MDStar wrote:I disagree 100%. This team has a severe lack of talent right now. And while I am a strong advocate of taking the best player available, you don't go out of your way to just replace one of the two really talented players that we actually do have.
I agree with you. You go BPA but you also have to build a team, not just randomly collect talent. Then you just end up with a random collection of talent and not a team--which means you've actually got nothing.
I understand these discussions are mostly academic, tossing around scenarios and seeing how they could play out, but the truth is Wall and Beal are the foundation of this build and they aren't going anywhere. The FO is committed to making it work with them and they'll get years to develop.
I think the two biggest problems with this construction are that our big men are unreliable/short term solutions and we've got a team of poor shooters. The only high quality shooter on the team is Beal. When you've got a PG that is not a reliable shooter in Wall, you have to surround him with good shooters.
To make this work, we need to find a
good long term big man that rebounds, and get better forwards that can shoot.
Our forward situation is one of the worst in the NBA. Nene is the only above league average forward we have and he's a big man tweener, he's aging, and he has a chronic foot injury. Basketball has become a forward driven game where most of the best teams have excellent forwards that can single-handedly cover up so much of the team's weaknesses. Someone who can shoot from range or score inside and rebound and play defense on multiple positions, switch onto guards and perimeter players or get into the paint, take up space and protect the rim.
When the new salary tax and repeater tax kick in and make it pretty much impossible to field complete teams that go way over the tax, you're going to become even more reliant on a versatile forward that covers up the flaws of other parts of your construction. Eventually all teams will have to start bums and guys who would otherwise be marginal role players because their contracts are cheap. You've got to be able to build a contender for less than 70 million dollars.
So us having arguably the worst group of forwards in the league has been a severe disadvantage. That's what I'd be looking to fix rather than shuffling around our guard situation, which is already very promising. We don't necessarily need stars here, we need to get good players who can shoot and/or facilitate that are at least NBA average. Someone who has enough offensive value to guarantee a 15+ PER and plays good defense on top of that. Someone that can hit open shots...
But again, in the draft, you have to use BPA as the foundation of your drafting. So you have to figure out a way to reconcile your needs with the talent available in the draft without ever forcing it and passing on potential all stars or franchise players for future role players.
And as far as team building goes, big men are ridiculously expensive and the market for them is going to get pretty debilitating when you've basically got a 70 million dollar spending cap. It's going to make the big men that are actually impact players the most valuable and efficient contracts out there. We've got 27-28 million annually locked up in two big men that, while above league average today, are going to decline from here out and can't be long term solutions because of their age. They don't coincide with the window established with Wall and Beal. So it really makes sense for us to take advantage of a deep big man draft and get that future contract settled with a quality long term solution.
But once more, you can't force the draft. If McLemore is the best talent available because you've got him graded as a potential All Star, you take him and try and make a plan to either have him work with Wall and Beal, or you deal him to bring in a good player that will.
Another thing to keep in mind during the delicate process of team building is that no team can successfully develop more than a few young players at once. Keeping a team of young developmental players together is probably the hardest thing to do in the NBA. If you go too young, you will not last long enough to see it mature together. I would never try and develop a class of more than one or two rookies. And if I've got a lot of young raw players, I would deal some of them for finished products to keep only two or three on hand at once. You simply will not be able to get a ton of young players enough attention and minutes to properly develop. And teams need to win some games to start developing and teams that are too young do not win. The Wizards went disastrously young in 2010 and 2011 and now we've got a team with seven players with less than three years of experience and a string of 20 win seasons. Most of those players are undefined and struggling to find a role and only the no brainer high draft picks Wall and Beal--with tons of talent and obvious upside and a host of NBA ready skills--are getting developed.
They have the same fierceness on defense - they're both players Scott Skiles would love to coach. a Moute is a bit more limited, because he's a tweener forward, while Olapido is a very good sized shooting guard - fitting that position very well. And Olapido probably has more upside offensively - though he's got questionmarks there.
