The Consiglieri wrote:payitforward wrote:Well... we can't count Deni on the one hand & regard ourselves as in year 1 of a rebuild on the other hand!
In fact, Tommy was rebuilding. After all, just 16 months after he took over, Beal, Bryant & Brown were the only players who remained from the team he'd inherited, & Brown was about to be traded.
Obviously, he was setting off in an entirely new direction. You don't want to call it "rebuilding," fine... but that's still what it was.
Tommy's only problem was that he convinced himself that he could get good again "on the fly," by way of trades -- & as we all know, you do have to give him credit for a bunch of extraordinary trade moves!
If he'd drafted well, we'd have the best young team in the league! Pick, say, 10 guys from this list: Brandon Clarke, Keldon Johnson, Cody Martin, Caleb Martin, Terance Mann, Tyrese Halliburton, Desmond Bane, Xavier Tillman, Kmart Jr., Sengun or Trey Murphy, Isaiah Jackson, Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, Herb Jones, Ayo Dusunmu, Charles Bassey, Aaron Wiggins, Jericho Sims, Tari Eason, & Jabari Walker....
So if he consistently managed to to avoid the busts, and drafted a bunch of solid complimentary players, and landed the guy everyone on this board would have picked except for possibly me (I was fine with Deni over Halliburton, clearly wrong in retrospect and I'd say at the time too, otoh, pretty much everyone had Deni ahead of Haliburton back then in basketball media, which was pretty much why I was fine w/either guy, just not someone else) we would be fine and he'd have a job? Well, #1 there's no way he's gonna manage to extract the handful of hits from those four or five classes and habitually always avoid the busts. It just strikes me as crazy to imagine so. To miss so consistently is pretty bad too, although he did manage to avoid some of the biggest busts, his players are players after all, but the key point is, even if you hit on a bunch of role players, and 1 sort of near star in Haliburton, that team isn't suddenly great.
I remain 1000% convinced that no matter what he did in the draft, if he didn't maximize the return on the few assets we had of huge value, like Beal in particular, all the complimentary players imaginable wasn't going to make a difference. The key flaw was always the foundational principle of his whole enterprise: that you could build a winner around Beal in the first place, and that keeping Beal made sense. It was ALWAYS ludicrous, and the way it was handled was the worst humanly possible, the only door open which guaranteed the least value return possible, and he picked THAT doorknob, of all the options available. That's why he's gone. The draft is just the whip cream and the cherry on top of the overall foundational flaw of teambuilding philosophy and asset management in general.
I liked the pick of Deni too, btw!
Halliburton is not a "sort of near star." I won't be surprised if he wins MVP one or more years of his career. He is incredibly good.
He did get top value for Wall, btw. But, of course, the biggest mistake was failing to trade Beal as soon as he got the job. No disagreement about that.
