KingRobb02 wrote:If anything, the current era of NBA has taught us that you can't just build around one or two highly paid guy. While I love what Pat Riley did to put together the evil empire down south, I would say that Bosh going down shows how risky his maneuvers were. They have two of those top 5-7 guys you were talking about and are needing historic performances from Lebron just to stay alive against the Pacers. The Thunder seem to be built around 2 guys with a great supporting cast that they were able to build through the draft and being awful for 3 years. They seem like a safer bet than the Heat at this point even though their top guys are nowhere near the Heat's top guys. The Spurs haven't picked in the top 20 in over a decade, so I just assume that they have a copy of Grey's Sports Almanac that is telling them where to find value. The Bulls went the route of just being so deep that it doesn't matter who plays for the. They won the east even though their best player missed nearly 40% of their games. It just seems like, instead of looking to get a name to replace Dwight, we need to spend a few years building a team the hard way.
Of all the mechanisms for acquiring a franchise player the draft has to be the most consistently successful choice. Rarely do you trade a franchise player unless there is serious baggage, and cap space only rarely leverages a franchise player to switch teams. Recently though we've seen a high occurrence of both trades and cap space getting the job done in building Miami and NYK cores while filling out the LAC core, and then of course Boston in '08. Meanwhile the teams you mentioned, Chicago, OKC and SAN, not to mention Dallas, all acquired their #1 through the draft and built up either via more draft picks, cap space, or trades.
The main draw to acquiring one of these fringe #1 players for Dwight is that we also could free up either cap space or acquire draft picks to fill out the core. Anyway, optimally we'll just keep Dwight or tank.