Frank Lee wrote:This timeline talk implies we are on some kind of schedule.... and if anything we are running late.
Its a ruse. A distraction. A coincidental strategy masking the inefficiency of the front office's attempts to put a competitive team on the floor. McD is all in on draft picks. If he can't move them, then he has to use them. Right now, we are supposed to patiently wait for Chris to learn how to play basketball, Bender to grow into a man, and Jackson to learn how to shoot.... and god somewhere we find a coach. We have dubbed Booker 'the face' and already pencilled in a max deal for him. We'd better hope he doesn't get tired of losing before he signs.... and then is content long before until he decides he doesn't want to be here either. I watch him play and sense frustration. He is always one step away from hog ball chucker mode as there is little to no support for him. Losing 70% of the games in the fashion we lose them will take its toll, on him, the team, and the fans.
Timelining is dangerous. It is founded on players achieving their abilities on schedule. Like there will be some regenerative talent pool as each player comes into his own. We have already seen one semi failure in Len... but somehow we can blindly look at Chris, Bender, and Jackson and project their success like with Booker and Warren. It just bucks the odds that that you succeed draft pick after draft pick, year after year. Its time to take what we have and build around and with it... rather than hoping we strike gold with some more flawed 20 year olds.
McD has tied up almost 40 million a year in worthless parts... run through 3 coaches, made countless non impact FA signings, lost valid NBA players to bad relationships... and has had to push the 'reset button' on more than one occasion..... I guess we get one more year of really bad non competitive borderline non system dysfunctional basketball served up to us... as we applaud our future draft picks and point to the time line when some new kid from a list of 7 will bring us around the corner.... in a few more years when he grows up.
That is all for now....
We simply just need to make good picks that pan out. The Suns have always built primarily through the draft when they were most successful.
We drafted Alvan Adams, Walter Davis, Larry Nance and then when we traded for KJ that was basically building through the draft by trading our best player for a rookie, Hornacek, Majerle, Finley (traded for Kidd), Nash (traded for a pick that became Marion), Amare.
Of course we did sign guys to add to already successful teams (Barkley, Manning) or sign a guy that was added to helped make the sum greater than our individual parts (Nash).
We've never really traded for some big name all star type player when we were having a down year. I can't even recall teams that were mired at the bottom of the standings trading for a star and becoming instantly competitive, other than maybe the 2007 Celtics. Most all teams flourish with their draft picks outside of the Heat signing those guys, but they already had a championship guy in Wade to start with.
I'm not sure how many big time difference makers signed with bad teams either. I guess maybe Tom Chambers, or you could say Nash, but in the latter situation we had made the playoffs the year before in 03.
