Billl wrote:Yeah, we had plenty of chances to get talent at our pick, but we really whiffed over and over. Of course, we compounded it by overpaying for marginal vets. We've had enough picks and enough chances at cap space that we should be in a better position that we are right now.
Just a list of guys taken after us in the draft in that 10 year period. These are for the most part starter level guys at the very least, not all are all stars. I've left out second rounders and late first rounders from this list. So no Jimmy Butler or Draymond Green on this list. I also didn't bother to look at Andre Drummond's year since we got a quality player with that pick.
Jrue Holiday
Jeff Teague
Darren Collison
Gordon Hayward
Paul George
Kemba Walker
Klay Thompson
Steven Adams
Kawhi Leonard
CJ McCollum
Giannis Antetekounpo
Myles Turner
Devin Booker
Donovan Mitchell
Tobias Harris
Nikola Mirotic
All of these are guys that would have helped us out a lot more than the guys we picked that year. All of them fit really well with the modern NBA, something you really can't say for most of the guys we currently have as our core team. Some of the picks are picks you can defend based on logic or conventional wisdom at the time, but the bottom line is that some teams make it work and some teams don't. We haven't.
Nobody is saying we should have gotten one of these guys every single year- no team does that. Any of these draft choices can be excused in a vacuum, but we've got a patter that can't be defended. But we should have at least managed 2 or 3 of them in the last 10 years, and if we had we'd likely be in a very different situation.
The takeaway? Yeah, we haven't had a great shot at drafting a generational talent. But there's no reason why smart drafting and better player development couldn't have gotten us out of this predicament without necessarily tanking. I'm not saying there's no merit to that type of thinking, I think there is, but success WAS possible even with a refusal to tank. We've just sucked at it.
