Bensational wrote:Skin wrote:
The future needs to be focused on building the best team they can around Fultz, Okeke, Isaac, Bamba and their pick this year.
I'm with you moving Fournier being more or less inconsequential to the rest of the team. But I don't agree the team should be building a team around any of those guys named above.
Everyone should give up on considering Isaac as a basketball player until he can provide some quality healthy time for an extended period. Seeing people make plans for the team's future involving him makes me feel ill - it's like trying to pretend Grant Hill will be as good as he used to all over again. He's gone all next season, and then how long do we evaluate with him before we decide he's proven healthy enough that we can factor him into crucial plans?
Bamba seems like someone we should cut free. We're clearly not going to give him the focus and attention he needs to really accelerate his growth whilst Vuc is here, and now he has health complications due to covid. Even without Vuc blocking his way, I'm not sure how long it takes for Mo to 'get it' even if his strength and conditioning comes through.
Fultz has skills, but he still looks scared on the court, and his engagement levels wax and wane too much for my liking.
Okeke hasn't touched the court yet. I have no expectations for him, and just hope that he hasn't lost too much of a step or rhythm after all his time off.
So next season we have Fultz, maybe Bamba, and whatever Okeke can offer. Plus whoever our rookie is.
That's a seriously depressing 'future' after 3 years of WeHam, unless they knock this next draft pick out of the park. We might be better off flipping youth and trying some new names.
Understandable, but WeHam's vision has to be given a chance to sink or swim in order for this Front Office to be fairly graded. If it fails, they fail and must be replaced. If not, then they keep coasting by wasting more years. Maintaining status quo can seem like "winning" in the eyes of ownership because they are not "losing", but we all know that we are a floundering team with no future with our current leadership core of players.
You could be right OR you could be wrong. Honestly, a large part of this depends on coaching and development. Don't let semantics get in the way though. When I say we should build around these guys, I'm not saying "these are our stars that we need to permanently build around". I'm saying "these are our guys that we need to invest our focus on" right now because we need to figure out who to keep and who to not keep.
There is no T-Mac here who I'm saying we need to "build around". We should be in constant churn, developing and evaluating our talent. We did that with the young Payton, Oladipo, Fournier, Hezonja, Harris, Gordon, Vuc era. The problem is we pushed all the wrong buttons. We drafted for straight BPA (I prefer BPA that fills a need - unless it's a can't miss player). We overlapped talent, created an unbalanced roster, made bad trades, players competed with each other, divisions were created, we had poor chemistry, endured a lot of losing, hired the wrong coaches, Alex Martins tried to do damage control, didn't tank hard enough, spent money on the wrong FAs, etc etc etc.
Now here we are with Fultz, Okeke, Isaac, Bamba, 15. I'm happy that at least we haven't overlapped talent with premium draft picks. I'm happy that there seems to be a vision for the kind of team they want to build. Eventually we need to figure out if they are piece of the future or not. That's more along the lines of what I mean of building our future around them. If they hit on their drafted potential, I don't see why they couldn't be building blocks. Too early in my mind to make final determinations on them.