NEM wrote:Winning is ridiculous? No what's ridiculous is cheering for your "favorite team" to lose. What you're saying is that if you aren't a top contender you should just forfeit the season. What happens when we draft okafor or towns, or whoever and we STILL suck? Do we just keep cheering for losses? You understand that you don't go from crap to world beater in one season right? Unless you get a sure fire hall of famer, it's not happening. Guess what? Those guys come around every 10 to 15 years... The last one came in 2007. Go root for someone else to lose you bunch of losers.
Keep it coming NEM, you're exactly right! I mean seriously, why even play the damn game if winning isn't what you set out to do? I don't care what your record is, you play every game with intensity and you play to win, that's why these players get paid millions of dollars. I mean how messed up is it that tanking teams want their fans to pay and watch them play, but in return half-ass it and lose on purpose? This should not be supported!
Also, this notion that drafting Okafor or Town is the only solution is getting old. This team can get better in many different ways, and tanking is not the only solution. I'm sick of people bringing up the OKC model like it's the only way to build a team. Hell, look at probably the two best teams right now, Atlanta and Golden State, neither of those teams relied on a tank to get them a top 3 pick. I bet people have told the Hawks a million times to tank over the past several years, but despite barely making the playoffs many years, they didn't tank but still manage to build a very good team with smart moves.
Then you had the Warriors, who were a pretty bad team for a long time, but despite not having a top 3 pick for several years, they still were able to find their star players with a 7th pick and an 11th pick. So why can't the Magic play hard the rest of the year but still draft a good meaningful player 4-8 instead of a top 3 pick? There isn't a perfect model for building a team, but what it takes is making smart moves and developing your talent the right way. So why sacrifice one for the other? Does developing our guys now automatically mean the Magic can't make a smart draft pick this year? Of course not. But does tanking mean this team is sacrifices developing these players right? I think so. I'm sick of waiting until next year to make progress, let's do it now, there's still a lot of games left!