drosestruts wrote:dougthonus wrote:An interesting though, if you really want to go for a title, the path way to do so, is to trade Coby, Ayo, Pat, and AC for as many draft picks as you can get. Those are the guys who will have real value and also guys whom probably aren't good enough to lead you to a title. You then stay afloat with the mid 3 for a couple years, and try to collect more long term assets for a real tear down in 2 years.
Hard to argue with this logic, though it also sparked a thought in my head about how AK/ME potentially thought of this team had things gone well.
Had things gone well, and players remained healthy I feel like their were clear transition opportunities:
DeMar and Vuc come in for the immediate veteran help/presence then are sign and traded when their contracts are up (obviously didn't do this with Vuc) and the team kind of passes to Ball/LaVine/Caruso
And then the Ball/LaVine/Caruso trio eventually passes the mantle to Coby/Williams/whomever else is drafted
We just seemed to have these three distinct groups of players if we were to group them by ages
In hindsight, we started with 3 aces and traded into a pair of 3s.
There were lots of options to do better along the way because we started in such a good place but didn't realize it and so there were always chances to do better.
I mean we started with the ability two have two future all-stars on contracts of 20M and 16M per year that were under 25, an average starting center, a starting caliber / maybe future near star caliber guard, both of whom signed good value extensions, and what would have been multiple lotto picks.
A good GM would have us winning 50+ games with a young core and enough assets to trade for a star if we wanted one.
But yeah, they didn't piss it all away to zero overnight, there were many opportunities to do better along the way.
Of the bad luck they had, it's basically just Lonzo. Nothing else with injuries was really out of the realm of normalcy, Vuc, DeMar and Zach (prior to this year) were all playing more than expected games.