pogiro wrote:WeAreVenom wrote:thelead wrote:Looking at all the young faces on that team, I wish we had a great core of young players and not overpaid and under motivated vets.
I know, I'm so damn jealous.
They are what we could've been had we been smarter.
I wonder, some of you may attack me for this but, if we had cleared enough cap in 2010, I wonder if Lebron would've came here?
Instant dynasty, imo.
It's not about free agency. It's the draft. The Thunder were horrible, they drafted Durant #2 overall. They stayed horrible, they drafted Westbrook @ 4 & Ibaka @ 24 the year after. Still bad, Harden at pick 3 the year after.
For us, we sort of got too good too fast. The summer we drafted Dwight, we also added Jameer and Hedo. We went from #1 pick to #11. Imagine if we still had a top 5 pick like the Thunder. That's the year Deron Williams and Chris Paul. And then if we still were bad like the Thunder? Andrea Bargnani, Lamarcus Aldridge, Brandon Roy.
Now of course you have to avoid the busts (Morrison, Martel Webster, Marvin Williams) when picking that high. But we just got too good too fast and it put us out of position to build properly. And that made us go to quick fixes, overspending, using max MLE's, LLE's, always over the cap, trading draft picks, etc... I always thought Otis wasn't bad at drafting quality players, but we never had high picks again after Dwight.
And it's also about letting them grow together. We had a ton of young talent at some point. We had Dwight, Jameer, Darko, Ariza, and then add a not so old Hedo. I thought that was a solid core to build on. And as I was researching, I forgot we drafted Varejao the same year as Dwight. I don't understand why we traded him. I remember people going on about him being a big steal getting him as late as we did.
Part of me was excited when it seemed Dwight was definitely gone. Because then we could build properly. But the decisions were made and there's no huge splash we can make in the draft anymore while Dwight is here. The only way I see that happening is if Jameer opts out, we stick with Duhon, we tank. Get high pick next year, Dwight resigns (which I don't see him doing in that scenario...), we get maybe a Josh Smith, and another max FA possibly.
this is a great post and my thoughts exactly as I went to bed last night. Instead of building with vets after we drafted Dwight, we could've stayed a crappy team to get another high lotto pick, possibly DWill or CP3. that combo would've had us great in no time and for a long time with cap to help grow. Everything is hindsight, but OKC has layed out the blueprint to build through the draft. You just have to get lucky and pick the right players.
... his shot looks fixable... I hope
