Pickled Prunes wrote:kuclas wrote:Pickled Prunes wrote:Agreed, Windbag is just that... a windbag!
That said, I can't be the only one enjoying watching "The Process" fail. Losing on purpose has lead to losing on accident and it feels like just desert. Tanking is disrespectful to the game. I wish all the players well personally, and I send my condolences to the fans who have lived through this.... but I hope it blows up! The worst possible outcome for the NBA would have been that PHI sucked on purpose for 4 years and then won rings the moment they began to try.
Screw you too, GSW... I hope your draft pick is a bust!
Multiple teams have tanked on purchase Seattle/okc started it. Atlanta and Chicago are currently on year 3 of the tank? Dallas tanked. Now golden state.
Sure, but PHI was the first team to make it their five year mission to boldly go where no tank has gone before. They didn't just decide to shut guys down at the AS break or bring guys back from injury slow. They committed to living in the cellar for half a decade.
The 76ers didn't plan such a long tank. They just did the usual process of trading away vets that could get the team wins but not enough to get them into championship contention, and focusing on developing younger players. They also consciously chose not to acquire more vets that could help them get wins, until they landed players in the draft they could believe in, as part of the "process". They did a great job developing young guys like Jerami Grant, Dario Saric, and Robert Covington, and they managed to flip their failed ROTY for draft assets (MCW). All of that was fairly standard rebuild procedure, with a little extra emphasis on not playing or acquiring vets, but it wasn't some 5-year super-tank plan. That was just an accident of circumstance. It just so happened that they missed on a few of picks, and Embiid and Simmons both took longer than expected to play in the league.
The main differences in a full-season tank-job, an in-season tank, and a standard rebuild is that tanking usually involves refusing to play/acquire many or any vets who could help a team win. Teams like the Celtics, Mavericks, and, most recently, the Thunder committed to rebuilds while still playing to win. Circumstances led to their various outcomes, not conscious full-season tanking. Even the Warriors had no intention going into this season of becoming a last place team, but they went into tank mode as the season started to turn sour, which is very different than the 76ers full-season "process" tank.
Tanking isn't really that common. It most famously goes back much further than "the process" though. The Rockets infamously tanked their way to drafting Hakeem, and it was that obvious effort that caused the league to create the lottery system. The league has been tweaking that system ever since to try to prevent purposeful losing, which the most recent change has probably helped. Once a team experiences some bad luck though, that purposeful losing appears to be inevitable as long as there is some draft reward for the worst teams.