Knightro wrote:It’s more like “we’re ultimately not going to win *enough* with the veterans we have to justify keeping them, but those veterans are also playing ahead of the young guys who probably aren’t ready or going to be ready to fill their shoes largely because they’re not playing. So there’s gonna be difficult decisions to be made in the near future that we don’t trust the front office to make.”
If the Magic win 45 games this year, I don’t see a realistic path to 50+ next year outside of one of Paolo or Franz leveling up to the point where their quality of teammate matters less and less. And that seems like such a passive way to approaching things.
This is probably the least worrying thing to me tbh - the path seems REALLY obvious: Internal improvement, no major injuries, signing or trading for an impact guard, letting some of our meh vets go and replacing them with Jett/AB, or even including one of them in a trade package if it makes sense, maybe making a tough decision with Cole or WCJ too.
The CONFIDENCE in our FO to do this is something everybody should fairly question, the means to get there feels very much attainable and they've positioned themselves in a spot to do so - waiting for them to "stick the landing" of this next part is going to be what's up for debate and challenged, no argument from me there, but major missteps because of wrong actions like trading Tobias for peanuts, the Oladipo/Sabonis trade, bad drafting decisions, is quite a bit different from hitting on very important draft picks and not upgrading worse vets with slightly better vets. Inaction, in this current season, is far from the worst outcome.. but it can be just as bad as the wrong actions if we're doing it the next season(s) too.
The hardest thing in the NBA is probably having a sustained 50+ win team so I don't think us as posters should be putting the cart before the horse as much as we do when it comes to assumptions. In fact, playing more vets and playing better in the short-term breeds more fans clamoring for action and improvement. If this was another year to play the kids, it can give them the easiest excuse to continue kicking the can down the road.
This sort of reminds me of that 2006-2007 Magic team before Rashard was signed, 40 win team (we're probably a bit better), but let's be real, we were only ever going as far as Dwight improved while the rest of the guys played their part. Getting the "right" guys over the next 3-4 seasons were important, but it's like people tripping out about Bogans or Dooling or something when there's pretty simple answers in what we need to do to get better.
