barelyawake wrote:The point would be there is no path to a championship by keeping Gil. That's why you can't provide even one path that gets us there. By losing Arenas, we have options with both cap and high draft picks. There are no options with keeping Gil -- at least, none that have been provided. Top draft picks doesn't mean we have to keep the talent either. It means we can trade them, but they have the clout of being top picks so they will get significant pieces in trade. It gives us more assets. With more cap, we can take on greater salaries and thus get even higher picks in a BOYD deal.
We don't have the assets to build a championship team. Period. And the only way to get more assets is high draft picks and cap room. Those are specifics.
Looking around at the wasteland of suck in the NBA, I don't see that we have the pieces to truly tank though. There is too much competition for the suck, and we landed our ball-dominant hypertalent too early in the process.
To suck your way to a championship requires a perfect storm of injured players quality talent at the right position but sitting on the bench. It requires the luck of perfect timing. You need to suck in the right year, and land that consensus #1 Big, despite long odds that ain't even close to 50/50. To swell those % points requires dedication to a half decade of suck, either to land the right guy in the right year or to stockpile talents that you can package and swap for the 2-way Big. Then you need an idiot of a willing partner who will trade him to you.
Problem is if you land your brilliant guard too early in the process, you have issues, inasmuch as they have far too much influence on the game and can get you wins early, but in the playoffs they don't take you over the top the way the dreadnought two-way Bigs do. We may be in that spot right now, and may have to find another method to land players. But I think we'll find that in adding Wall we're already better than the baddest of the worst. In that respect it make s the most sense to maximize the assets we have, not dump them for nothing. Squeeze every last positive benefit out of them. Trading high not low.
Losing Gil for nothing right now (ie for Wince, who is then flipped for (protected) picks, or bought out) gives us little long-term benefit. We suck in the wrong year. We load up weight on John Wall who by his own competitive rage will try too hard to win the whole thing by himself. A still-skinny kid, at age 19 --adjusting to the 82 game grind, to adulthood, to the pressures of burgeoning supastardom, and to the deadening effect of loss after loss-- can quickly sour on a team, a city, the whole experience. And learn habits that may take some time to unlearn. Learn to distance himself. Not allow losing to sting.
But put him next to a guy who can carry the weight, in a dark place with everything to prove, nothing to lose, humbled by lost chances, desperate to kick ass and take names. I think Johnny Ballgame will soak up a great deal of the positive benefit of playing next to a guy like the former Boy Wonder, now grown. A guy who trains with blowtorch intensity and works on his game with OCD-fixation like Gil always has.
Gilbert nearly lost everything. Lost the game he loves. Lost his freedom. Lost his good name, his endorsements, his positive reputation, the public love. Did lose his long-lost mother and any opportunity for true reconciliation.
His only road for redemption is success. Not superstardom, not media attention which will bite you with poison fangs if you stop stroking it. Winning.
Consider too that not only has Gilbert's best success come next to heavy use guards, but their success has swollen by playing next to him. Teams wishing to teach the rook a lesson may choose to load up on him, trap on the perimeter, knock him to the ground when he enters the lane. Bounce him around a little bit. 82 games of heavy pressure.
But if the presence of a healthy Gil can turn Mr19% DeShawn into Mr 50%, consider how teams will have to play the Wing positions with Gil and Wall running uptempo. Consider how Gil can play when he is in the off-ball ricochet role, running past triple screens at high speed, and the opponent's best defender is shadowing the rook.
A championship team needs a raise-the-game scorer, a dominant two-way Big, a competent and unrattled floor general, and a tactician with a sense of the moment directing the action from the sidelines. The tank method asks us to drop Gilbert in the hopes that we land two of the above. But there's less than a promise of a hope that we'd even land a player in the draft that can approximate what we already get by the (healthy) return of one Gilbert Jay Arenas Jr.
. It all really comes down to what we think we can get out of Arenas, whether we think he can change, play D, accept a new role. There's no proof that he will, for sure. There's also no proof that we won't end up using our capspace as effectively as NJ has this year. Perfect situation for a chat board!
