CBAreject

We had a winning culture—arguably the best in the conference, and we attracted a Dwight Howard in steep decline, coming back to his hometown. Durant had a chance to become a legend in the East, but he chose to form a super team with the league MVP. This has been a trend of every star FA in recent memory—George, Paul, James, Bosh, Howard (5 years ago), Durant. All those guys signed to pair up with other superstars. That was the “winning culture” they were seeking. We can Keep signing the Thabos, Carrolls, and Dedmons of the league by promising them playing time and a good coach. To attract stars, we need stars

I’m not sure how you managed to cram that many straw men into the first paragraph. Nobody believes any of what you’re saying they do. Nobody said the draft guarantees anything. Nobody said a new GM will definitely draft better than BK and Babcock, or that they couldn’t mess up a pick, but it would be hard to do worse. Here’s one thing that was a guarantee: if we’d kept our roster intact we’d have continued to be a first-round playoff fluffer with almost no pathway to become a contender that didn’t involve eventually becoming really bad. So we accelerated things. Winning culture or no, you can’t sign anybody with no cap room, and even when we were coming off 2 straight seasons among the East elite, had the best culture in the conference, and DID have cap room, none of the top free agents wanted to come here. We signed Howard because few other teams wanted him, and few other players wanted our money. It is sad but true. If we want a star, with have to play the lottery, and everyone knows a lottery is just that.

And this is a great example of a “middle build” gone horribly wrong. Their saving grace is that it went so bad they may get a top-3 Pick from it. Dallas had a team without much surplus value and added expensive liabilities to that team. That doesn’t make you a contender, it makes your roster expensive and inflexible.

It is possible to draft better than Billy Knight did. He wasn’t just a victim of circumstance—he was genuinely bad at his job.

Seeing Kent Bazemore’s salary gave me a seizure. Ugh, put that thing away.

Oh I’m not really in favor of it for exactly those reasons. But for fans who hate tanking so much, they need to look at those kinds of options rather than trying to selectively punish teams for ill-defined and subjective cases of tanking.

Agreed. It is commonly seen as a perversion of justice to make ex post facto rulings like punishing tankers when there is no explicit rule against it. I don’t mean players throwing games, I mean management stripping down a roster to be uncompetitive or coaches playing younger players ahead of veterans. It’s alarming to me that people want just such an ex post facto rules enforced against their favorite team because of their own nihilistic rage over having a losing season.

Just make the whole draft a pure lottery, each team has one ping-pong ball, unless they’ve traded it ahead of time. Nobody will tank. Any future draft choice becomes more valuable in trades. Also have a hard cap like the NFL and stop capping individual player salaries.

Oh, I am in no way saying Jerry f’ing Stackhouse was a good player. He is one of my least favorite players of all time—inefficient volume scorer...maddening to watch. He was an asset, in that he had perceived value to other teams, and he had been acquired with a lottery pick. The question put to KB was whether there was an asset-poor mediocre team without a star like ours in 2017 that made some sort of moves to become a contender without becoming bad first. Detroit is raised as an example, but Detroit had actual star players (Hill, Stackhouse) that they acquired from being bad that they then parlayed into other assets. Nobody was giving us a package like Detroit got for Hill or Stackhouse for Dwight Howard, a player seen to be not worth his contract, declining, and a clubhouse problem. The one asset we had was Schröder, but he is also seen as a flawed player. You might be able to turn him into a mid-lottery Pick like Philly got for Jrue Holliday. As for the rest of your post, I totally agree that the Hawks mismanaged their rebuild a decade ago, blew obvious draft decisions, attempted to become competitive too quickly with the JJ trade, and that led to a decade of mediocrity. That was compounded by the horrible decision to destroy Danny Ferry, and then subsequent BudCox decisions. But none of that has bearing on the fact that as our roster stood in 2017, we had no legitimate pathway to contention. Blow up was the only option to acquire star talent with such a dearth if capital

I didn’t say we wouldn’t be worse, but we can be worse record-wise and better positioned asset-wise. Signing Derrick Favors, at this point in the rebuild would be a huge mistake, on the order of our Joe Johnson acquisition. The timing is all off to sign a guy who is a good third option. It makes you too good to draft top-5 without giving you the core you need to utilize a third option. That is a legitimate concern. I hope Bud sticks around. We were committed to tank largely by his decisions, so I kind of feel he owes us. You and I have very different definitions of asset, as I’ve made pains to explain. To you, an aging Dwight Howard making $25 million is an asset because he “helps you win”. To me, he is a liability because he offers negative value considering his salary and is untradeable. If you build a team of as many players with the production to salary ratio of Howard as you could sign, that team will be in the luxury tax and miss the playoffs.

Maybe, but you don’t know that. And you will judge whatever happens through a hilariously myopic lens. Let’s agree that we won’t challenge for the playoffs next year. My hope is that we use next year to position ourselves to contend in the future. That may entail taking more salary dumps for more draft assets or young players. Giddy up. When you are asset-poor, as we were last year and are again this year, you have to trade wins for future assets. There is simply no alternative. The hope is that we sit in an asset-rich position in two years. That is very doable. We won’t be a contender, but we can be in an advantageous position and not deadlocked into mediocrity as a CEILING.

Let’s look at how Detroit built that championship team. The first thing they did was trade Grant Hill (#3 Pick) for a package including Ben Wallace. They didn’t want to trade Hill, and Wallace was not expected to become he did, but he ended up becoming one of the most valuable players in the NBA for the next 6 years. The next thing major move was to trade Jerry Stackhouse (#2 Pick) for Rip Hamilton So did they start as a middling team without a star and no assets and acquire talent? Or were they a team with young tradable assets who parlayed them into better players for their scheme?

Yes, it takes less skill or luck to land HOF talent in the top 5 than in the 13-20 range. That’s the whole point. If you want to bank on getting Malone and Stockton in the teens instead of Adam Keefe and Rumeal Robinson, then you’re going to be disappointed. Heck, we nailed some of those picks the last few years with Teague, Schröder, and Collins, but still those guys are supporting players that you build with but not around.

Very true, but also part of this is that undervalued players cease to be undervalued when you give them massive contracts. We let Carroll and THJ walk for a reason. Should’ve let Baze walk. Again, this all goes back to surplus value, not just signing a bunch of expensive players.

Agreed, but there are levels of hell. If we land in the top 3 picks, I will be way more optimistic than I was when we got bounced in the first round and had a team about to be older and more expensive with no prospects for improvement.

And if it takes 10 years, it’s not like you win 20 games for 9 years and then 60 games in year 10. Best case, we get a franchise center and we are at least “interesting” to watch as soon as next year. What would be really sad is if we had resigned Millsap and THJ and won 40 games and just missed the playoffs. We had some years like that with Nique, and it was depressing.

We would rather have that, too. But we had no chance to be great once we were paying Bazemore, Millsap, and Howard $70 million.

And again, we’re at an impasse here. We are literally having different discussions. It’s like living on different continents and disagreeing about how to describe the weather today. Nobody disagrees that the Hawks could’ve continued to win 40 games or so for many more years. Nobody disagrees that we would’ve been without a superstar for the duration of that time, and thus irrelevant.

@KB21, tanking doesn’t work if you define “tanking” in a very particular way and “work” in a very particular way, which are both self-serving for your predetermined conclusion.

One example is not instructive of anything. If middle builds work out so well, why Pete Babcock? Why Isaiah Rider? Obviously, that one case tells you nothing except “every middle build doesn’t succeed”. Wiggins tells you that “not every #1 Pick is a superstar”. That was never in dispute

I’m sure we have very different interpretations of that era. Babcock never tanked—he should’ve been your favorite GM. What Babcock did was try to stay relevant by trading an aging core of boring players that got annihilated by the 8th seed for risky young problem players. That made us bad, but not bad enough to draft very high. He compounded the problem by trading all of the high picks we did get for veterans because losing for multiple seasons was “not acceptable”. Well, acceptable or not, we did lose for multiple seasons, only we didn’t have a franchise player to show for it. By the time Billy Knight took over, we had no real assets and he did his best to rid our roster of liabilities. At that point, we actually did tank for one season, but then we had Billy knight drafting for “length” instead of ceiling. He also made our situation worse by attempting to win now and trading for JJ.

Another way of saying this, @KB21, is if losing for multiple seasons is “not acceptable” to you, then maybe you’re not in a position to objectively evaluate whether or not tanking “works”, since it requires exactly that—losing for multiple seasons. This actually makes a lot more sense out of why you were being so obtuse. It’s an emotional issue for you, and people don’t tend to be the most rational when they’re emotional.

Ok, but we’re just back to a difference of opinions, which is what I keep saying to you. You’re welcome to enjoy one 43-win season after another—you had 25 good years of that to enjoy. Now we’re trying something that I’ve been wanting for decades—to get a bona fide superstar in the draft and maybe be a championship contender. Different goals for the team, see?

This is the thing that all this boils down to—surplus value. You can only win a championship with lots of surplus value. That’s why it’s hard to do with a collection of mid-tier free agents. Players that offer surplus value are assets. Those that offer little value or negative value but are expensive are liabilities. Dwight Howard was a liability. That’s why he could only be traded for other liabilities. Kent Bazemore is a liability. Millsap was an asset who was bound to become a liability before his next contract was up. Schröder is a marginal asset. THJ was an asset until he became expensive, at which time he became a liability. Good on us for letting the Knicks absorb him. Speaking of which, the Knicks have been so bad for so long because they repeatedly built a team out of liabilities. All the discussions about our “alternatives” fail miserably to consider that we simply had virtually no assets, and we had a roster jammed full with expensive liabilities, I.e., no surplus value, with no cap room. The question of how to increase our surplus value then was limited to the draft. And so, drafting in the late teens, we would’ve had to find amazing steals repeatedly to improve significantly. That’s a bad bet. A much better bet was to cut loose some of the liabilities and move our draft position and odds higher. It was a no-brainer. Understanding surplus value makes this very straightforward.

Good, we need to lose for a few years to keep drafting high and accrue some assets.