theBigLip wrote:I think Weaver had a different plan than what you (and many others) expected. Our vets to start the season: BB, Burks, Harris, Morris. Three common characteristics: they can (or used to) shoot, (unfortunately) often injured, and all expired this season. Good attempt to get shooters, unfortunately they were injured and didn’t help much, but they didn’t impact our cap for this year.
One of the beat writers has noted that the organization did not expect much out of Harris. His acquisition was primarily a means to gain draft capital, meaning that the front office effectively surrendered $20 million in cap space with an incomplete roster for the sake of two blah second-round picks. It would have been even less excusable if they'd been expecting him to contribute anything, because he was very plainly washed up already.
The roster had issues from top to bottom. It wasn't
this bad of a roster -- the worst coaching the NBA has seen in a long time took that very inadequate roster and made it enormously worse -- but it had substantial gaps, and blowing $20 million in cap space for a couple of seconds was a characteristically brazen act by Weaver. He's constantly made questionable wagers throughout his time as general manager, and they have almost without exception failed. This time the wager was that Stewart would do fine at a position for which he was completely unsuited, Livers would be healthy and effective, and Ausar could provide good minutes despite coming into the league as a zero-level scorer. None of those bets had any solid logical basis to them.
His strategy certainly left the roster relying immensely upon Bojan and Burks for perimeter shooting. Very, very disproportionately so. There was no reliable volume perimeter shooting anywhere else. Another major flaw of the roster.
Why do that? We weren’t winning anything this season and all the young guys needed playing time. We got that. Everyone has improved because of it. Maybe hard to watch at times but still the right move. Spending money on big free agents would have been premature last summer. If that was your expectation, then yes, Weaver blew it. But that wasn’t his goal.
The idea is for young players
to develop within a functional system. Thanks to Weaver's inability to resist prioritizing longshot reclamation projects and longshot development avenues over the acquisition of reliable role players, no young player on the team has had an opportunity to do that.
The most functional roster the Pistons have had during his tenure played in his first season. Despite lucking into the first pick in 2021 and selecting his ostensible franchise cornerstone, he spent that offseason from draft day morning onward going all-in on development without any effort whatsoever to provide Cade a roster which had anything even resembling the necessary fundamentals or put him into any position to succeed. That's been Weaver's way as a general manager. It's been risky, it's been brazen, and it's genuinely been an absolute failure -- precisely none of the players he bet on in the process panned out as he'd hoped (I'm not referring to Ivey, Duren, or Thompson in that evaluation).
Beyond that, the goal this season was to take a step forward, be more competitive, and win more games. Weaver built it with that in mind. He just did a very bad job of it.
I’m fine with giving Weaver the chance to use the cap space he created as the final step for the rebuild. IMHO Next year is judgement time for him and his plan.
I'm hoping he can do good things with that cap space, but he's put a lot of stock into a very devalued resource; offseason cap space is vanishingly less valuable than it was ten or even five years ago. It's much more effectively converted into minor draft assets than into genuinely valuable players. The upcoming free agency class is very weak, both in a vacuum and in terms of this particular roster's needs; and there are other teams with cap space as well, every one of them with a significantly brighter future than the Pistons currently enjoy.
I suspect that the front office's desperate hope -- or rather Weaver's, because Tellem and Stefanski seem to be 100% safe under Gores -- is that a trade can be made using the draft pick and that the return can be taken directly into cap space to reduce asset expenditure in sparing the other party the need to take on salary in return. It's a spare hope, and I don't care to think right now on what may panicked use may end up being made of that cap space should it fail to be realized.
