emunney wrote:I just can't **** on Kidd for this too bad. For one, the 6ers are utterly terrible. Tanking teams have been beating them all year. For another, for all of pre-Hinkie history, tanking meant sitting your good vets and rolling with the youth. Well our youth is pretty good. They're better than the 6ers, at least.
What you guys are asking for is a much bigger ask than you seem to think it is. It is ok to put guys in tough spots, to give Giannis the green light to shoot all the 3s he wants, to trot out weird lineups and give Vaughn and JOB opportunities, but it is different to sit totally healthy 21 year olds so that you can ensure a loss against the worst team in the league. Acting like what Kidd is doing is stupid beyond precedent ignores what the precedent actually is, which is basically everything that Kidd has done: sit guys with mild injuries, give the keys to the team to the guys with the most long term promise. Again, this is every late season tank in history before Hinkie came along. You never lose every game.
I somewhat agree with you. But what gets me is that we still trotted out Middleton for 40+ minutes on the first night of a back-to-back when we all thought that he'd (and he should have) be shut down for the rest of the year with the convenient "thigh bruise". I felt that all of Kidd's lineup changes and distribution of minutes was defensible up to this point, but the Middleton thing is just confusing. I don't get why you do that this late in the year.