badinage wrote:The worst thing you can say about the trade is:
Winger is so focused on the future that he doesn’t care about the present. The present is about the future. Only the future. It’s about — I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna say it, I’m gonna swallow that goddxmn pill — “asset acquisition.” (Whoo. Bitter.) We’re not a team right now. We’re a box of toys, old toys, and from different kids. And Winger and maybe Dawkins are rotating toys in and shipping toys out.
There’s no identity. No culture. No nothing.
They’re not trying to put together a team right now. They *have* a team, but that’s only because they’re obliged to. They’re not thinking about the fact that they had a pretty good center tandem. At the moment, and for the next several years, all they care about is making moves *now* to be able to make moves *later*. All they care about is later.
And the risk is great: what’s going to keep Bilal and Deni (and whoever else comes along that’s good and youth) engaged, game after game? How do they not accept losing as okay?
Winger has defenders, lots of them, because he’s got a plan and it’s ambitious. And because others have done it, and hit. (Of course, many more have done it, and not hit. And not hit badly.)
But it makes following the team moot. There’s nothing to see — only the draft and free agency and the trade deadline. And then, also, checking in to see the new picks and realizing that it’s gonna be years, and patience is imperative, blah blah blah. This is your fandom for at least the next two years. The year after that maybe there is the semblance of a team. Maybe. But not a good team, unless we get stupendously lucky.
I agree 1000% with this. This is what I think is happening. I was listening to the Bleave the Wizards podcast or whatever its called last night and you can hear this in prior episodes too and it does make me wonder what they're thinking. Jahidi is talking about what Gafford brings in rim protection, what he offers and this and that, and they're discussing the efficacy of the carcas they brought in and whether they made the Center position worse from the trade and all I can think is:
You guys do get that they don't care about ANY OF THAT right now, right? Not a whit. That's the coaches problem to turn whatever detritus they've acquired into workable semi-solutions that will fail in as many games as possible. That's the reality.
They aren't trying to win, at all, they are trying to maximize the paltry assets we actually have so we're potentially good 3-4 years from now or could be good anyway.
You are right, will they lose Deni or Bilal to trade demands etc after playing for a dumpster fire their entire careers through the '25-'26 season? Maybe. But there is no choice here. The roster itself is bottom 2 in the league and maybe the worst. There is literally nothing they can do in the short term to make it top 15 in the league in the next 2.5 seasons, period. So really should you pour assets in to raise the ceiling from a 10-15 win team in this year to a 25-35 win team next year? Why? The ceiling then in four years is 40-42 wins. It's utterly pointless.
You're right there's a risk that this doesn't work, but is the other method working? I don't view 1980-2022 to be an era where things periodically worked. It was the ultimate disaster in basketball. Never good enough to matter, rarely bad enough to move the needle. We were perpetually 16th-23rd best in the league, so we were perpetually stuck between a 25-40 win team for Forty freaking years. Why is it a risk to potentially instead try to tank?
I can't see why its a problem. If we lose Deni, well, he's a complimentary player, he isn't a catalyst, if we have to lose him, oh well, if we lose Bilal it will be worse, but it's still survivable. Bilal is a 2nd or 3rd piece on a playoff team, he isn't a guy who can do it alone. He needs a lot of help, so even losing him is survivable. What we can't do is try to push the ceiling up for any reason other than acquiring trade assets to flip into bullets for the draft or trades for prospects.
Anyway, we'll see how this goes, I expect us to bottom out this year and into next, and then if we can get usable assets from the '24 draft (I'm skeptical at anymore than complimentary 4th or 5th pieces), and trading Kuz, we should be able to potentially do damage with the '25 and '26 classes. My only fear is that we actually build a 30 game winner by '25-'26, which would suck, we still need to be 15-25 bad in '25-'26 unless we jump up to the top of the lottery by some miracle.
