closg00 wrote:Typical slothful Ernie. I have been watching the other teams wheeling and dealing on new two-way contracts, not our Ernest. Ernie should be doing everything in his power to improve our talent, especially in the front court and back-up SG.
It's pretty clear what Ernie's position is in all of this. He doesn't care to throw even small amounts of money for players who he considers to be nothing more than lottery tickets to even become utility players off the bench. He will use the odd draft pick here and there because it's what the league does, but he won't use that many of them because he doesn't value them the same he does players who are established and are less risky. And it's true. A proven NBA player is less risky than a draft pick in terms of returns, provided all else is equal.
The problem is that it's also less likely to actually produce stars, as the odds of producing a star are actually pretty bad no matter how you choose to go about it, and it costs orders of magnitude more for established players to the point where it clearly is no longer worth it. Saving an extra few million to get Mahinmi instead of Mozgov is a debatable value at best, but hey, he also got to try for Durant and Horford. The amount you can actually save there is much higher, but Ernie doesn't care because he much prefers proven. Meanwhile teams like the Spurs, and now the Warriors, Raptors and Celtics among others, are running laps around him by putting in the work and relatively small amount of money to invest in scouting and developing players.
In a league where everyone understands the value of established players, it's extremely hard to get ahead outside of bottoming out by accident and getting the right top pick at the right time, by focusing on proven players only. The end result of such endeavours is usually a team that floats around .500 or so, probably averaging just below .500 over a longer sample size, because that's where most teams really don't want to be. The Wizards are slightly more successful at their antics than the likes of the Hornets, Pelicans and any other number of teams that flush their draft picks whenever possible and focus on throwing big money at whoever they feel is the best guy they can get no matter what, but they're all iterations of the same thing.
