doclinkin wrote:Suck to get lucky. Or Build a Good Team. I feel like those are the choices in looking towards the future. Ted's 10 Point Plan, Sam Hinkie's 'Process' are both suck luck methods.
Vs a team like San Antonio who is always in the running, always has a good team, but without landing the next Big Timmy are never real contenders for a chip.
The draft order lotto reset adds some disincentive for the Suck2Luck method. Which means maybe it is time for us to lay out a plan of incremental improvement, and to get solid team with a unifying vision of how to get there and what that means.
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Problem is, in sucking lucky, odds are, we fail. Year after year. Odds are everyone does. While we stockpiled and kept high draft picks we were never lucky enough to suck into the game-changing keystone player in the right year. And to keep those high picks proved unaffordable long term. Seems like everyone has tired of that game. The roller coaster of streaks and failures based on over-playing injured stars, and hoping to get lucky. Maybe its time to recognize the probability that luck is not on your side, for any team, that even the Process that landed a squad multiple picks year after year has not resulted in a championship. Yes we want a chip, but is there a way to build instead a solid squad that is fun to watch, that gives good effort, and instead of trying to outsuck the sucky, we look for inefficiencies in the game and actually build a scouting department that is good at outguessing opponents later in the draft to land a Giannis or the like even with a later pick.
As a fan base are we willing to cheer for a team that may not win a championship if year after year they were able to give us Spurs level success? Effort. Good attitude. Smart play. Even if other hypertalents would transcend and beat us. Because a few of us on here could lay out a plan that would build a good team. Ideas on how to maximize efficiencies in our favor. Build a solid squad from bench to starters, even given a shortfall in cap while we survive the wreckage of 9 or so points of that Plan. I have ideas on how to do that, to build a hellofa Good team, but even in that I know the truth of the adage "Good is the enemy of Great".
I'd like to see peoples plans for both: how do we build a good team.
-Vs-
How do we build a champion contender?
Answering my own question here, I think with the flattened odds for Lotto chances it forces teams to rely on actual team-building principles. Which is, I suppose, as it should be. I have a few ideas towards this that will drop here in thumbnail form since I haven't had time to scribe the full manifesto. But. Here are the basics of what has been on my mind for a time.
Outside of top luck in the lotto: trade for extra picks in the late rounds. Trade down, insist on 2nd round picks in every trade you make, now and in the future. Value extra picks in the second round as much or more than higher picks in the first round.
PIF has been yapping this concept up and for those of us who watch the back end of the draft looking for falling stars and hidden gems it has haunted us for a while: Even professional scouts who make their livelihood by trying to guess the future and land productive players fail at selecting good players more often than they succeed. The top mega-talents have been identified since middle school, but others do fall. Every draft there are favorites of ours that drop past the first round and that show up on rosters later and forge productive careers. As many do as any first round selections past the top 3 in any given year. So in that respect you want more bites at the apple. More chances to bring a guy under your wing and see if you can retain him. With the Gilbert Arenas rule these guys are more likely to be retained at a reasonable price if they do pan out, and we have options like Eurostashing guys who may develop overseas if they are willing to tattoo their passports for a couple years before coming back. You get 15 players on your roster, fill the end of your bench not with has-been scrubs and veteran roster filler, but with promising talent. We now even get 2 two-way players who may find their way onto the team.
Build a gladiator school out of your G-League squad. Yes, by all means send down promising talent for seasoning, but rather than fill the entire squad with unpolished talent, draft for BBIQ all-stars even if they lack supernova upside. At this lower level you want to implement team play and squads that don't simply gun for stats to be noticed and picked up by other teams, but instead you want it to be a continuation of college, a place to learn fundamentals and skills and team play. Teams in this league are noted to be lax in defense. If your squad does play D you will win. Players who get dropped to this level will enjoy winning, and will pick up the habits of being surrounded by gutty hustlefxcks who are unselfish and play the right way. Winning at this level will make it hurt less to be sent back down. It is always fun to win. Fill the home arena however you can. Free tickets, bands before and after, free shuttles to the building from parking elsewhere. Make it fun to play here so the players miss the team atmosphere. Treat them as well as guys in the bigs so the drag of playing in I dunno Maine in February is not as draining. But mostly: commit to winning at this level, so players don't get used to selfish play as a means to get noticed. Then as the stigma of being sent 'down' erodes, use the team liberally. As often as the Players Association rules allow, cycle players between the two squads. Reward good play at the G-League with 10-day contracts up at the bigs. So even your NBA players will see a cycle of fresh scrappy hardnosed players coming in to scrap in practice and the try-hard mindset will circulate. Hell if the league allowed it I'd like to send veterans down to rehab during home games if they were coming back from a set-back and needed a few reps to get conditioning and rehab themselves. Sadly I don't think we are there yet.
Win or lose, develop your talent. In the Warriors era we aren't going to steal a ring unless we luck into a hypertalent. Nor were we in the LeBron era. Reserve a certain number of minutes per game to developing your talent. You pay the players, you bank on their development, you had hopes for them when you drafted them. PLAY them. Salt young players in a few minutes a game with your established talent. Not just a full-scrub bench-dump in blow-outs. But throughout the year play them a few minutes here and there with starters. Try them out in live fire real time. A few possessions a game. When playoffs roll around or in critical games you can rely more heavily on starters, but until then use your entire bench. You should never have a guy on the bench whose only job is cheerleading and towel waving. There are still too many back-to-back nights and meaningless games on the record to burn out your starters by leaning too heavily on them night in and night out with no relief. Use your bench.
The game has changed. Change with it. With the uptick in pace there are more possessions a game to play with. Experiment with that. One area that a few teams are sneakily emphasizing is rebounding. Especially second line rebounders. With the fetishization of three point gunning and small ball there are more rebounds to be had. We now see an average of over 30 shots a game taken from 3-land. But even good teams hit just over a third of those shots. That means 20 of them are misses and long bounces. To my way of thinking, if you are not the most efficient scoring team in the league (and only GSW and Houston can argue over that claim right now) , then you might as well emphasize snatching as many of those chances as you can, and prevent those efficient scorers from taking second chance shots. So. When drafting players or trading, if you have a choice between two guys, pick the guy who rebounds better in relation to other guys at that position. The basic BBIQ stat is defensive rebounding. Everybody knows the old guy at the gym who is a pain to play against not because he is more athletic but because he boxes out and grabs every rebound and his team wins all the time. Defensive rebounds and assists show you know where your team is and where their team is at the critical moment. It's a simple short hand for 'does this guy know what to do and and have a sense of the moment'. So in a choice between a PF and a 2-guard, if the PF is an average rebounder at his spot and the guard is a superior rebounder relative to other true guards, take the guard, even if naturally the PF has more actual rebounds.
Ditto assists relative to position. Especially in all players other than Point Guards. If your big can collect the rebound and fire it to the guard for a better shot, or pass out of the double-team as soon as they collapse on him, he will make the players around him better and the squad will buy in to team play. IT starts to change the culture and players enjoy helping each other out and moving the ball since they are going to get it back at some point.
My feeling is by building from the "G" up we can change the culture of the team. And even in an era where we can't expect to win a chip, even if the pieces aren't there and we have a cap issue with a damaged supermax star, we can still sneakily build a tough scrappy team that is fun to root for, and develop our own homegrown talent. If we have a foundation of a winning mentality then when we do land those underdeveloped talents we can help them grow the rest of the way by peer example. Hard work is a transferable trait when you are steeped in it. The military is is built on it, you never want to let your squad down, if every one else is working hard then so will you.
Just the skeleton of an idea, but it seems to me we can take advantage of the opportunity of lowered expectations to shake things up and change the culture and eventually the impression of players around the league. That this sis a squad that rewards success and is a good spot to land if you're a cat who is a lifer in this game and loves to play/compete.
