doclinkin wrote:Jumping in to throw elbows for Consiglieri.
It's a win-now pick because Porter is healthy, uninjured, and NBA ready. He won't take 3 years to reach his level, whatever his upside is his development will be incremental and it doesn't require hope and a leap of faith to project him to a useful player at both ends. Any contribution he makes won't have to wait until December.
While I like the Otto pick, it is defensible to think that the pick was a safe one for Ernie who needs to make solid plays while he's in the final year of his contract.
Yes, that's fair enough, if Consig had stopped there or gone a bit further, I wouldn't have said anything.
My only substantive objection to that really is just that I'd point out that the Grunner's contract runs one year, as you noted, so “won’t take 3 years to reach his level” wouldn’t have too much of a place in our hypothetical jaundiced projections of Ernie’s rationale. I mean, yes, I could argue otherwise on some of those points at the margins, maybe rolling them back by 20% more than overturnign anything, but I’d just be going through the motions without much conviction.
The issue here is that aspects of Consig’s statement were about two orders of magnitude beyond that and fixated on specific facets which struck of Cheshire cats and tea cups.
The Consiglieri wrote:It was a pure, b.s., all about me, not about the franchise move. Even if you don't feel that incendiary, there's no denying the wizards move was 100% about making the playoffs next year.
I do believe that we could construct a cynical view of why Ernie would take Otto in the interests of job safety, but “making the playoffs next year” would be like, uh, footnote 17 on appendix three of the document supporting this argument. I’ve covered it already, but as a rule, 6’9” 197 pound twenty year-old rookie small forwards aren’t really needle movers in the win column. On a team with two competent incumbents and solid production? If Ted really is laying out a "we need to make the playoffs next year or you're fired" mandate (and I doubt it's that simple), Otto is well down the list of things that help Ernie sleep at night.
If I wanted to back this up further and debunk the idea that Ernie was
surely thinking this way, I’d scurry around and come up with about 15-20 quotes from respected posters here like Nate or CCJ as well as the published pundits on Bullets Forever complaining mildly that Otto isn’t enough of an improvement in the short term. Well, if this argument goes on for another day or so, I guess I could do that, but it’s pretty well in the bag that there’s lots of good basketball minds out there who don’t feel that Otto is adding a lot of wins next year for us. In fact, a common refrain from the Washington faithful who don’t like the pick is that we’re messing up a good thing at the small forward. Consig’s pushing the opposite position as some sort of an inarguable absolute.
If we felt like being sour, we could say that…..“Ted wanted Otto and it’ll be good at the box office, so how could Ernie get fired when he took the guy ted wanted and attendance is up?”….. and this increases Ernie’s job security. We could go further than this and talk about feel good stories in the local media and probably some other angles that I haven’t thought of that are fairly reasonable and might well have factored into the pick some extent. OK, yes, there’s plenty of ways we could look through the kaleidoscope and come up with how Porter increases Ernie’s job security. If someone had created a really nuanced argument to this effect, I'd be skeptical, but not in outright attack mode. But that’s not even the argument that was put out there; instead it’s “100% about making the playoffs next year”.
That dog don’t hunt.
Secondly, I strongly dislike this idea:
It was a pure, b.s., all about me, not about the franchise move.
Ok, so no objective basketball mind could have taken Porter over Noel under any circumstances other than their being a craven dog who’s selling out the interests of everyone but themselves?
I mean, six teams passed on having Noel if we include the Pelicans and it took a top 3 protected 2014 pick being thrown in from a team with a zero percent chance at the playoffs next year to get Jrue Holiday. That doesn’t suggest that Noel was seen as being particularly valuable in the eyes of “The Scouts”. I mean, in the name of Ned, Noel was taken behind another injured guy!
Likewise, I don’t believe that the safer aspects of Porter as a bulwark to Ernie’s job security easily disentangle from the team benefit angle. So, yes, Porter’s obviously a safer pick for Ernie, but he’s safer for the Wizards as well. I'm not asking anyone to like safe picks, but that's a very different thing from the above quote.
So, I don’t believe that this second position is defensible to throw out with such certitude. It’s also extremely condescending to everyone else here who sees things differently.
