tsherkin wrote:Scase wrote:Being negative about the outlook of the team doesn't impact the rest of my life, it's called compartmentalization lol. I had things to be positive about the team over the last couple of years, but as they continue to not pan out, and we continue to make stupid moves why should I manufacture optimism for something that doesn't deserve it?
Then don't. But manufacturing TOO much negativity, as in it being basically all you do, is
technically against board policy these past dozen years. It's something to keep in mind.
I still think GD has room to get better, JKW seems interesting, and I still have hope for Scottie to be a defensive stalwart. But the team has nothing that screams any sort of potential to even be a deep playoff team. And I don't mean that in the sense of this exact roster, but the possible projections of the players are all kinda "meh". No one has any real upside beyond like a solid to good starter.
Having a healthy team will result in a better season for sure, but it's not some panacea, nor is health something intrinsic to our team.
GD has some room to improve. We'll see if he can adapt his physicality, improve on D and figure out how to shoot against close-outs. Scottie's D is the main thing to be optimistic about him, for sure.
Yeah, we need something to happen for us in order to take the next step. Health will be a big deal. We lost Quick for 50 games or so last year, give or take the tanking. He's played 64, 78, 81, 68 and 33 games in his career. I'd lean on that 70ish games from him in an average season. And that's a 17/6 player who can shoot the 3. That's HUGE for our offense. And then we have whatever we get from BI, and whatever we get from our rook, and whatever we get from improvement out of our guys in their second season.
We're gonna be a decent team. How we elevate our ceiling is the next step, but we have moves to make, potentially. So we'll have to see what the FO does. But not every team has ultimate title potential. You need luck. You need a certain threshold of talent. And you can be a decent FO and not produce something magical because the opportunity wasn't there. But we'll see with this squad. We should be above average at either end of the floor, and that's not far different from how things started with the best stretch in franchise history.
It's worth remembering that we gave up Bosh and had very little... but we'd acquired Lowry and DeRozan, and they gave us something. We eventually got Jonas, and then we got Anunoby and Siakam and that worked out well for us... from the kinds of picks we'll have access to with this team. So again, we'll have to see what our opportunities become going forward.
Hey man, you wanna talk about rampant negativity, go take a gander in the 2 "Masai is fired" threads, hell I'm one of like 4 people in there NOT claiming the sky is falling. I also listed at least 3 players I am still overal positive on, I used to be positive on Mogbo, but with CMB I don't think there's much to that anymore as he's just a better version of Mogbo, so those minutes will likely be very limited. I have been a staunch defender of GD, Darko, and many other situations people love to be negative about, but that positivity gets ignored because I call out overwhelmingly mediocre moves we've made as those are the more notable ones. Doesn't mean the positivity doesn't exist, BI is the hot topic right now, if GD was popping off I would be singing his praises with just as much fervour. But the reality is, the team has more negatives than positives, so by its very nature will result in more talk.
IQ being back will be a huge boon to the team, I'm not saying we're going to be an awful team next year, I'm saying we are going to be comfortably treadmill. And just because that is a net positive compared to the prior few years, doesn't make it intrinsically positive. Kick in the nuts or a kick in the shin, you're still getting kicked you know?
Opportunities are there for every team, what matters is the quality and likelihood of them panning out. Both Lowry and Siakam are moonshots that are the exceptions to the rule, you know this better than most. OG was a lot of luck that he fell to us and so many people were afraid of his injury. DD required a lotto pick, JV required a top 5 pick, both things we are very unlikely to have moving forward, which is exactly what I have been saying.
This team as constructed is not bad, but it IS mid. Mid teams are the absolute worst place to be, not good enough to accoplish anything, and not bad enough to balance out that poor product with bright eyed blue chip prospects.
That is my biggest complaint about this trajectory, not that everything is objectively awful, but that this pathway in NBA history, typically leads nowhere. Bulls, Hawks, Kings, and the list goes on and on, that is where we are headed and I see no reason to be happy about that.
Maybe some big trades come down the line and shift that trajectory, that would be swell, but maybe BI plays like 45 games a season for the next two years and bends us over a barrel picking up that PO. One of those is based more in reality than the other, one has history, the other is just pure hope. And that's cool, I'm not telling anyone they aren't allowed to hope, I'm saying this team has done nothing to give
me hope.
If that is negativity, then so be it, but I've been calling out the bad moves we've been making over the last few years and was told I was just being negative, only for most of them to become reality. I've also been wrong with stuff like Ochai, and I've owned that and have been happy to be wrong, but overwhelmingly through the past few years there have been a lot of bad moves that have led to bad outcomes, and I see this no differently.
EDIT : Just saw the Sandro signing, solid pick up, something to be positive about
