Chamberlainship wrote:One of the recurring errors/design flaws of the sixers' recent player development strategy has been expecting too much from young players who then struggle to fulfill expectations. I like TLC, but I'm thinking it'll be a few years before we should count on him for big minutes.
I don't think that expecting a lot from young players is/was part of the process at all. A large tenant of the process was that short term results on the court were irrelevant. Nobody was saying that playing exclusively young guys will improve the product on the floor in the present at all, or even that it was best for the development of the players to be on as bad a team as possible. It was that there was to be a focus on long term development, and the best way to maximize your chances of obtaining real talent was to pursue this strategy.
We dredged the bottom for all the talent that we could get, and now that the process is complete we have ridiculous amounts of young talent, and high draft picks from which more young talent will be obtained.
I think you are demonstrating how many naysayers of the process never even understood it because you are ascribing motives to the process that it didn't have, and then measuring results that it didn't pursue, and claiming that it came up short.
It's the whole "how good of a GM was Hinkie when he could only win 10 games?" BS. The question should rather be "how much talent, and future high picks, could we have accumulated in the last 3 years if we had pursued short term gain, over talent acquisition?"
Following that path would result in no Noel, Saric, Embiid, Okafor, or Simmons, and we would instead have something like Jrue, and a bunch of talent acquired in the 8-15 range in each of the last three drafts. We would have no potential franchise players on the team currently, instead of the two that we currently have in Embiid, and Simmons.
Embiid, and Simmons are the main precious harvest of the process that would have ZERO chance of being on the Sixers if we pursued wins on the court during the last three years. Now the process is done, and they are 19, and 22.
When was the last team that brought in 3 rookies in the same year as talented as Embiid, Simmons, and Saric? These are Hinkie sowed fruit.