Badonkadonk wrote:raincityraptors wrote:Dalek wrote:Gambling losses are the story of the Toronto Raptors lately:
We went from Fred VanVleet metaphorically "betting on himself" and getting paid career type money by the Rockets this past offseason, to gaining Jontay Porter who literally went and "bet on himself" and likely cost him his NBA career.
We thought we could get max value from Siakam and OG and ended up with zero prospects and a bunch of mediocre players.
Darko was probably the safest bet as a new coach, and even he got sued by the Knicks for stealing information.
This is a dark era and really the only way out of it is firing Masai and Bobby and starting over. There is no winning culture here.
I'm pissed that we got Jacob instead of starting the tank for Wemby. We had no business being buyers that year. We should have sold then.
Still it's tough to say there is no winning culture here. This front office won a Championship in 2019. Things have been considerably worse since Bobby's promotion but you can't say that a team that won a Championship in 2019 doesn't have Championship culture. As long as people from that team are here, we have Championship culture through them.
That's precisely why what we are experiencing now is so frustrating. We deserve better than this.
Yeah man, should've "tanked for Wemby". If only every other team had thought of the same thing, so easy!
And shame on Indy, Washington, Orlando, Charlotte, Detroit, Dallas, Utah, Portland, Houston for not tanking hard enough despite missing the playoffs!
It is funny, because last year there was only one team below 20 wins in the NBA (Detroit with 17) and the next worst teams had 22 wins (Spurs and Rockets), the fourth worst team had 27 wins. Everyone was talking about how it was league wide parity, a new NBA where there were no really bad teams.
This year there are currently 5 teams below 20 wins, 3 of which are virtually guaranteed to be below 20 by the end of the season (Pistons, Wizards, Spurs) and another team with a good chance to be (Hornets). And yet this is a season with no clear generational draft prospect like Wembanyama in 2023, in fact it's considered to be one of the weakest drafts in a decade. Why are there a bunch of horrible tanking teams this year, but weren't really any last year?