well looks like OKC will surpass the Sixers tank job now and no one bats an eye about it. How the times have changed?
LOL.
Lol yeah this is my reaction too. Guess the pitchforks should come out cause a guy had a freak injury.
How dare Chet Holmgren get injured and OKC becomes a lottery team again!
It’s very funny. Philly drafted players that were already injured and sat simmons, noel and Embid out their entire rookie season. This is clearly a different thing than drafting a healthy guy that gets hurt in a pro am. People still with an axe to grind about the process are honestly pretty weird at this point imo. It’s been close to a decade since that started and they never made it out of the second round. It’s clearly not some amazing thing that happened and looking back at that process thread now is just flat out embarrassing for some posters here with okafor in China, saric a fringe nba player and Noel a second or third string center. Some people just get emotionally invested I guess and stop being objective.
Yeah, for all of Philly's draft picks, they hit one grand slam, and have an old Harden. Maxey is a very nice player, but he wasn't part of the "process".
It's interesting to think that they could have Embiid, Ingram and Tatum right now. Does that validate the process, because those players were available, or undercut it because draft evaluators are imperfect?
Simmons is far more decorated than Ingram. Has the All NBA 3rd team, the two 1st team Defense, more all star games (3 to 1), finished 2nd and 4th in DPOY voting, and even got some MVP votes in a season. He left Philly badly and has now missed 2 full seasons (1 for injury, 1 for mental health), but Ingram isn't on the team that drafted him either.
But that was the entire point of a multi-year tank i.e. the draft is a crap shoot and you need to maximize your chance of landing the elite players.
Also, for the record the Thunder did not sign a single free agent this summer and the one veteran they acquired in the draft day trade i.e. JaMychal Green they waived (they got a 1st to take him on). They weren't acting like a team that was trying to win before Holmgren got injured. They were clearly going to tank this season regardless, Holmgren's injury just gives them a better excuse to do so. Remember this was a team that prior to the start of last season that the entire team had played less combined minutes than Lebron James had and that included Favors and Muscala. They still have 10 players that are in their 1st or 2nd year and Muscala and Favors are still the only players with 5 or more years experience. They are not a team trying to win games and given that in each of the last two seasons they have completely shut down anyone that was "good" the latter part of the season, they are now entering their 3rd year of blatant tanking, which puts them directly in the Sixers Process category of tanking. Also, not sure why Simmons is being brought up in the same vein as Noel and Embiid, because Simmons wasn't hurt when he was drafted and was in fact hurt in a Sixers practice at the end of September when he broke his foot (sounds like a pretty similar injury to Holmgren).
