nate33 wrote:If I were running the team and had a goal to achieve the maximum number of wins in 2011/12 without sacrificing any young assets, I'd probably sign Tayshaun Prince to start at SF and add whoever I could sign among M.Gasol, Al Horford, Kendrick Perkins or Joel Pryzbilla to play center. (I'd probably end up with Pryzbilla since those other guys are RFA's or would rather play somewhere else.) Take our current team, replace Howard with Prince, replace Armstrong with Pryzbilla, and add another year of seasoning; and they would probably win 45-50 games in 2011/12.
That said, I don't think these types of acquisitions are in the cards. Ted Leonsis has repeatedly stated that he will patiently build through the draft. He's not trying to win 45 games in 2011/12, he's trying to win a championship in 2014 or so.
It could be that "your way" becomes the actual path despite the Ted Commandments.
Ted's articulated what he wants to do, but he can't alter the workings of the CBA, so if he really is planning to keep Gil long term, he's got to finagle opportunity where it actually exists, with that being more profound than his native druthers.
I'm not seeing that much incentive towards patience if we're somewhere in the 40 win range come the 2012 season and Blatche and McGee are looking at sizable extensions. Hard to leverage a real draft-centric build towards a champagne-ship in that situation as I don't know how you work a jump in there other than drafting a Ginobli late.
And unless we pull out some real tricks in the 2012 offseason dealing with the timing on those perspective extensions, we're pretty likely to just have either the summer of 2011 or the post lockout signing period thereafter to make something big happen. I presume we could work a BOYD trade before the next draft even with a lockout (not sure how that works logistics-wise), but that's a bit tough to see as an impact move if that's truely the last real bubble of "bigger than the MLE" cap-space. Some might say we can just outright buy a volume of late picks and go scatter-shot with volume fire, but it seems there's always eight teams that want to drop straight cash on a pick and one or two actually pull it off.
As currently constructed, I see the pure rebuilding path as being not so compelling. Of course I like it in theory, but I don't see it converge with our roster and salary situation.