.

Memphis is going to out-tank us all. Their 13th loss in a row came to the Magic. They may not win again.

Stop with the straw men. Nobody would rather watch losing than winning. It is just more interesting to see a young, hungry team that has a future than an expensive, mediocre, veteran team that tries half the time, knowing the first round will be another embarrassment. For decades, the first word association for “Atlanta Hawks” has been “mediocrity”. They honorably took their first round beating by a real team and set about finding away to repeat the same outcome the next year.

The truly remarkable thing is that Dallas has had the worst record in the league as late as 60 games into the season. They would be a 35 win team some years with this roster.

Flip Bembry and Bazemore for The Brow IMO

Advanced stats love David Robinson. He is 3rd all time in Win Shares per 48, 4th all time in PER, 8th all time in VORP, 15th in Win Shares. That’s among all players, not just centers.

@KB21, I see there, but I do think he meant that is the Hawks’ “plan”. I should also point out that he thinks the plan is to sign guys once cap space is cleared, and that will make us a playoff team, not just straight draft picks. I personally hope we don’t rush this rebuild like we did the last one. Trading picks for Joe Johnson made us better quickly but it put a ceiling of mediocrity on our team for a decade that was only broken by Ferry’s shrewd moves.

But I thought you couldn’t add veterans without a “winning culture”. This is one of the main reasons you keep saying “tanking doesn’t work”.

Who is excusing anything? They could’ve drafted better, but even blowing 60% of their picks, they have the necessary 2-superstar core to win a championship. That proves you can tank and screw up most of your picks and still come out with what you wanted. We ended up with a 50-win team 5 years into Billy Knight’s incoherent rebuild.

Yeah, but this is how tanking actually works—administratively. Players on they floor are playing for contracts and for pride. They probably won’t even be on the roster when the benefits of tanking come. They may even be tanking to draft a player that replaces them. The only way to get players to cooperate would be to pay them, but if that happened, just one leaker would expose it as a monstrous scandal that would destroy a team for years. Cuban shouldn’t have said what he did, but it was a totally self-evident comment. For an 18-40 team, there is nothing to be gained from getting hot and finishing with 28 wins. It is in the organizations’ best interests to lose. That is totally different from saying that the players/coaches should throw games. Based on last night’s hard fought game against one of the league’s best teams, Mavs players are playing to win.

How did we ever win 47 games just 4 years after we won 13 games in 2005? And with Billy Knight drafting MW and Shellhead with those picks!