gmoney411 wrote:HotelVitale wrote:K_chile22 wrote:They also didn't impact long term books too much. FVV is expiring after next year and Jock+Jeff are non guaranteed every year so they can get to max space if they need to in 2025 easily. Dillon deal seemed questionable at the time but think they could easily find someone to give up something for him now. They had a very good off-season between those guys, Ime and Amen+Cam
Yeah, think it was a good gamble. Even at worst--if FVV and Brooks failed to gel or were butting heads with Ime or the young guys--they could still move either or both for at least neutral value and go forward with a more regular rebuild year. There wasn't a lot to lose, esp in a year in which moving down like 8 draft slots matters so little.
I just don't like the idea floating around realgm that lots of teams can and will now do the same thing. I guess some impatient owners might want to use that as an example for accelerating rebuilds, but it'd be a bad idea/gamble for most teams. If you don't already have a big stash of high-level prospects, or don't have ways of refreshing them, it's usually gonna be a pretty bad strategy (or at least an unnecessarily risky one).
I actually think it's a good strategy that more teams should use. Two of the best teams in the league right now are the Celtics and Thunder and I'd argue that their young guys development was speeded up by playing with vets and learning how to win. Teams play bad basketball for too long and end up wasting young talent but allowing them to develop poor habits. Jalen Green was close to being too far gone but thankfully Ime, FVV, and Brooks came along the year.
I get why people say stuff like this but the arguments for it usually don't work out well, always ends up seeming like something some people just really like to believe. In this case your evidence is a few young players developing well on good teams (Tatum/Brown, Chet/J Dub) but then you have to set aside the hundreds of prospects who didn't end up succeeding much while on decent or good teams. Also not sure why FVV and Brooks get 100% credit for one great three-week stretch that Green's had, while the rest of his season (which was extremely disappointing) wasn't on them; even if he keeps this up, why wouldn't he like many many other top prospects have made a leap on his own in his 3rd year? Given that the vast majority of high-level prospects who succeed do so or show signs while still on bad/rebuilding teams. Hard not to see that as simple confirmation bias of an idea that you already want to believe.
Also why are we assuming players across the board developing 'bad habits' on teams that win like 25 games instead of 35? That seems like an idea people get into their heads about 'losers' and 'winners' but it seems like at best this is more a question of coaching and culture more than anything else. There are plenty of bad cultures on treadmill teams and plenty of good coaching/cultures on sort of tank-y teams, and again the outcomes don't tend to suggest that being on a decent team is better for development. If you look at the Process (which I sat through the entirety of), the Sixers ended up with a couple huge successes and some major busts at the top of the draft, and they also had a ton of 2nd rounders and undrafted guys wash out but also ended up with some huge successes. Did Jerami Grant, Robert Covington, TJ McConnell, etc vastly outperform their draft/undrafted spots because being on a bad team allowed them space to develop, or did the Sixers have just enough 'culture' to allow that to happen, or would those players have really been successful no matter where they got opportunities? I don't know for sure, but it's enough to cast some doubt on the idea that players will develop significantly better on decent teams--let alone that this bump is worth what you're losing in cap space, draft picks, etc.
To be clear, I do think it helps to have simple roles for players on solid teams--in my years of following the draft, that seems like the best recipe for over-performing draft picks--but even then the bump is pretty modest and it definitely won't make okay prospects into boom picks.