Mark Cuban quote on tanking.

[LilRip]

OKC didnt have a winning culture before westbrook and durant and harden. now look

And they haven't won anything still either and I don't see them winning it all anytime soon.

oh right, because Westbrook and Durant are already way past their primes. sure they haven't won a championship but if OKC offered us Westbrook-Durant-Ibaka for Rondo-Green-Olynyk or Sully (assuming the salaries magically work), i'd do that trade in a heartbeat.

People are not knocking on their talent. It is outstanding. But they are questioning whether it is easy to overcome tanking and install a winning culture. Look at Cavs, Pistons, Bobcats, Wizards aso who have all tried to copy OKC, but have been left with less talent. And none of them have been in the playoffs while doing that. And with Oden in stead of Durant, OKC would probably have been a borderline lottery team for the last three or four seasons.

Saying something as bold as "they haven't won anything and likely won't anytime soon" is absolutely a knock on their talent. And I also disagree with the notion that winning a championship is some sort of a prerequisite for a winning culture. A team full of scalabrines will not win a ring but it will have a "winning culture".

[Galeto]

I don't get this changed culture business.  You know what was a big factor in "changing the culture?"  Turning over about 62 percent of the roster from 2007 to 2008.  Or having only 4 players remain from the 2006 team.  They shipped out a ton of inexperienced and/or bad defenders/players from 2006 to 2008, replaced them with a bunch of good defenders to go with the good defenders they'd kept and voila, they were a great defensive team.  It wasn't because of some KG-induced culture change.  I love KG but I always thought that was nonsense.  Whose culture did he have to change?  There was almost no one from the previous team left!  Sport narratives are always the worse and most cliched.

Building through the draft is always tricky because you're at the mercy of draft odds and the quality of a certain draft.  Even if you get lucky and get a top three pick in a supposed three player draft more than once, there may be no franchise-caliber player available.  Even so, it can still come down to drafting the right players.  Minnesota has been unlucky with draft balls and weak drafts but they would have escaped the lottery merry-go-round much sooner had they not picked busts like Wesley Johnson and Johnny Flynn.  Maybe teams get stuck in the lottery because they have a lottery-worthy GM. 

The first time the Lakers were in the lottery in ages and still only picking 10, they managed to snag Bynum.  Kupchak knows what he's doing.  Maybe without Bynum they're not good enough in 2008 to where they don't make a play for Gasol, even if they ended getting him for little value at the time.  Maybe Kobe isn't even there in 2008 because he finally pressed the Lakers enough to trade him before then. 

I'm not as high on Ainge's drafting acumen as I was previously but most of the recent busts have come in the late first round.  If he can pick the right guys in the lottery in the next few years, the Celtics rebuilding period shouldn't stretch for ages. 

[Boris Badenov]

As much as the celtics franchise did have a culture of winning, it was somewhat lost by the time the 07-08 season rolled around. It was Kevin Garnett the brought the winning attitude back here

I agree with you 100%. Garnett was a huge part of it. So were Pierce, Allen, Doc, Rondo and everyone else.

It's interesting though that all of those players, and Doc, had been part of "cultures" of not contending right until they all came together. Garnett in particular had been criticized heavily for not taking his teams farther.

The T-Wolves were 32-50 in the year before KG got traded. Ray Allen's Sonics were 31-51. Pierce's and Rondo's Celtics were 24-58.

And yet, once you put the talent together that "culture" didn't matter much.

This is what I am saying about Cuban's argument. It doesn't fit the facts.

[Galeto]

What is this nonsense about winning attitude?  Only three seasons before in 2005, they finished above five hundred.  It wasn't like this franchise had been mired in the dumps for decades before 2008.  They hadn't been close to their championship standard but it wasn't like the memory of the playoffs or a winning season was something only the fans of the eighties and early nineties could still recall. 

KG's a great leader but it wasn't like he succeeded in inculcating Ricky Davis and Mark Blount into the culture of winning over in Minnesota.  And believe you me, those two guys needed more instruction on winning than anybody else.  Ricky "Buckets" Davis in particular has to have one of the lowest winning percentages in NBA history.  It's possible to give KG a ton of credit for the turnaround with going overboard and falling into sport cliches.

In 2008, they simply assembled the most talented and well-constructed team in the league.  They had everything.  They  had long-range shooters, mid-range shooters, charge takers, rebounders, passers, high IQ players, smallball versatility, one of the best defensive coaches in NBA history, and a player who could get to the line and even out matchups against prolific foul-drawers like Lebron or Kobe.  They could've been an expansion team and they still would've been great.

[chambers]

Think about how terrible the Mavericks would be if they hadn't luck boxed Dirk at number 9? The entire reason they have one championship is because of their lottery pick Dirk lol.
Without him they'd have stunk for 15 years.

[European NBA fan]

"A quick story. The week I bought the Mavs I was asked by Nellie if I wanted to bag the season in order to get the best draft pick that we could. My response was “No. At some point this franchise has to learn how to win and develop a culture of winning. You don't create that culture by tanking the season. I don't know how many games we can win, but we are going to try to win every one of them.” Thank goodness we didn't tank the season It wasn't a very good draft. And that turn around for the rest of the season helped define who we were and are to this day."

This view is irrelevant for our current situation.

We tanked ONE YEAR BEFORE winning our last championship. So, either
(a) It's a heck of a lot easier to "develop a culture of winning" than Cuban thinks, or;
(b) Our culture of winning as the Celtics is strong enough to overcome a year of tanking - and very quickly, at that.

In either case, tanking this coming year wouldn't hurt us.

The Celtics are the perfect example that it is NOT easy, and that you have to make BIG changes to get there.

First of all we got Kevin Garnett, who everybody says changed the Celtics culture. Secondly Doc had to revisit his basketball philosophy and come up with Ubuntu to get everybody on the same page. That's two pretty huge steps. And it might not have worked with bigger egos.

PS. Getting Kevin Garnett was not easy, either. Danny had to wait a couple of years for that kind of trade, after the decision to go in that direction had been made.

I'm not sure why what you're saying here would constitute a response to my post.

Of course it's not easy to get better, and of course it requires big changes. Those things are pretty obvious.

I'm just saying that Cuban's view that tanking poisons a franchise is directly contradicted by the Celtics' transformation from 2007 to 2008. So, either he's wrong, or the Celtics are different from the Mavs.

And I'm just saying that there are plenty of examples of the opposite (Wizards, Bobcats, Raptors, Pistons and more) and that the Celtics are the only team in recent years that have made the transition from tanking losers to champions.

I'm not sure how what you're saying differs from "more teams don't win championships than do win championships."

If you pick any strategy - whether it's getting high picks, or signing free agents, or making smart trades, or some combination - there are going to be more losers than winners for each strategy. Only one team wins a championship  and many don't each year.

And the Celts are not the first team to be very bad and then win a championship, or even more than one, in short order. The Spurs did it too. So did the Celtics in the 1980s.

Cuban's entitled to his opinion but it's not like he uncovered some great truth that applies to the Celtics' situation right now.

The point is that if many teams go down the tanking road in the same seasons, it gets harder to pick top talent two or three years in a row. Cuban just didn't believe that the odds were with the Mavs, and that it was worth taking down everything they have built up for. As you said, teams can't generalize from that, they have to look at the hand that they have been dealt. It's like playing a very prolonged poker game.

The Celtics 2007 had nothing to lose, neither did San Antonio in 1997 or the OKC when they were moving out of Seattle. The question for the Celtics this season is whether they have something that they want to hold on to or not.