tamaraw08 wrote: Sorry man, you know I respect you but for every 1 OKC, there's like 4-5 bad teams still languishing in the bottom half in the league for the past 8-10 years now.
So your right that it's a crap shoot, and there is certainly some luck. What I think your overlooking here, is that there are 32 teams trying to win a title every year.....so yes....you can do it all correctly, and still lose out. There will be 4 or 5 teams that do it right, and never reach the top. The 00's Suns were a great team, the 90's Jazz, the 90's Blazers. You can site example of teams building their squads in all sorts of ways that never made it (Harden Rockets, Lob-City, 00's Nuggets) and there are also a million teams that hung around, and hung around, and managed one...something that is nice, but I thing we agree we're hoping for more than 1 out of an era.
So the odds are against you to begin with no matter what you do. So just because you don't reach the top....it doesn't mean it wasn't the right plan of attack. Also you speak to OKC's "Luck" with SGA....how about Philly's "unluck" with a constantly injured Embiid? Or the Pelicans "unluck" drafting a guy who clearly doesn't care about the game...but saw a giant paycheck. Or what about the Clippers "unluck" being good right along the Warriors? The Clippers and Sixers were quite good in their perspective windows....but it's the game. Alot of good teams never got there thanks to guys like Kobe, Duncan, Jordan, Shaq, Curry and Lebron. I know those teams are "failures" on Planet Nike...I guess there are alot of failures in the world then.
I don't have a problem signing a star. But we've dug ourselves a massive hole mortgaging our future. Even once Lebron does leave....your only gonna get so far with his salary freed up. We're over the cap to start with...and $50 mil ain't gonna come close to plugging all the holes we have (and of course replacing Lebron). And when any opportunity does come up....we can't move on it.
I mean.....I admit rebuilding will be hard now. We have so many picks spoken for, that even getting 4 FRP's and 4 2nds for Luka would only get us back near square one. I honestly don't know what Luka will do. The Lakers have a history of pulling snakes out their arse like nobody else. So we have some cache in that dept. But we are so, so, so, far from a title.
And I guess what annoys me is watching us still throwing picks at the wall in efforts to desperately contend...when the truth is we're not a contender. We're not close. So we need to stop. We aren't in a "window". We need to start paying off our "debt" get back to zero. If that means losing Luka, then so be it. Cause we're not gonna go get 2-3 pieces and be in contention again. We need a whole new team. And that's gonna take time.