CBAreject

This thread is full of straw men, mostly due to KB.  Here are a couple.  

1) Prove to me that “tanking is the best strategy!!!”

-Tanking is clearly not the best way to build a contender, and nobody has argued that.  The problem is, it may be the only feasible option to the Hawks as their roster stood in 2017.  Citing examples of the Lakers signing hall of famers is useless because we will never be able to attract FA like the Lakers.  

2) You think you can dip down into the lottery and be back in contention in two years!

-I still haven’t seen where anybody said this, at least not any of the people KB keeps indignantly accusing.  Maybe someone did, but it surely isn’t a widespread view.  Tanking doesn’t work out for most teams that try it.   Neither does spending big dollars in free agency.  Most teams don’t become contenders no matter what they do, but nearly all contenders have drafted one of their best two players in the lottery and/or traded top-10 picks to acquire stars.  

3 minutes ago, KB21 said:

More media glorification of tanking as a strategy, calling a 60 win season an empty season simply because they didn't win the championship that season.  Having tanking teams generates more clicks for these blog writers.

Right, saying it is a “sad rebuild” is “glorification” of tanking.  

6 minutes ago, Watchman said:

5%.  Good track record.

He misspoke and got it backwards.  2 out of the last 20 were NOT drafted in the lottery (kawhi Leonard and tony Parker).  Of course, there’s a lot to quibble about both ways (being finals mvp doesn’t mean you’re the team’s best player, some of these players were not drafted by the teams they played for), but it makes the point.  

Yes, you can propose all the trades you want, but the fact is, we have not built trade capital over the the last decade, we have squandered it. 

https://www.si.com/nba/2017/11/03/nba-tanking-teams-bulls-hawks-suns-knicks-kings

WHICH REBUILD IS THE SADDEST?

Atlanta Hawks. The poor Hawks spent a decade loitering in the middle of the Eastern Conference just to have one empty 60-win season (they were swept by the Cavs in the playoffs) and then watch their good-but-never-great core fall apart. Now, the Hawks are comprised of career backups, a lead guard who elicits enmity as much as excitement, and a couple recent mid-first round draft picks who might only be OK. Finally, a roster worthy of Atlanta’s notoriously insipid home crowds.

By my calculations, the Hawks are the only NBA team without a prospective star (sorry, Dennis Schröder), and they don’t sport a single top-10 selection on the squad. Kent Bazemore, who would make a great eighth man, is their highest-paid player. Sure, they’ll have cap space next summer, but marquee free agents seem allergic to the ATL.

The only good thing about Atlanta’s situation is that the Hawks might actually be awful enough to snag the top spot in the draft. Oh, and John Collins dunks, at least they have those. — Ben Teitelbaum

14 minutes ago, KB21 said:

So you openly admit that you support a strategy that doesn't work?  Because if the Hawks are in the lottery for 4 years, the strategy has not worked.

You’re being obtuse and argumentative.  We obviously have different definitions of “work”.  You create an impossibly high standard of success for tanking (championship contender within 2 years) and a laughably low standard for success for other strategies (first round playoff exits in perpetuity) and use them as your “proofs” that your favored strategy succeeds more frequently.  

1 minute ago, KB21 said:

Like I said, we have the media glorifying the strategy and a bunch of fans who are buying into the idea that accepting losing is OK.

I’m not sure they’re glorifying it.  They’re calling attention to the brazenness of it.  This will probably lead to even more aggressive rule changes.  

The NBA is a joke for more reasons than just tanking.  Superstars play by different in-game rules, and the new cap structure has fostered the creation of super teams.  This creates a bottom heavy league that is unwatchable.  

In the 06/07 season, we won 30 games.  We had the 4th worst record and drafted 3rd (Horford).  Only 2 teams had fewer than 25 wins that year.  This year, there will be 8 such teams. 

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/22573750/how-nba-bottom-dwellers-putting-tanking-clinic-nba

9 minutes ago, Peoriabird said:

Didn't joe Johnson come to a sub 20 team?

He was a sign-and-trade to a 13-win team, but basically yes.  Interestingly, the Joe Johnson acquisition was one that the anti-tank camp applauded.  It got us into the playoffs a lot faster, but it committed us to a decade of mediocrity.

15 minutes ago, KB21 said:

You are taking it for granted that you can simply dip down into the lottery for a year, nab a superstar player, and then be on your way up in a short amount of time.”  

 

Where did I say how long it would take us to get good again?  For the record, I expect to be in the lottery for at least four years.   I’m ok with that.  If we whiff on this year’s pick, it adds at least one more year.  Multiple whiffs and this thing gets really ugly.  I’m still ok with the gamble after decades of being a first-round fluffer for actual contenders.  

1 minute ago, davis171 said:

so what is the quickest way to win a championship in your opinion? Try and be a 4-6 seed ever year while paying luxury tax with no star to bring in fans and pray everyone gets hurt?

I figured it out over the course of this thread.  KB thinks we could sign a Demarre Carrroll and Paul Millsap any offseason and end up with 2 veteran all-star forwards who were perfect scheme fits.  

This is where we disagree.  Most of us take for granted that it was impossible for us to substantially improve on our lousy, expensive first round playoff team 

1 hour ago, KB21 said:

Something we will agree on.  Danny Ferry should not have been fired.  In fact, we should have corrected that wrong and hired him back instead of Travis Schlenk this past off season.  Instead, we have a numb skull who is in over his head.

Might well be true.  I will take the Collins pick as some evidence of competence, but who knows.  I wanted to believe in Billy Knight, but he didn’t have a coherent vision for building a team. 

57 minutes ago, Lurker said:

Once again, there is only one thing to criticize here, and to get down to the nitty gritty of it, it's the failure to look for an actual GM after the Danny Ferry situation in 14/15.

Travis Schlenk has nothing to do with this, Mike Budenholzer on the administrative side with Wes Wilcox, sadly has a lot to do with it. He and Wilcox were not ready and hurt the organization as a pairing.

Yes because Wilcox was not hired for his skill at being a GM but for his vapid SJW sentiments.  The great irony is that the team ended up punishing him for making a virtue signaling comment about his wife and family that was misinterpreted.  Management totally deserves what they got when they fired the best GM we ever lucked into.  The fans, though...we didn’t deserve this crap.  

13 minutes ago, KB21 said:

So, Danny Ferry did what you would call a middle build, and he built a championship contender.  The Hawks made the ECF within one year of their down season, which was 38 wins.  

Will you consider the times that “middle builds” didn’t work, or will you use one example and assume it is repeatable at will?  

Will you consider that a team with Horford and Teague in their primes was in a different position than a team with an aging Millsap and Howard as its best players?

What would you have suggested?  Sticking with a Howard-Millsap core and adding a Harrison Barnes or reupping THJ?  Would that have made us a contender?

Let’s ignore for the sake of arguments that the arguable best player on that team was our own #3 pick.  

But if some team tanked and went to the ECF once in 50 years, would you call that a success?  Of course not.  You use two diametrically opposite standards to judge the two models.  Tanking only works if you get a championship contender within 5 years.  Not tanking works if you get a championship contender twice a century.  

If Philly or Minnesota goes to the ECF next year, will it prove you wrong?  Does OKC going to the NBA finals with their own top-5 picks prove you wrong?  What would it take to falsify your hypothesis that “tanking doesn’t work”?

2 minutes ago, KB21 said:

Give them 3 years?  After they have already taken 5 years to get to this point?  That's my entire point.  Tanking doesn't work if it still takes you 8-10 years to get to where you want to be.  

We got to the conference finals once in 50 years, and we got brutally swept, so did our method “work”?

4 hours ago, KB21 said:

None of those teams have a remote chance of winning the championship. 

Neither did we with an aging Millsap and Howard.  Gosh it’s almost like you judge things by totally different standards based on how much you want them to be true or false. 

4 hours ago, KB21 said:

Heck, one of them is so strong that Hawks fans are currently concerned that they will fall out of the playoff race with the Jimmy Butler injury.  Isn't it something that out of all those top 5 picks Minnesota had, their best player was a free agent acquisition who was drafted with the 30th overall pick in 2011?

There is no planet on which Jimmy Butler is a better player than Karl Anthony-Towns.  Now you’re just trolling.  

4 hours ago, KB21 said:

The data on that alternative you speak of shows that you have a 19% chance of building a championship caliber team when you start as a 35-44 win team, whereas you have a 10% chance of building a championship caliber team when you start as a sub 25 win team.  So, Atlanta would have essentially doubled their chances of being a championship team within the next 5 years had they not tanked and actually attempted to put a competitive team on the court this year.  

This is intuitive.  All teams that tank will either fail or succeed in getting franchise talent. The ones that fail will tank again.  The ones that succeed will become 35 win teams on the way to contention.  Becoming a 35 win team means that the tank worked out early on, so the chances for contention go up.  

If im missing something direct me to the data so I can see if I’m oversimplifying things.  

Additionally, my list wasn’t exhaustive.  There are several strong teams that recently built through top-5 draft picks, like Washington, Minnesota, and recent OKC teams.  

The NBA has had a competitive balance issue for decades, and it threatens the league.  It’s a serious problem, but the fact is that there are only a few ways to build a contender.  One is to sign several of the best players in the league (generally, these players only want to play in Miami, NY, or California).  So if you’re not one of those teams, you can either tank or make a series of genius trades (Boston).  Here’s hoping it works out for us.  

9 hours ago, KB21 said:

It's an absolute disgrace, and the fact of the matter is, the strategy does not work.  The tank is cloaked in the premise that you are doing so to get a star player, but you are more likely to get an Andrew Wiggins than you are a player that can actually help you win.  Of those teams who are tanking, Phoenix is currently in the midst of an 8 year playoff drought.  Orlando is in a 6 year playoff drought.  Dallas is going on 2 years.  Sacramento is in a 12 year playoff drought.  Brooklyn is in year three and hasn't won more than 21 games in any of those years.  This is what tanking gets you, folks.  You get on that lottery treadmill, and it is hard as hell to get off it.  

Of course you can prove “the strategy doesn’t work” if you cherry pick the worst examples for your proofs, but that’s not the way to study something.  You should look at cases where it has worked (GS, Philly, Cleveland, SA) and also look at cases where teams didn’t tank but should have.  

For example, Charlotte honorably became competitive for a playoff spot in its third season of existence, winning 33 games.  Since then, they have made the playoffs 3 times in 10 seasons, getting bounced in the first round each time.   Most years, Charlotte tends to win just enough games to stay out of the lottery and draft a role player who will only help them stay non-competitive.  Every now and again, they squeak into the playoffs and get reminded that they are totally insignificant.

To me, Charlotte’s strategy is totally incoherent.  I would much rather be where we are (holding the most lottery balls) than where they are (little to no hope to contend until they finally blow it up and tank).  

The 8 worst teams in the NBA, all of which have 20 wins or fewer, are currently on losing streaks totaling 43 losses.  The worst of these belong to the Grizz and the Suns, each of which are on a 9-game losing streak. This is a tankfest without historical precedent.  

1 hour ago, AHF said:

We were in line for years of crap no matter what we did.  Sap might have won, what, 4 more games this year?

That’s the thing.  If we had kept Howard and Millsap, we would’ve missed the playoffs and drafted 12th or so and had zero prospects for improvement.  People are acting like we tore apart the 60-win team to tank.  That team was long-gone and never coming back.  Replacing a shrewd Danny Ferry with a SJW GM didn’t help, but that was only one of several decisions that committed us to this rebuild.  

Lol this thread turned into a tank thread. Lol.  

7 hours ago, Watchman said:

Well, let's see...30 wins in 55 games projects out to 44 - 45 wins, with a likely first round exit.  Four years of crap to get back to that same point again?

You know very well that the Sixers aren’t maxed out with 45 wins.  As has already been mentioned, I’m talking about a mediocre 44-win team of veterans with no cap and no draft prospects—remember last year’s team?  That team actually epitomized the Hawks of the last 25 years.

Pete Babcock tried to build that sort of team repeatedly.   Even when we ended up in the lottery it was because his experiment of trading an aging core for younger mediocre players failed so badly.  There was a point when our best player was Jason Terry and all anybody could talk about was adding Austin Croshere with our cap room.  All of these efforts to win now and blow our draft capital and cap room on mediocrity begets mediocrity.  I’m quite sick of it.

On 2/17/2018 at 11:36 AM, DBac said:

They have control of Embiid until 2023, control of Simmons until 2025. . They're in the playoffs right now and neither of those guys are in their primes.

And if Fultz gets his confidence back they have him until 2026

edit: And they'll be able to offer a supermax to all of those guys to entice them to stay.

Of course you’re right, but honestly, it’s just sour grapes. People who have spent the last 2 decades railing against tanking can’t bear to see the most shameless example of it work out so amazingly well.  The Hawks have never truly committed to tanking.  The worst example was finally getting the #3 pick, using it on Gasol, and then trading him for mediocrity (SAR).  Babcock loved trading away high picks—he shipped two of them for Lorenzen Wright (RIP).  That mentality, though, won’t die.  So many fans would trade a chance at a contender for a 44-win team that gets bounced in the first round.  They’re entitled to that preference; I just don’t understand it.