Badonkadonk wrote:ciueli wrote:I don't know who really deserves the blame for this season, but ultimately the buck has to stop with Masai because he his the guy in charge. And this season was an unmitigated failure. Baynes was paid almost $7M, for the same money we could have signed Dwight Howard and Bobby Portis, both have been solid options at C for their respective teams.
If you would have told me before the season started, with the cloud of Covid hanging over it, the condensed schedule, all road games etc, that the Raps were just going to chill and see if the could settle into a lottery pick with more-or-less the same core that won 74% of its games in 2020... then I'd have been completely on board.
I think we're going to look back at what ultimately was a throwaway season as nothing but fruitful and opportunistic.
As for the impact of a Dwight Howard (absolute trash) or Bobby Portis (he has a 2nd year player option; Raps were swinging for the fences with Giannis), please... they are not remotely close to the kind of players that would have transformed the team into one that makes a deep playoff run.
We'll see how it plays out. I don't think there's going to be much "blame" thrown around after the Raps make their draft selection on July 29th.
This is revisionist history peddled by various members of this board.
You hit the nail on the head: the goal at the start of the season was to be in position to sign Giannis or another major free agent in the summer.
We went into this season looking to be competitive in order to achieve this goal. We let Ibaka walk and brought in two replacements (Baynes and Len) that we thought could help us comfortably make the playoffs.
There would’ve been little or no reason for a star to join us in the summer after the season we just had.
Early in the season it became apparent we we weren’t good enough. A 500 record was enough for 4th at the ASG break but would’ve had us in the play in if we maintained that clip until the end of this season.
The awful season we had is in large part to Masai putting a mediocre team together. Yes, Tampa and our COVID outbreak sucked the wind out of our sails but at the end of the day the personnel decisions Masai made resulted in a mediocre product on the court.
Anyways, Masai has earned the right to make mistakes and have mediocre seasons. I’m excited about him hopefully coming back and fixing the team.