I'm treating these games as extension of preseason

[Somebody]

To be fair, I have consistently said the failure to pick a direction meant Boston wasn't going to win a title or even be a real contender, and Boston hasn't been one of those. 

Depending on how the season shakes out, Boston might very well make the ECF again this year (match-ups will be important), but team still won't be a contender as presently constructed.  Enough talent for a nice regular season and a fun little post-season run, but not enough talent to actually win.  That has absolutely been the case the last 4 years, is the case this year, and will continue to be the case going forward with a major move of some kind.

If we're going to set the bar this high for what makes a team a "real" contender, then we're basically just shuffling deck chairs until we have a clear cut MVP candidate (i.e. top 5ish player) plus another top 20 player.  We've seen that for the most part that is what it takes to be more than a dark horse / second tier contender.

Long ago, I reached the conclusion that you can't really *plan* to end up in that position.  Unless you're the Lakers.  Every other team has to basically do everything right and get really lucky to have a guy under contract who is in the MVP conversation and also have a top 20 guy.

Not to mention that even once you get that in place, you have to have good chemistry, a decent enough supporting cast to make it through a long season and playoff run, and you need to have luck with injuries.

I think you can plan to build a very good team around a couple of perennial All-Star type talents and try to maximize your chances to have a break out season due to some luck or one or two of your supporting guys breaking out unexpectedly.



You could make the argument that Harden is a MVP candidate  every season, Tatum is a top 20 guy, and that those two together would make you a "real" contender.  But the team would have an extremely threadbare supporting cast, there would be major chemistry issues, and you'd only get a couple bites at the apple.  I think you'd basically be guaranteeing that Tatum leaves in a few years, too, irrespective of whether you win a title.


I'd rather just ride or die with Jayson and Jaylen, see what Ainge and co. can do to manage and improve the supporting cast around them, and see what Brad can do to maximize the rosters he's given.

At the end of the day, they may never be a "real" contender in any given season, but I think they'll be far more enjoyable and if they do make it to the Finals or even win a title, the culmination of that story will make it so much more significant.


Anyway, I reject the "real" contender framing just because I think it sets up an unrealistic standard for what we're "allowed" to enjoy as fans or regard as a "good" team.  I think if you have that mindset, you're almost never going to be particularly happy with the product on the floor unless the team happens to have that generation's LeBron, Bird, Jordan, Kobe, Duncan etc on the floor.  And again, unless you're the Lakers, most teams only get a guy like that once in a lifetime.


I guess my philosophy is that it makes a lot more sense to try to build a team like the 00s Mavericks (very good team built around one top 5-15 player that stayed really good for a long time) instead of feeling that it's necessary to put together the Bron/Wade Heat or the Curry/Durant Warriors in order to be a "real" contender. 

I also think that looking at the team building process that way is a lot healthier from a fan standpoint.


Personally I think it's a lot of fun to watch a team make a run to the ECF or the Finals even if it doesn't end in a title.  I think that only gets stale if you don't see any signs of steady improvement.  If it truly stagnates, I think that would sour things for the players, too.  At that point you do need to shake things up (see: what the Raptors did trading Derozan for a year of Kawhi).  Like it did with the Raptors, that can pay off, even though it's risky to put it all on one season (see: four bounces game winner).

Eh you don't have to get an MVP candidate and an All-NBA sidekick in order to be a real title contender. Plenty of teams have won or competed for championships without having a true MVP calibre player - the 70s Celtics/Sonics /Bullets, the 80s/90s Pistons, the 90s Blazers/Pacers, the 2000s Kings/Nets/Pistons and the 2010s Spurs come to mind. We can absolutely compete for a title if Brown and Tatum both develop into top 10-20 players, but what we're doing right now is hoping that Tatum becomes a top 5 guy while shackling Brown - a team with a fringe top 15-20 player pretending that he's an MVP candidate is going to look **** next to genuine title contenders.

Dave Cowens not only won the MVP, he finished in the top 4, for 4 straight seasons (and was 7th the year before he won it).  Pretty hard to say he wasn't a MVP caliber player.

The Bullets had MVP Wes Unseld and 3-time, top 5 MVP finisher Elvin Hayes.  Dandridge also finished in the top 5 once. 

I'll give you the 70's Sonics.

The Pistons had 5 different players that received MVP votes and only 1, was a 1 season wonder (Laimbeer finished 12th one year).  Thomas finished in the top 5 in MVP voting and both Dumars and Rodman had top 10 MVP vote getting seasons.  Aguirre finished as high as 11. 

Drexler finished 2nd one year, had a top 5, and top 6 appearance as well.  Pretty hard to say he wasn't a MVP caliber player.

The Pacers made the Finals once, didn't win, in a very odd year.  Though no MVP caliber player.

Both Webber and Peja had top 5 MVP seasons and they never even made the Finals.

The Nets were led by Jason Kidd.  Not sure how anyone could claim he wasn't a MVP caliber player, you know since he got votes in 8 different seasons and finished as high as 2nd. 

I get that Wallace was terrible offensively, but he was so good defensively that he ended up in the top 10 in MVP voting 3 times along with the 4 DPOY.  Billups finished 5th and 6th (along with two others seasons of getting votes).  Even Rasheed had 2 seasons of receiving votes.  They certainly didn't have a super duper star, but the Pistons had a lot more talent then they've been given credit for having. 

The Spurs, come on.  Putting TD aside (though he did finish 12th their last title year), Parker finished 5th and 6th in consecutive seasons leading up to the title (that year he tied TD for 12th) and he had 7 seasons garnering MVP votes, despite playing with TD all those years.  Manu also had 3 seasons of MVP votes finishing as high as 8th in 2011. 

There is a difference between a MVP caliber player and the Super Duper Gold Medal Superstars.  You can win without the Gold Medal Superstar, it is rare, but it happens.  It is almost impossible to win a championship without a consistent top 5ish player and a lot of champions have 2 of those guys.

Voting was wild back then - Dave Cowens won the MVP over guys like Jabbar and Frazier. Nevertheless he wasn't the "MVP calibre" guy he was in the early 70s on that '76 title team, which serves to support my point that you don't need an MVP calibre player to win titles.

Same case for Wes Unseld (he won the MVP over the big 4 in the 60s lol), ntm he wasn't the same player in '78 - Hayes and Dandridge were the team's best players and neither of them were particularly close to being a real MVP calibre player in the late 70s.

None of those Pistons players received a good amount of votes in those title years, and Laimbeer, Thomas, Dumars and Aguirre were nowhere close to being MVP calibre players.

Drexler's finishes serve as a very strong argument that using accolades or voting to evaluate a player's quality is incredibly flawed: he was the figurehead of a very deep and balanced team that fit around his strengths well while compensating for his weaknesses rather than quarterbacking an average cast into contention or catapulting a quality squad into dominance.

Those Pacer teams had great point differentials and were incredibly difficult to eliminate in the playoffs every single year, they were absolutely title contenders who had the misfortune of running into dominant teams (the only CF/finals series where you can say they dropped the ball a bit was 1999 against the Knicks, but that team was on a '81 Rockets type of run where everyone was on fire).

Webber's defensive woes were downplayed while his poor scoring efficiency dragged down his offensive efficacy and Peja was never really that type of guy offensively - those Kings teams were balanced squads with multiple stars who fit well together (Divac was an underrated two-way star in the late 90s/early 00s) and were coached well by Rick Adelmann to get the most out of them on both ends of the floor.

People can claim that he wasn't an MVP calibre player because he was in a similar situation to Drexler? Those Nets teams were absolutely loaded defensively, you don't truly deserve MVP consideration by quarterbacking a below average offence and being a non-anchor entity on an elite defensive squad (Kidd was definitely one of the best defensive guards of all time, but he doesn't move the needle on that end like an elite rim protector).

Same thing for the Pistons, Wallace is in line with defensive giants like Gobert/Mutombo/Eaton/Draymond who all aren't MVP talents. Billups was in a Kidd-like situation offensively without the top-end defence and Rasheed wasn't the same guy he was in the early 2000s. They had the perfect team construction for teams that didn't have an MVP calibre player: get two All-NBA defensive anchors and a perimeter star who can make sure that the offence doesn't suck too much alongside two-way pieces at the wing.

Putting aside Duncan (that 12th placed finish was more of a sympathy vote than an actual reflection of his quality in 2014), Parker was overhyped by the media because he was the best offensive player on a balanced team that used a ball-movement offence to get more out of the sum of their parts while Manu aged out of stardom right after that 2011 season. The 2013 and 2014 Spurs that contended for titles consisted of a very old Duncan who was more of a fringe All-NBA talent at that point with elite defence, quick-burst low post scoring and above average passing, a rapidly aging Ginobili who was a Smart level player (top 40ish) and peak Parker who was great but more of a top 10-15 player than a guy competing for MVPs against the likes of LeBron/Durant/CP3.

There is a difference between the guys you've mentioned, but the MVP calibre player is better than you think while there are only a handful of gold medal guys, and all of the teams above didn't have a player who was in either class when they were competing for titles.