We Should Tank

Quake Griffin · Post #1 » by **Quake Griffin** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 3:28 am

We tried it your way not tanking. Congrats. We were over .500. Then when it came draft time, everybody whined about 12 and 13 not being good slots.

No good use in making [moves for] the 8th seed when that means we are going to lose our 2019 pick.
No use in trying to sell the 2019 FA Class on this team. Kawhi wants the Lakers. The rest are 2nd tier stars and more than likely aren't going to be interested in playing 2nd fiddle in LA and playing in LeBron's shadow.

The 2019 draft is our best bet at getting better next offseason.

MartinToVaught · Post #2 » by **MartinToVaught** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 3:38 am

Exactly. Keep the pick. Add a wing prospect like Doumbouya, Hachimura, Little, Reddish, Wilkes, etc. to the young core. Keep building for the future. The goal should be to have a team that looks good enough by 2021 for Giannis to want to sign here.

esqtvd · Post #3 » by **esqtvd** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 3:55 am

Quake Griffin wrote:We tried it your way not tanking. Congrats. We were over .500. Then when it came draft time, everybody whined about 12 and 13 not being good slots.

Not me. I enjoyed all 6 months of last season and am fine with our draft pick. This is supposed to be fun.

Sixers are my hometown team and the 4 years of Hinkie-tank were a disgrace. Many Philly people simply stopped following the team—in essence just bandwagon-jumpers, off then back on. And right now the entire future of the franchise rests on Embiid's back and feet--and he hasn't had an injury-free season since high school.

And if you think the 12th pick is garbage, well, why throw away enjoying a whole season of basketball for it? Why not try for the playoffs? And if you're aiming lower, with the new draft rules, you can completely trash a whole season and still have little to show for it. You could finish with the 3rd-worst record and still have a 1-in-3 chance of falling out of the top 5!

The entire Sterling era was one big tank with only 2 winning seasons out of 33. .500 is just fine with me because the alternative is worse. I've been there, I know.

Quake Griffin · Post #4 » by **Quake Griffin** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 4:11 am

#EveryTankIsAHinkieTank

Ranma · Post #5 » by **Ranma** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 4:21 am

Read on Twitter

Roscoe Sheed · Post #6 » by **Roscoe Sheed** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 4:32 am

They shouldn’t tank. The clippers already have a bad reputation unfortunately. They need to improve the team image. They actually have some decent talent. Should be above .500 IF they stay healthy. Tanking is very unattractive and didn’t work usually in the past for the clippers. I know it is good to get high draft picks but the need to show that they are committed to winning. The team culture is important

MartinToVaught · Post #7 » by **MartinToVaught** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 4:38 am

Roscoe Sheed wrote:They shouldn’t tank. The clippers already have a bad reputation unfortunately. They need to improve the team image. They actually have some decent talent. Should be above .500 IF they stay healthy. Tanking is very unattractive and didn’t work usually in the past for the clippers. I know it is good to get high draft picks but the need to show that they are committed to winning. The team culture is important

The Clippers will never have a good reputation until we win a ring. That's the only way anyone's ever going to take this franchise seriously. Lob City didn't change that. Fighting for the 8th seed and a first-round exit will not change that.

This team does not have anywhere near enough talent to win anything of note. Losing the pick would be a disaster when we're trying to build a young core.

You can't compare our current position to the past. We have a real front office now that knows what they're doing. The old Clippers weren't tanking - they were just incompetent and cared more about saving money than winning.

Clemenza · Post #8 » by **Clemenza** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 4:53 am

The West is just hard as hell these days. Wish the league could do something about it but what. The top 4-5 draft picks came west and now Bron is out west. Sh*t is nuts!

Dynamix · Post #9 » by **Dynamix** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 5:05 am

Tanking is an ugly word, I want to see it as a chance to develop young players, so let's make sure we have plenty of those on the roster. Hopefully we don't go overboard with the short deal veterans, because Doc will surely overplay them in order to keep his/our record somewhat decent. But with the way the WC is shaping up, we could throw any team out there and still end up below the 10th seed, which is why I'm not too worried about our pick.

esqtvd · Post #10 » by **esqtvd** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 5:23 am

Roscoe Sheed wrote:They shouldn’t tank. The clippers already have a bad reputation unfortunately. They need to improve the team image. They actually have some decent talent. Should be above .500 IF they stay healthy. Tanking is very unattractive and didn’t work usually in the past for the clippers. I know it is good to get high draft picks but the need to show that they are committed to winning. The team culture is important

There's nothing wrong with the team image. We got Jerry West, we got the richest owner in sports, and if Doc is damaged goods, he still has the currency of being a championship coach and one of the only two black ones at that--and also a social justice hero for handling the Sterling thing. There are plenty of people who'll play for Doc. Milos and Gallo both came here willingly.

The important thing is to preserve the team image and culture while this whole GSW-LeBron-HOU thing shakes out. [The latter two are dependent on CP and Bron, who are both 33.] Nobody's getting through that roadblock to the Finals.

Losing is for losers. The Sixers have got away with it up to this point only because a) the East sucks b) Embiid managed to play 60 games and c) Brett Brown had his Spurs background to keep the doubters at bay.

But The Process is no done deal. Process 1.0

was a complete failure. That's a lot of draft picks and a lot of meh. And Process 2.0 still rides on Embiid's fragility and converting FRPs like Dario Saric into something like a trade for Kawhi Leonard.

I'm glad my hometown 76ers are back in the game [I'm still a Clippers fan #1, FTR

], but I'm no believer in Hinkie-ism.

KXKriszna · Post #11 » by **KXKriszna** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 5:56 am

IMO we are in a great position now to play our rookies whenever we can.
What do we have to lose?

There are two options:
1. We give our rookies starting minutes and let them learn through their mistakes, they develop, we have a losing season, we get a Lottery Protected Boston pick in 2019. Everyone's happy. We have amazing young players (Shai and Jerome) for 2019/20 season AND get another great player from our lottery pick.
2. We play old veterans all the time, give our rookies 5min a game just to stop people from saying "Doc doesn't play rookies", we fight like hell for the whole season only to get the 10th spot/if we get 8th seed we lose our 2019 pick and lose to GSW/Rockets in first round. With Shain and Jerome playing 5 min a game, we get another Bryce Johnson but this time it's two of them. We lose our lottery pick AND get swept in the first round.

I'm not saying we should tank. I'm saying we should play Shai and Jerome as much as possible and see how that works.
I see no reason why we should fight for the 8th seed this year. If we get to the 8th seed with Shai and Jerome playing 30min a game, than I guess that's okay. But I don't wan't to see us getting some 30yo players in this Offseason and give them 35min a game to fight our way into the PO.
I'd rather we lose next season but see how Shai and Jerome get better and better with every game than get to 8th seed.

ejftw · Post #12 » by **ejftw** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 6:45 am

https://mikeksmind.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/early-2019-nba-big-board/

Got my early big board up. Who would you guys be going after? Guard is apparently going to be very unlikely.

I'd personally love to get Bol Bol.

Ranma · Post #13 » by **Ranma** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 7:52 am

Tanking is not the word I would use but I was one of the early advocates for blowing up the team and doing a full rebuild when it was clear the Clippers were going nowhere after years of squandered opportunities and wasted assets under Doc's incompetent leadership. However, owner Steve Ballmer chose not only to continue on with Doc but extended him during this off-season. Hiring Jerry West as special adviser while keeping Doc's cronies around seems like a half-measure. In fact, everything we've done can be described in that fashion.

I favored keeping Chris Paul over Blake Griffin, but we lost Paul as Doc's antics in the front office pushed him out the door. We then scrambled to retain Blake Griffin in order to not lose him for nothing. Granted, the new front office was quick to dump Griffin and receive both Tobias Harris and a late-lottery pick, but we also doubled down on seeing what Griffin can do by signing Danilo Gallinari, a player I was never fond of and criticized as being injury prone. On top of that, we re-signed Austin to an overpriced extension with a player option included no doubt at the behest of Daddy Doc. Both of those contracts kept the Clippers from having cap space to even sign LeBron outright this summer even with the fortune of having DeAndre Jordan opt out of his deal.

What's frustrating is that it seems like the Clippers keep doing the opposite of what I specifically want the organization to do, which keeps coming back to bite us time and again. Remember, I didn't even want to sign Doc in the first place since I cited how overrated he was as a coach. I was resigned to support all of these moves after the fact only to be reminded time and again how futile it is to expect things to be different when they keep repeating the same mistakes.

Yeah, we're certainly in a much better position with Ballmer as owner instead of Donald T. Sterling. Likewise, we're definitely better off not having Doc serve as President of Basketball Operations while filling executive positions with respected figures like Michael Winger and Trent Redden, but like everything else, it just doesn't seem to be enough. We still have a suspect medical and training staff and our talent evaluation staff still seems short of capable personnel.

This is all emblematic with the way Gillian Zucker fumbled our logo and uniform redesign by outsourcing the task to a competitor's graphic design department located at the HEAT's headquarters. Even now, we're still stuck wearing second-rate garb as we are restricted from making drastic changes to the original half-assed redesign job. How can we be expected to be taken fully seriously when, top to bottom, we look and act like a second-rate organization?

Yes, I know we have high aims with our own sports arena being developed and the legitimacy of having the Logo in the fold, but progress still seems too little and too late at otherwise opportune moments. Ballmer's cluelessness led to early missteps that continue on today and keep us from capitalizing on opportunities that have presented themselves to us.

Aiming for 2019 with a projection of an abundance of cap space misses the mark then LeBron James was available in 2018. Even Kawhi Leonard is likely to be dealt and extended before becoming available as a free agent. So instead of giving out max contracts to players like LeBron and Kawhi (if fully healthy), whose value would even exceed such monetary investment, the Clippers are now aiming to overpay the likes of Klay Thompson and Kristaps Porzingis in 2019 instead?

There are oh so few players truly worthy of a maximum contract such as the aforementioned LeBron & healthy Kawhi along with Anthony Davis and Giannis Antetokounmpo and those players rarely, if ever, make it to free agency. The Clippers looked to have missed on the opportunity of going after 2 such players this off-season. I'm sorry, but holding out for the opportunity to overpay Klay Thompson as a necessary cost of doing business doesn't do it for me. And it shouldn't for organizations aiming to be great.

With star players being a rare and valuable commodity, you would think that the Clippers would prioritize that in our past draft, which is one of the few avenues where teams can obtain such players, but nope. We eschewed star potential for safer prospects who are promising albeit of the role player variety. I'm not even criticizing the team for bypassing Michael Porter, Jr. since I think he is a flawed prospect despite his talent even before his injury concerns.

As much as we hope for more promising outcomes, the Clippers keep behaving in ways conducive to producing middling results. Ballmer brings in the Logo and is supposedly paying him $5 million per year to not only set us on the right course but also close the deals that will eventually net us a LeBron or Kawhi and so far he hasn't been able to deliver on that as of yet. Now, I don't blame Jerry West for our continued failure to launch, but make no mistake, getting paid that much money engenders higher expectations for results.

The esteemed Mr. West is afforded more time since he's already made some notable progress in a short period while Doc has stayed on long past his welcome and continues to do so with Ballmer's indulgence and tolerance for mediocrity.

It was not much of a secret at all that LeBron was inclined to be in Los Angeles and in the end, Magic Johnson was the trump card that secured him for the Lakers, but one can't help but notice how we continue to come off as second-rate by comparison mostly because we continue to do business as usual in half-measure and middling fashion.

I guess the best we can hope for is that Ballmer and the front office figure everything out by the time we have our new state-of-the-art arena in place, but that is a long ways away and a lot of patience to ask for, especially when we could have accelerated this process a while ago based on obvious things that should have been done differently.

esqtvd · Post #14 » by **esqtvd** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 8:59 am

Ranma wrote:Tanking is not the word I would use but I was one of the early advocates for blowing up the team and doing a full rebuild when it was clear the Clippers were going nowhere after years of squandered opportunities and wasted assets under Doc's incompetent leadership. However, owner Steve Ballmer chose not only to continue on with Doc but extended him during this off-season. Hiring Jerry West as special adviser while keeping Doc's cronies around seems like a half-measure. In fact, everything we've done can be described in that fashion.

I favored keeping Chris Paul over Blake Griffin, but we lost Paul as Doc's antics in the front office pushed him out the door. We then scrambled to retain Blake Griffin in order to not lose him for nothing. Granted, the new front office was quick to dump Griffin and receive both Tobias Harris and a late-lottery pick, but we also doubled down on seeing what Griffin can do by signing Danilo Gallinari, a player I was never fond of and criticized as being injury prone. On top of that we re-signed Austin to an overpriced extension with a player option included no doubt at the behest of Daddy Doc. Both of those contracts kept the Clippers from having cap space to even sign LeBron outright this summer even with the fortune of having DeAndre Jordan opt out of his deal.

What's frustrating is that it seems like the Clippers keep doing the opposite of what I specifically want the organization to do, which keeps coming back to bite us time and again. Remember, I didn't want to even sign Doc in the first place since I cited how overrated he was as a coach. I was resigned to support all of these moves after the fact only to be reminded time and again how futile it is to expect things to be different when they keep repeating the same mistakes.

Yeah, we're certainly in a much better position with Ballmer as owner instead of Donald T. Sterling. Likewise, we're definitely better off not having Doc serve as President of Basketball Operations while filling executive positions with respected figures like Michael Winger and Trent Redden, but like everything else, it just doesn't seem to be enough. We still have a suspect medical and training staff and our talent evaluation staff still seems short of capable personnel.

This is all emblematic with the way Gillian Zucker fumbled our logo and uniform redesign by outsourcing the task to a competitor's graphic design department located at the HEAT's headquarters. Even now, we're still stuck wearing second-rate garb as we are restricted from making drastic changes to the original half-assed re-design job. How can we be expected to be taken fully seriously when, top to bottom, we look and act like a second-rate organization?

Yes, I know we have high aims with our own sports arena being developed and the legitimacy of having the Logo in the fold, but progress still seems too little and too late at otherwise opportune moments. Ballmer's cluelessness led to early missteps that continue on today and keep us from capitalizing on opportunities that have presented themselves to us.

Aiming for 2019 with a projection of an abundance of cap space misses the mark then LeBron James was available in 2018. Even Kawhi Leonard is likely to be dealt and extended before becoming available as a free agent. So instead of giving out max contracts to players like LeBron and Kawhi (if fully healthy) whose value would even exceed such monetary investment, the Clippers are now aiming to overpay the likes of Klay Thompson and Kristaps Porzingis in 2019 instead?

There are oh so few players truly worthy of a maximum contract such as the aforementioned LeBron & healthy Kawhi along with Anthony Davis and Giannis Antetokounmpo and those players rarely, if ever, make it to free agency. The Clippers looked to have missed on the opportunity of going after 2 such players this off-season. I'm sorry, but holding out for the opportunity to overpay Klay Thompson as a necessary cost of doing business doesn't do it for me. And it shouldn't for organizations aiming to be great.

With star players being a rare and valuable commodity, you would think that the Clippers would prioritize that in our past draft, which is one of the few avenues teams can obtain such players, but nope. We eschewed star potential for safer prospects who are promising albeit of the role player variety. I'm not even criticizing the team for bypassing Michael Porter, Jr. since I think he is a flawed prospect despite his talent even before his injury concerns.

As much as we hope for more promising outcomes, the Clippers keep behaving in ways conducive to producing middling results. Ballmer brings in the Logo and is supposedly paying him $5 million per year to not only set us on the right course but also close the deals that will eventually net us a LeBron or Kawhi and so far he hasn't been able to deliver on that as of yet. Now, I don't blame Jerry West for our continued failure to launch, but make no mistake, getting paid that much money engenders higher expectations for results.

The esteemed Mr. West is afforded more time since he's already made some notable progress in a short period while Doc has stayed on long past his welcome and continues to do so with Ballmer's indulgence and tolerance for mediocrity.

It was not much of a secret at all that LeBron was inclined to be in Los Angeles and in the end, Magic Johnson was the trump card that secured him for the Lakers, but one can't help but notice how we continue to come off as second-rate by comparison mostly because we continue to do business as usual in half-measure and middling fashion.

I guess the best we can hope for is that Ballmer and the front office figure everything out by the time we have our new state-of-the-art arena in place, but that is a long ways away and a lot of patience to ask for, especially when we could have accelerated this process a while ago based on obvious things that should have been done differently.

tl; dr

Apparently it's about Doc and the Staples Center and the uniforms to blame and something about Austin even though he was traded. Thanks for clearing it all up, bro. Rock on.

Post #15 » by **QRich3** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 9:56 am

We sure should. I'm a little bit pissed about all this 2019 capspace bullsh*t, it's costing us assets and it won't bring us anything good. Specially now that Lebron is on the Lakers, any significant free agent looking to live in LA is just gonna join him before coming to a lottery team. They should've been trading future capspace for assets and instead they're letting guys expire so they can make some misguided attempt at maxing Kyrie Irving or some crap like that?

I like that they're going after Looney, that's the type of player they should be trying to get, but all this stuff about resigning Bradley and going after Tolliver and KCP is not great at all.

I already said this after the Blake trade and the Lou extension, but I fear they are putting so many chips on the free agency/keep being competitive and attractive to free agents side of it, that they're gonna lose a lot of value from the gathering assets type of rebuild.

Sofia · Post #16 » by **Sofia** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 11:16 am

#shjttleforlittle

Captain Ballmer · Post #17 » by **Captain Ballmer** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 12:02 pm

I don't know how tanking helps with the new lottery system. We should play youth, but also showcase enough of Gallo, Lou and Bev for possible trade deadline movements.

Only exciments our team has besides the rookies is what will Tobias Harris do as a first option? That sums it up i guess.

MartinToVaught · Post #18 » by **MartinToVaught** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 2:46 pm

DieHardFan wrote:I don't know how tanking helps with the new lottery system.

It helps us keep our pick. That's all that matters this year.

Captain Ballmer · Post #19 » by **Captain Ballmer** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 6:52 pm

MartinToVaught wrote:
DieHardFan wrote:I don't know how tanking helps with the new lottery system.

It helps us keep our pick. That's all that matters this year.

Keeping our pick? so you are optimistic that this team can make playoffs if they dont tank. Sir I have news for you. Lakers Got LBJ and Dallas Get DJ and Doncic. I don't even wanna mention Memphis will being healthy. The three team that worst than us last year are better than us now. we were 10th in western conference, but now 12th best winning percentage looks optimistic.

nickhx2 · Post #20 » by **nickhx2** » Mon Jul 2, 2018 7:21 pm

not even remotely sure how we can compete for the playoffs with dj gone and gortat as his replacement.