Post#1686 » by mhd » Mon Sep 19, 2022 6:04 pm
Josh Robbins (from the Athletic) wrote a terrific piece on the hamster wheel of mediocrity that Turd mandates in a mailbag piece:
"The answer has many layers, but the most basic answer can be summed up this way: Ted Leonsis.
“We will never, ever tank,” Leonsis told reporters nearly four years ago during a team trip to London.
A team can undertake several kinds of rebuilds, but you mentioned the Baltimore Orioles. It’s fair to say that the Orioles went with the most drastic kind of rebuild: a total teardown. Just how ruthlessly did Elias pursue his plan? Put it this way: Baltimore lost 115, 108 and 110 in their first three 162-game seasons with Elias at the helm. And as you note, even this year, with the Birds challenging for a wild card berth, Elias still dealt Trey Mancini and the team’s lone All-Star, Jorge López, at the trade deadline. Those trades exhibited a ruthless devotion to the Orioles’ long-term plan.
As others have written, Leonsis and the Wizards likely made a mistake by not trading Bradley Beal a couple of years ago, when Beal’s value was at its highest and the team could have secured the best possible return.
But that ship had sailed this past season, with Beal on the cusp of unrestricted free agency.
Let’s also get one thing straight: Going with a complete teardown and gunning for the No. 1 overall pick in multiple drafts would have been a decision that needed to be OK’d by Leonsis himself. Tommy Sheppard would have had to gain permission from Leonsis, and I suspect Sheppard’s counterparts with the NBA’s 29 other teams would have had to seek their franchises’ owners’ go-ahead, too, before pursuing the same strategy with their teams.
The final decision should indeed rest with a team’s owner, because the decision to tank almost always carries significant business consequences, sometimes long-term consequences. Two months ago, the highly respected baseball writer Richard Justice said on The Tony Kornheiser Show that the Houston Astros’ attendance still hasn’t recovered completely from the team’s decision to bottom out during the early 2010s — even though the Astros went on to win the World Series in 2017! Houston drew over 3 million fans during the 2006 and 2007 seasons, even though Minute Maid Park wasn’t in its first or second season, and hasn’t broken three million since then.
So while Leonsis may be missing the big picture as it relates to giving the Wizards their best chance to win a championship, he would be well within his rights to want to avoid a total cratering in attendance and interest in the short term, if that’s his reasoning. I’ve seen this occur firsthand with the Orlando Magic, who arguably have lost a generation of fans following their decision to tank after they acceded to Dwight Howard’s trade demand in 2012
(By the way, Leonsis deserves the opportunity to explain his point of view, but it shouldn’t occur only with a team-owned enterprise. I’ve put in requests to interview Leonsis since I started on this beat, and the most recent request still has not been answered by his chief spokesperson.)
The Wizards did attempt to build from the ground up early in Leonsis’ tenure as the franchise’s majority owner, but even though the team drafted John Wall first overall in 2010 and Beal third in 2012, it never advanced beyond the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Which brings me to my next point: A good number of full rebuilds never result in even reaching a conference finals series. Just because a team bottoms out does not mean they are guaranteed to succeed, especially these days in a world with flattened-out lottery odds.
One of the reasons the 2022-23 NBA season will be fascinating is the relatively large number of teams that appear to want to compete for the best possible lottery odds, all in an effort to draft Victor Wembanyama first (or possibly Scoot Henderson second). Those teams include Detroit, Houston, Indiana, Oklahoma City, Orlando, San Antonio and Utah. Just imagine the amount of ugly basketball and unseemly posturing that will be required to out-tank fellow tankers in the Wembanyama chase. Securing the best lottery odds in 2023 will require sacrifices similar to the ones Mike Elias engineered for the Orioles.
You can disagree with Leonsis’ directive not to tank, but he can argue that he doesn’t want to subject Wizards fans to multiple 20-win seasons.
My last point is perhaps the most important one: Teams can draft franchise-changing talents in the middle of the first round, and sometimes later. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Devin Booker, Kawhi Leonard, Domantas Sabonis, Klay Thompson, Bam Adebayo and Donovan Mitchell all were drafted in the 10-15 range. Rudy Gobert went 27th in 2013. Nikola Jokić? Forty-first in 2014.
So the path the Wizards have chosen can yield major success.
But it can also produce year after year of mediocrity. That’s the danger they’re in now, and it’s up to them to prove the naysayers wrong — or, as New York Jets coach Robert Saleh has said, “taking receipts.”"
Turd is a coward. Never answers any tough questions. Hasn't given a real interview in over a decade.
