Butler trade rumor - KC Johnson update: pg 63

[League Circles]

Because it's the only way to justify an extended period of losing on the court and losing financially. You don't trade Jimmy Butler, tank for an extended period of time and wind up with the next...Jimmy Butler or worse. There's no progress there. You took 6 steps back to take 6 steps forward.

I think Butler is a 2nd-tier star right now. So if it was done, you have to get a 1st tier star.

So to be clear, we can't justify the Thunder's run with Durant or Westbrook because they never lead their team to a title, despite years of winning games and deep post season runs?

Even if you don't use the Thunder example, but another team that can collect 2 all star level guys via the draft, to the extent that they become the Raptors, again, is that a bad thing?

It's not. Using absolutes like a top 2-3 pick needs to win a title to justify a tank is pointless. It's as insignificant as me saying trading or using free agency is pointless and stupid unless you can land Lebron James, Tim Duncan or someone similar.

And again, these hypotheticals you pose are 3-4 years of tanking turmoil only to walk away with one good player. You're painting a bad scenario, not necessarily the only scenario. That's my problem here.

I don't have a problem if the Bulls don't trade Butler and tank, so long as they build around him properly instead of pairing him with Wade, Rondo and Lopez. But to act like tanking as a general premise is terrible while ignoring the fact that the reason it makes sense is to land multiple guys, something the Bulls don't have, is weird to me.

Did the Thunder even tank though? They just weren't good IIRC. I'm not sure what moves they made that I would call tanking moves.

[dice]

What would it take to get Gallinari or Wilson Chandler here?

why would we be remotely interested in wilson chandler? there are 6 or 7 players on the nuggets i'd rather have. and they're a bad team!

Wilson Chandler is 1 of Denvers top 3 players....guy gets buckets...plays and guards 3 positions too.

i could get buckets too if they gave me enough shots. the fact is, when wilson chandler looks to score he's less likely than most to get the job done

gallinari is certainly better. jokic has been a stud in his short career thus far. i'd argue that fareed is better. and both their SGs are about as good, with gary harris on a path to be better soon. i think at best he's the 4th best player on a bad team

[kingkirk]

Did the Thunder even tank though? They just weren't good IIRC. I'm not sure what moves they made that I would call tanking moves.

I would say trading Ray Allen to the Celtics for drafts rights to Jeff Green to pair with the recently drafted Durant constitutes tanking, particularly when they were terrible for the next 2-3 years to then be in position to draft both Westbrook and Harden in the top 5.

[League Circles]

Did the Thunder even tank though? They just weren't good IIRC. I'm not sure what moves they made that I would call tanking moves.

I would say trading Ray Allen to the Celtics for drafts rights to Jeff Green to pair with the recently drafted Durant constitutes tanking, particularly when they were terrible for the next 2-3 years to then be in position to draft both Westbrook and Harden in the top 5.

Fair enough I personally wouldn't refer to that as tanking at all. To me, tanking is making moves for the express primary purpose of winning fewer games to get a higher draft pick. I saw that just as realizing you're starting to build around a great #2 overall pick and realizing that a 31 year old Allen probably wouldn't line up with their progression arc very well and IIRC Allen had just a year left so they were also getting something instead of nothing.

[kingkirk]

Fair enough I personally wouldn't refer to that as tanking at all. To me, tanking is making moves for the express primary purpose of winning fewer games to get a higher draft pick. I saw that just as realizing you're starting to build around a great #2 overall pick and realizing that a 31 year old Allen probably wouldn't line up with their progression arc very well and IIRC Allen had just a year left so they were also getting something instead of nothing.

Sounds like semantics to me.

If you trade away Ray Allen, a HOFer, to start a rebuild around Durant (who hadn't played a game yet), you're looking to be young, which a byproduct is being bad for years to come, meaning acquiring more picks and cracks at the draft.

[GimmeDat]

I love how 'when did a team win a championship from tanking' became an argument, like going out of your way to get bad is somehow a different situation than being bad in the first place. There are lots of elite cores built from the draft.

You can't say a tank is a failure if you don't get a player better than Butler. The point of a blow up is that you can't get a good enough team around Butler. A blow up gives you multiple high pick chances, cap flexibility, and trade flexibility that we don't have right now.

Also, if you do Brown and both BKN picks, for instance, that's 3 top 5 picks right there. With the Bulls pick both this year and next, that's 4 extremely strong lottery picks in a 2 year period, including a possible #1 this year and next, a 3rd overall in Brown from last year, and the Kings pick on top of that. This is not including what returns you get on the supporting cast.

That's a completely different ball park than happening to suck and having 1 top pick every year.

[dice]

If we trade Butler...I want Julius "The Next Draymond Green/Zach Randolph" Randle, DAngelo "20yrs old, Superstar Upside" Russell and Brandon "#2 pick" Ingram. These guys will be running the league in 2-3 years when THEY ARE STILL ONLY 23-24 YEARS OLD. Plus with the NEW CBA, its easier to keep your players.

randle is the only one that has given any indication whatsoever that he can be an all-star

Russel is a future star in this league. Hes 20-21 yrs old...in 3-4years he will be 1 of the best PGs in the league. Ingram has huge upside as well.

he's a a pretty one-dimensional scoring PG who hasn't been very effective in that role. i'm not really seeing where the promise is. even if he really improves his defense i see his ceiling as a 2nd tier guy like john wall. his game doesn't mesh with what the league is geared toward nowadays either, with the emphasis on ball movement

[the ultimates]

Calling what Seattle did a tank is a stretch. They traded a 31 year old Ray Allen after he had been there 5 and a half seasons while trying to build around him and Rashard Lewis. Allen's last two seasons produced 35 and 31 wins respectively. The Thunder didn't make it back to the playoffs until 2009-2010 when Ray would have been 34 years old. So what's the use of having him around during the rebuild?

[Mech Engineer]

Calling what Seattle did a tank is a stretch. They traded a 31 year old Ray Allen after he had been there 5 and a half seasons while trying to build around him and Rashard Lewis. Allen's last two seasons produced 35 and 31 wins respectively. The Thunder didn't make it back to the playoffs until 2009-2010 when Ray would have been 34 years old. So what's the use of having him around during the rebuild?

31(Ray Allen's age) is the same as 27(Butler's age) if you didn't know it.

[Rerisen]

I just don't think you can look at a franchise as a binary title or bust choice. There are numerous ladder steps between that are very meaningfully different.

I agree. But why is the anti-tank crowd looking at a tanking regime as binary to title or bust?

Bias, is why.

I don't see tanking as binary, as far as its required level of success to do it, it should be a weighted decision based on whether you are likely to be better off.

If you are some of level of bad already, have nothing going on, no franchise player, then tanking is better than just being 'kind of' bad, and collecting the 7th pick or whatever. Even if tanking doesn't produce a title, its likely the better choice in that situation.

But that weighting does not ad up to tanking just because you aren't Golden State or Cleveland, or can't see a clear path how to beat them in the next 3 years. There's about 25 teams in that boat.

[the ultimates]

This question has been asked before in another thread but I'll ask it again. How is a successful tank defined. Is it winning a championship? Is it becoming a perennial contender? A perennial playoff team? Or is it just to get a bunch of high draft picks and hope to get at least one player better than Butler, although with the way he's playing that is becoming more and more unlikely.

[League Circles]

Fair enough I personally wouldn't refer to that as tanking at all. To me, tanking is making moves for the express primary purpose of winning fewer games to get a higher draft pick. I saw that just as realizing you're starting to build around a great #2 overall pick and realizing that a 31 year old Allen probably wouldn't line up with their progression arc very well and IIRC Allen had just a year left so they were also getting something instead of nothing.

Sounds like semantics to me.

If you trade away Ray Allen, a HOFer, to start a rebuild around Durant (who hadn't played a game yet), you're looking to be young, which a byproduct is being bad for years to come, meaning acquiring more picks and cracks at the draft.

There are many moves that are wise that can be foreseen to coincide with suffering team performance that I would not term tanking moves.

To me, that move was just a team deciding that 4 years plus RFA rights of a 20 or so year old Jeff Green was a better piece to build around Durant with than one year of a 31 year old Ray Allen. That it may have resulted in a better subsequent pick is to me secondary, because even if it wouldn't have, it still in theory would have been the right basketball move. Of course no one knew how well Ray would age. Ray, also, FWIW, was coming off a meh season.

[Rerisen]

This question has been asked before in another thread but I'll ask it again. How is a successful tank defined. Is it winning a championship? Is it becoming a perennial contender? A perennial playoff team? Or is it just to get a bunch of high draft picks and hope to get at least one player better than Butler, although with the way he's playing that is becoming more and more unlikely.

Each team should have a different requirement I would think, based on the alternative of not tanking. I think you have to end up not just better off, but far far better off, because you are trading several horrible seasons of opportunity cost to do it. Unless you are already a pretty bad team, say missing the playoffs routinely, then the opportunity cost is pretty low.

Right now for the Bulls, I would say the bar would be getting a better player than Butler, since anytime you have a guy as good as Jimmy, you're base starting point is probably an average team at worst. And with any kind of luck at all, in FA or drafting you can become a good team, and with great luck, you can become a contender.

See the 2011 team, which was also average, and lucked into winning the lottery, getting a top pick on top of already being decent is what made us contend so fast. If we had just come off tanking in 2008 and drafted Derrick, we never would have competed for a title before his career was derailed by injuries.

[the ultimates]

This question has been asked before in another thread but I'll ask it again. How is a successful tank defined. Is it winning a championship? Is it becoming a perennial contender? A perennial playoff team? Or is it just to get a bunch of high draft picks and hope to get at least one player better than Butler, although with the way he's playing that is becoming more and more unlikely.

Each team should have a different requirement I would think, based on the alternative of not tanking. I think you have to end up not just better off, but far far better off, because you trading several horrible seasons of opportunity cost to do it. Unless you are already a pretty bad team, say missing the playoffs routinely, then the opportunity cost is pretty low.

I agree that's why the tanking talk and people advocating a Butler trade is perplexing. He's is a guy you can win a title with, he is someone you can build around. Moving Butler is like taking several steps back for the small chance of taking a leap forward with no time table of when or if that leap will actually happen.

[kodo]

I lived in Seattle during the last of the Ray Allen / Rashard years and the first years of Durant before the team was swindled out of the city.

It was a 100%, purposeful tank, and it started years before Durant or the Ray Allen trade.

The core was a 52 win team with the #2 offense in the league, 2nd only to the Nash Suns IIRC, and lost only to the eventual champions Spurs. A 52 win core returned to win 35 games, that's purposeful. Especially when you fire the coach who got you there and tell him he did a fantastic job, but there will be new owners who are going to replace the entire org.

Having been to the games at the Key Arena, you could tell Ray & Rashard were just straight up chucking and not trying to win games. Ray actually reached his highest PPG seasons at 30 & 31 years old because he did nothing but chuck, when he was always a cerebral player trying to win games in the past. But those years, he just let it fly because everyone knew it wasn't about winning.

The first tanking pick was not Durant, it was Sene. Durant was the result of the 2nd tanking season.

By the time Durant was in a Sonics uniform and Green was traded, Seattle was already deep into the tank.
And then when we got Durant, the org asked Durant to play SG. He was horrible at it. So bad we won 20 games total, Sixers-esque bad. But it was all intentional.

It was about getting Durant in an environment where he could expand without any pressure of winning, and getting more picks to rebuild for the new owner Clay Bennett.

Seattle was an unusual situation because it was very openly tanking due to the team leaving the city. Seattle didn't care, it wasn't their future, so people didn't bother to hide the tank.

[League Circles]

I lived in Seattle during the last of the Ray Allen / Rashard years and the first years of Durant before the team was swindled out of the city.

It was a 100%, purposeful tank, and it started years before Durant or the Ray Allen trade.

The core was a 52 win team with the #2 offense in the league, 2nd only to the Nash Suns IIRC, and lost only to the eventual champions Spurs. A 52 win core returned to win 35 games, that's purposeful. Especially when you fire the coach who got you there and tell him he did a fantastic job, but there will be new owners who are going to replace the entire org.

Having been to the games at the Key Arena, you could tell Ray & Rashard were just straight up chucking and not trying to win games. Ray actually reached his highest PPG seasons at 30 & 31 years old because he did nothing but chuck, when he was always a cerebral player trying to win games in the past. But those years, he just let it fly because everyone knew it wasn't about winning.

The first tanking pick was not Durant, it was Sene. Durant was the result of the 2nd tanking season.

By the time Durant was in a Sonics uniform and Green was traded, Seattle was already deep into the tank.
And then when we got Durant, the org asked Durant to play SG. He was horrible at it. So bad we won 20 games total, Sixers-esque bad. But it was all intentional.

It was about getting Durant in an environment where he could expand without any pressure of winning, and getting more picks to rebuild for the new owner Clay Bennett.

Seattle was an unusual situation because it was very openly tanking due to the team leaving the city. Seattle didn't care, it wasn't their future, so people didn't bother to hide the tank.

So you're saying the players were in on the tank? That the players wanted to reduce the quality of their own performances for the purpose of getting a better draft pick?

I'd have a hard time believing that was true. Did management make moves for the primary purpose of getting a bad record and high draft picks? If so, what moves?

[GimmeDat]

So you're saying the players were in on the tank? That the players wanted to reduce the quality of their own performances for the purpose of getting a better draft pick?

I'd have a hard time believing that was true. Did management make moves for the primary purpose of getting a bad record and high draft picks? If so, what moves?

Sounds like he's just suggesting that he knew managements priorities weren't with winning basketball games, so guys like Allen and Lewis just went 'yolo' and played for themselves instead.

[dice]

So you're saying the players were in on the tank? That the players wanted to reduce the quality of their own performances for the purpose of getting a better draft pick?

I'd have a hard time believing that was true. Did management make moves for the primary purpose of getting a bad record and high draft picks? If so, what moves?

Sounds like he's just suggesting that he knew managements priorities weren't with winning basketball games, so guys like Allen and Lewis just went 'yolo' and played for themselves instead.

if that's his suggestion, he's still wrong. in the case of ray allen, he wasn't scoring more because he was chucking. he was scoring more because he was shooting the ball BETTER. and he wasn't scoring that much more regardless. and his assists didn't decline either

in the case of rashard lewis, his assists went UP when the team was bad. his scoring barely ticked up because he too was shooting a bit better. so he wasn't chucking either

basically, this guy was seeing stuff that just wasn't there

[the ultimates]

So you're saying the players were in on the tank? That the players wanted to reduce the quality of their own performances for the purpose of getting a better draft pick?

I'd have a hard time believing that was true. Did management make moves for the primary purpose of getting a bad record and high draft picks? If so, what moves?

Sounds like he's just suggesting that he knew managements priorities weren't with winning basketball games, so guys like Allen and Lewis just went 'yolo' and played for themselves instead.

if that's his suggestion, he's still wrong. in the case of ray allen, he wasn't scoring more because he was chucking. he was scoring more because he was shooting the ball BETTER. and he wasn't scoring that much more regardless. and his assists didn't decline either

in the case of rashard lewis, his assists went UP when the team was bad. his scoring barely ticked up because he too was shooting a bit better. so he wasn't chucking either

basically, this guy was seeing stuff that just wasn't there

Don't forget he also became a first option in Seattle. In Milwaukee he had to share a lot of shots with Robinson and Cassell.

[Red Larrivee]

So to be clear, we can't justify the Thunder's run with Durant or Westbrook because they never lead their team to a title, despite years of winning games and deep post season runs?

Even if you don't use the Thunder example, but another team that can collect 2 all star level guys via the draft, to the extent that they become the Raptors, again, is that a bad thing?

It's not. Using absolutes like a top 2-3 pick needs to win a title to justify a tank is pointless. It's as insignificant as me saying trading or using free agency is pointless and stupid unless you can land Lebron James, Tim Duncan or someone similar.

And again, these hypotheticals you pose are 3-4 years of tanking turmoil only to walk away with one good player. You're painting a bad scenario, not necessarily the only scenario. That's my problem here.

I don't have a problem if the Bulls don't trade Butler and tank, so long as they build around him properly instead of pairing him with Wade, Rondo and Lopez. But to act like tanking as a general premise is terrible while ignoring the fact that the reason it makes sense is to land multiple guys, something the Bulls don't have, is weird to me.

Tanking is worth it if you can land a LeBron/Jordan/Kobe type player, or a couple of Jimmy Butler level players. Unfortunately, the chances of accomplishing both are equivalent to catching Bigfoot. More likely than not, you will tank and have a core comparable to Kirk Hinrich, Ben Gordon and Luol Deng. I'm not saying tanking can't produce quality, I'm saying it's unlikely to put you in a better position and you will lose money as a business doing it.

The year Seattle was bad beore Durant, their best player was a 32-year-old Ray Allen, who they traded for the #5 overall pick. It's not comparable to trading a prime JImmy Butler who, who just turned 27 four months ago.

I never said the Bulls had to win a championship with their new core to justify tanking. I said they had to get a player better than JImmy Butler to justify it. You can't spend years missing out on playoff revenue, merchandise sales, etc. all while having a terrible on-court product just so you can get the next Jimmy Butler. That's not progress.