Leslie Forman wrote:Wingy wrote:How is highlighting the reality of our franchise's ownership (and most ownerships) moving the goal posts? That's honestly not clicking with me....not trying to be disingenuous.
No other major team sport is comparable to basketball, and I'm sure you know why. What other basketball team has undertaken such a route to actively tank again after acquiring a solid all star, and a previous solid period of tanking?
Because you're bringing up some new super specific criteria that isn't even technically possible to meet. The Bulls tanked for like a grand total of two months three years ago.
My point is simply that everything you said that is supposedly so utterly impossible here because the ownership is hell bent on not ever doing it is exactly the same thing someone could have said about Orlando and their ownership. In fact it's exactly what Orlando fans have been complaining about for a long while and assumed wasn't going to happen. And yet, for them, it just did.
It's not that specific. It's directly related to your preferred direction. You're advocating for what amounts to consecutive resets without seeing any modicum of "success" (i.e. - playoffs) in between. That's not what Orlando pulled the trigger on here. They got to the point of some playoff series, and had some young guys that gave them hope they could keep ascending. They've stalled out since those guys have disappointed and/or are always injured, and now they are hitting the reset button.
We didn't have that pause giving our latest all star a chance to go anywhere (until now). Orlando is not a precedent for our current situation, and your preferred plan.
Wingy wrote:If it were purely a conceptual exercise where it was done apart from the business, you'd see it more often. The reality of the business, ownership, sponsorship, and fan attention span doesn't really allow this.
Leslie Forman wrote:None of us know what is happening at that level in this franchise. The notion that the ownership is some completely unmovable object that will never deviate is fundamentally wrong when we simply see what happened last summer. We here were all assuming the old regime had pope jobs and would never leave and yet, here's some Lithuanian guy who has never worked for Reinsdorf in his life before running the team. I just gave you an example of this franchise's very owner saying "F the playoffs" and throwing in the towel even when he was already in deep sh*t with his fanbase, and that's for the sport he actually cares about.
I might hate Reinsdorf and his stupid stadium we are still all paying for, but even I will admit that he has zigged when we were expecting him to zag before. He is not always the predictable old coot we think he is.
If your point is that it's not gonna happen so I should just shut up and take the red pill, well what's the fun in that.
But they are relatively predictable. The only reason they changed course was because of the bottom line. Attendance dropping, ratings sinking, increased national ridicule. They acted, and changed course when new information told them profitability was damaged. Prioritizing revenue has always been this ownership's m.o. Another tear down is not going to heal the Bulls profitability, and if you think the ownership group would be fine with that...I don't know what group you've been watching all these years.
The baseball example doesn't make sense given the nature of the sports. A baseball MVP only gets 4-5 chances to even impact a game offensively. A Cy Young winner only plays every 5 games. Given how dominant individuals are in the game of basketball, there's just not a ton of precedent for doing what you're talking about in the context of...basketball. Much less doing that twice in a row.
"so I should just shut up and take the red pill"
...nah, never. There's no point of this board if we can't discuss ideas. Honestly, I've been in your camp more than not on this type of thing. I'm just coming around more to the fact that discussing the dream to death isn't going to change our actual circumstances.