SkyBill40 wrote:ESPN released this story today outlining the worst moves of all 30 NBA franchises dating back to 2020. You can read the story here:
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45790173/all-30-nba-teams-roster-mistakes-2020There's clearly been some really brain dead decisions made over the past five years, but are these really the worst moves of each franchise in that period? What say you, NBA fan? Agree or disagree?
So, my immediate hang-up here is what they selected for the Lakers:
14. Los Angeles Lakers
Biggest mistake: Losing 3-and-D players from their championship team (2020 and 2021)
I wouldn't necessarily be bothered if they named this the mistake and placed it super-high on the list, but the fact they are putting it at 14 drastically misses the mark.
The reality is that the loss of these players was about a specific strategy of building a super-team by acquiring Russell Westbrook, that off-season basically then killed any chance the Lakers had as a contender again in the LeBron-AD era. Given that there's really good reason to believe that the (healthy) '19-20 Lakers were the best team of both the '19-20 & '20-21 season, for them to have an off-season where they decided to go "all in" on contending but instead drop them from best-healthy-team to non-contenders-ever-again, this is something that should be very high on the list.
Other thoughts:
1. The Luka trade at #1 makes total sense from a "bad decision making" perspective, though the reality is that their headline of "biggest mistakes" is iffy. The reality is that the Mavs may well end up better in the long-term because of the combination of the move and the dumb luck of winning the Cooper Flagg lottery.
(The flip side of course, if we began in 2019, is the the George-SGA trade, which I still think was understandable decision making from the Clipper FO given their financial considerations at the time, but basketball-wise, the fact that the Thunder may be won the trade by a GOAT degree, means that it can be viewed as an incredibly bad move in retrospect. There were reasons to object to it at the time too, but none of us knew that SGA would become what he has.)
2. The fact they are combining KD & Beal together (at #2) for the Suns feels like a cheat to me in part because they happened in what I would consider 2 different seasons. However, they were driven by the same New Owner Syndrome guy in Ishbia within 5 months of becoming owner definitely make sense if we're just talking about a question of which franchise's ownership was most damaging during the time frame.
When we consider that between Feb. 2023 and the 2024 off-season, the Suns had not only basically blown up the promising supporting cast near Booker's age that was working so well, but fired not 1, but 2 coaches, and then replaced the 2nd coach (Vogel) with another coach (Bud) with a very similar player reputation (serious, defense-oriented, a step slow on current offensive strategy but proven champion... white guy who didn't play in the NBA), what we clearly see is a front office (clearly driven by the ownership) is looking to make the biggest move they can at any given moment with the hope that the next one will make the Sun team better than it was in '20-21 & '21-22, only to make the team an extremely expensive and unhappy lottery team without any real hope for continuing around Booker, even as they continue in 2025 to insist that Booker is their guy for life.
I have a particular frustration for what Ishbia has done to the Suns, and were I looking to give advice to new owners, I'd tell them to look at Ishbia and make sure you don't do what he's done.
(Bizarre, to me, that I'm saying all this about the guy who came after Sarver as owner given that Sarver was really, really not good. I personally like Ishbia's enthusiasm, and think that bodes better for the long-term than what Sarver brought to the table as a cheap non-basketball man who also ruined a great situation when he took over basketball leadership of the team 20 years ago, but the speed at which Ishbia brought all this crashing down has to be noted.)
3. #3 for the Bucks trading for Lillard is I think too high here, but it's absolutely worth exploring what went wrong in Milwaukee, and this move is the logical place to focus.
So let's keep in mind that win the Bucks won the title, their 5 main playoff players had the following ages:
26 - Giannis
29 - Middleton
30 - Jrue
32 - Brook
35 - PJ Tucker
So, when you're franchise player is more than half a decade younger than the average of his core supporting cast, you have to expect that this is going to start crumbling, you're going to have to make some moves to get a core cast that is more in line with your franchise player's age, and there's a severe risk that you're not going to be able to re-capture the magic easily.
You compound that with Middleton's career going off the rails with injury, and this was actually a high degree of difficulty issue.
This then to say, I don't see anything the Bucks did after the chip that "ruined a dynasty". I just see fail attempts to keep the ship afloat, and I also recognize that even though such attempts failed, it absolutely appears that the Bucks made their riskier moves at times where Giannis was pushing for some kind of front office action. We should also note that the first time the Bucks operated under this pressure, they acquired Jrue, who wasn't simply essential to the chip that next season, but whose loss in the Lillard trade along with where he ended up (Boston) makes that trade sting like salt in a wound.
But what really bothers me most about the move is the age factor:
Dame was the same age as Jrue, on a team whose 4 key players were still 4 of the 5 guys on that list above (only PJ was gone). So at a time when you're going to be paying and playing a 35 year old Brook to be a starter because you still haven't made the move to get younger, and your other big assets (Middleton) is having debilitating injury, you trade your 2nd best player, and you don't get younger? Like, even if the on-court miraculously worked as they hoped in 2023, they'd still probably be in big trouble by now. It just absolutely screams of short-term thinking induced by pressure/panic, and it's not the wise way to run a franchise.
(Note: While I don't think it's going to make the Bucks contenders again now, a move like replacing the much older Brook for the prime-age Myles Turner is exactly the kind of healthy move I'd have been going for. Regardless of how well Myles works in Milwaukee, this is the sort of decision making that I look for to identify some common sense long-term thinking intermixed with the apparent panic events, making the Bucks front office more of a mixed bag rather than being in that lower tier of front offices that just seem to be eternally stepping on rakes.)
4. Singling out the trade for Harden by the Nets (at #4) is weird to me. It's absolutely a key step in the slow motion car crash that was the KD-Kyrie Net tire fire, but basketball-wise it was their best move, and if they had refused to try to get Harden, it would have only brought conflict with KD & Kyrie sooner.
5. At, and at #5 we get to the Kings. Here we go.
Now again, this whole thing where they are combining events is problematic, and in this case the causal link is pretty indirect, even if we can identify a throughline of decision making that continues to be worst-in-league levels as a matter of course since 2014 with the arrival of new owner Vivek. It now seems clear that Vivek is in the class of owner who isn't simply a "new owner syndrome" guy, but a guy who is just inherently overconfident in his own understanding of things outside of his original field of expertise who is going to keep messing things up until he either agrees to be truly hands off, or he sells the team.
The Haliburton trade is to me a strong candidate as possibly the most damaging to the franchise brand of any of the moves we've seen in recent years now that the Mavs fluked into Flagg after Luka. The Kings prior to Haliburton had already developed a reputation as a place players wanted to avoid for reasons beyond its small market existence. Then they got Haliburton who just made such a point of emphasizing how happy he was in Sacramento, and then when he became seen across the the NBA as their best asset, they trade him. While the brand risks would be muted if the Kings had gone on to some kind of Adelman-level success, you have to be thinking about the entirety of the blowback if it doesn't work, and the loyal guy you gave up leaps forward in the new place.
An example of that blowback? Well, the guy they chose to build around instead of Haliburton was Fox, who would force his way out two and a fraction seasons later after the franchise fired his coach (Brown) and implied he'd pushed for it. Fox might have been encouraged when the Kings were willing to trade Haliburton to better build around him, but it surely didn't escape his notice at the time that the King organization didn't seem to have or value loyalty, and so when they did anything that made him think the knives were out for him next, he bucked, and the Kings now have a team that's essentially the hand-me-down version of a Chicago Bull team that was itself treadmill at best.
really hard to argue against. I still remember that draft night, wanting Sengun and thinking FOR SURE the Spurs would pick him when he fell to 12 only for them to announce...Josh Primo, much to everyone's confusion. Winning the 2023 lottery really helped sweep that under the rug but man, what an AWFUL pick by the Spurs. Worst I can think of in my 25+ years of watching them