Post#58 » by _s_t_u_r_t_ » Tue May 7, 2019 1:06 am
I realize of course that Schlenk threw cold water on my ambition for us to add 6 new rookies for this season, but Travis, if you're out there, let me make my case from a rational perspective....
Us Hawk fans are paying a price, and have been, ever since you arrived and the decision was made to tank for awhile.
So, for you this was a professional career decision. You almost certainly didn't grow up a Hawks fan. Nothing against you--most GMs aren't lifelong fans of their employer. But please hear the point, once you get this franchise to an NBA Finals for the first time since being in ATL, that will be enough to allow you to move to whatever NBA team you'd choose.
For us fans, most of us anyway, we're lifers.... given this team's history, if it were merely a consumer entertainment choice, we would have bailed long ago.
All of that to say, Travis, we have an emotional plea for you to care about more than merely getting this team to the Finals once, or even a couple of times. It's no fun to go through what we've went through for the last two years, and very possibly next year sitting out the playoffs, and maybe even the year after that, with only the reward of an eventual one-time visit to the Finals on the plus side of that ledger.
There's only so much that you can control, of course. But at least until the team gets Collins and Young signed to extensions and the team gets to its first conference finals at some point, it's assumed you're naturally going to be trying to do good by us. But I believe a lot of us feel we're entitled to more than that. You're getting something professionally out of this, at the price of our pain.
So, instead of thinking about this as a project that boils down to identifying 3-4 all-star-quality players for the roster, 1 of which is NBA elite, and filling-in the rest with a mixture of recent draftees and free agent contracts, consider please the advantages of emphasizing quantity in the mid-to-late first round in a draft like this one, where the top tier quality is so thin, but the middle tier quality is so thick.
1. This team is still in a development stage, by your own definition, Travis. There will never be a better time for an influx of rookie talent, unless we could go back in a time machine to OS 2017 or 2018.
2. For the foreseeable future, this team is likely going to be picking-up middle tier talent, drafting in the middle of the draft.
3. Given the unusual sameness of the talent inventory in this draft, to the degree you can take that #9 or #10 pick plus 3 upper 2nd round slots and trade into the #15-#30 range, it's conceivable you can seriously add additional middle tier talents that, going forward, you're only going to be adding once a year.
4. In terms of timing for contracts, it couldn't be better than to have the capacity to pick and choose from your OS 2019 draft harvest those players who you've developed and have good reason to want to keep, since those are low-cost guys you can then extend above the cap at a time when you're likely going to be over the cap and constricted from what free agents you can pursue.
5. Circling back to where this began, this is the kind of strategy that seems more likely to help any success the team enjoys in the next 4-5 years extend to 7-8 years. And we deserve that kind of long-term concern.
Granted, you can't just snap your fingers and make it happen, and there are always many things to assess before making any trade, especially draft-day trades. But the point here is that it's certainly not something to be rejected on its face. There is a cogent line of reasoning that would justify it.
Thanks for reading, Travis.
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