CBAreject

21 minutes ago, AHF said:

Duncan becomes a stud whether Robinson is there or not.  Come on.  We claiming all the greats got there because they had injured borderline All-Stars showing them how to put up a net neutral point differential (assuming for the sake of argument that we were better than last year despite Sap being out for most of the year).

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.  

1 hour ago, Sothron said:

All good things must come to an end. Except in this case ten years of playoffs equaled zero titles, zero Finals, one token conference finals with zero wins and a whole lot of glass ceiling exits.

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.  

4 minutes ago, AHF said:

This discussion seems really over complicated.  It isn't a matter that people don't call out specific members of the management team, it is more that it is super common to use the term "we" when talking about what a fan hopes to see from the collective organization.  Bud is definitely 100% responsible for minutes and strategy on the floor with the possible exception that Schlenk or someone else might be involved in deciding who to sit out, etc.  

Anyone who doesn't like the idea of rebuilding through the draft will have a circle drawn around Schlenk's picture because clearly Schlenk sold ownership on that vision and he has moved to go in that direction.  Budcox was atrophying talent and escalating costs over time but it is unclear whether Budcox was on board doing moves like trading Sap for assets which seemed an obvious move if we were going to rebuild.

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.  

24 minutes ago, Peoriabird said:

The 1st sentence..."we need to take it one game at a time"  Who were you referring to as we?

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.  

1 hour ago, Peoriabird said:

What is this?  No one on this board can control wins and losses!  Bud and the players control our fate whether you like it or not. 

Where did I say that we control wins and losses?  

Just now, KB21 said:

The straw man argument is this idea that you have to tank to be a championship contender.  

No.  You actually have to win games to be a championship contender.  

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...

43 minutes ago, KB21 said:

It's clearly implied.  Where else do you think all the comments about having to tank to be able to win a championship comes from?

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

42 minutes ago, davis171 said:

Who has said that it is guaranteed?

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.

7 hours ago, KB21 said:

That article is as true today as it was back then.  Good teams stay good.  Bad teams stay bad.

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?

Yep, that 8th pick is as good as ours

15 hours ago, KB21 said:

It's not a straw man argument.  This idea that you would rather see a young, hungry team is absolutely more about watching losing than winning.  That's what young and hungry gets you   

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. 

6 hours ago, KB21 said:

Oh, I know you would rather watch losing than winning, but I hate losing, so that's not me.   You will get what you want.  This team will have no fewer than 150 losses over the next three years, and the biggest loss this team will have is Mike Budenholzer.

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.  

1 hour ago, AHF said:

Here are the point differential which are fairly predictive on record (at least under normal circumstances):

PHX -8.6

SAC -8.0

CHI -6.3

ORL -4.6

ATL -4.6

MEM -4.6

NJ -4.1

LAL -2.7

DAL -2.6

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

31 minutes ago, davis171 said:

You realize you are comparing a top 3 player all time in Lebron to David Robinson right? Robinson wasn't even the best Center in the NBA. BTW a team of Hill, JR, Hood, Nance, Thompson with Korver, Cedi, Clarkson off the bench would win more than 25 games in the east imo and they lost 5 less than that they were 100% losing on purpose by the end of the year.

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.  

2 minutes ago, KB21 said:

Thanks to veteran additions to the team during that span of time.   Do you really think they get there had they tried to build exclusively from the draft the way some of you pro tankers want to do?

This is why the Hawks should sign Derrick Favors this off season.  Start back adding the veterans to shorten this god forsaken losing.

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”.  

2 hours ago, KB21 said:

So, this excuses how the 76ers missed on 3 of the 5 top 5 draft picks they have had during their tank?

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.  

Quote

"We have been careful to distinguish between efforts teams may make to rebuild their rosters, including through personnel changes over the course of several seasons, and circumstances in which players or coaches on the floor take steps to lose games," Silver wrote in the memo, obtained by USA Today Sports.

"The former can be a legitimate strategy to construct a successful team within the confines of league rules; the latter -- which we have not found and hope never to see in the NBA -- has no place in our game. If we ever received evidence that players or coaches were attempting to lose or otherwise taking steps to cause any game to result otherwise than on its competitive merits, that conduct would be met with the swiftest and harshest response possible from the league office."

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.  

9 minutes ago, KB21 said:

But because they tanked some of the time, they are doomed to their current fate.  This is the fate that awaits the Hawks for you pro tankers.  This is what you want the Hawks to become.

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!