Good article on the subjcet.
Here are basically Arnovitz's points:
-Tanking is better than being a playoff team and losing in the first round (or even in the second)
-Gutted teams are easier to turn into championship-caliber teams than marginal playoff teams
-the Nuggets are basically a 6-8 seed at best, they should have tanked instead of signing nene and afflalo
The last point I'm going to return to later. First, let's talk about the other two points. I kind of did this the other day in my article on the Eric Gordon trade -- "rebuilding" is basically the NBA management playing the hamster running endlessly in the wheel. There are two key points:
The playoffs are pure marginal gross profit for an NBA team. This is because players are paid for the regular season, but beyond a per-diem, they don't get paid for the post-season.
Being the worst team in the league does NOT, in fact, offer very good opportunities to land the coveted "super-star" player. Ask Chicago, who waited about 10 years to land Rose. Or Minnesota, who have NEVER gotten the first pick (their management is terrible but not responsible for this bit of bad luck). The fact is that the #1 overall pick is about 4-6 times more likely to land a championship player than other lottery picks. Yet your chance of the #1 pick is very low, even if you are the worst team in the league.
To point one, if you use the NBA's total payroll to estimate how much a win *costs*, it works out to about $1.5 million. This means that any playoff win is worth at least that much (likely more because of increased attendance). Winning a first round is probably easily worth $10+ million to an NBA franchise. Add to that the fact that a playoff team earns a lot more in regular season revenue than a lottery team and the difference between a lottery team and a playoff team is, financially speaking, huge. As long as you don't overpay for your talent (*cough* knickerbockers *cough*) this is likely to be worth a hell of a lot more than the revenue sharing check the NBA sends you each year, especially once the salary floor moves up to 90% of the cap, which will cost those cap-space-saving teams multiple millions per year in tax payment reductions. If the NBA's revenue sharing plan is really lucrative enough to make this assumption false, then the Lakers, Knicks, and Heat did a pretty poor job negotiating with the small-market teams. In other words, fielding a lottery team costs a ****-load of money.
To point two, I just don't see the big advantage that the team stocked with cap room and lottery picks has over some other team that just needs "one more piece" to contend. Let's look at those middle-of-the-road teams that Arnovitz dreads so much and see how many of them managed to acquire a superstar:
The Lakers have done it so often it's practically their business model. Yes, I know, free agents want to go there, but many of their players came in trade or the draft. They were about a 45-win team when they got Shaq. Kobe was drafted. They got Pau for a song (remember how the Lakers were like an 8th seed team with just Kobe? Yeah, Pau is that good).
The Trailblazers were a middling team when they landed Oden; they were unlucky that he's not healthy, but in the few games he's played, he's played like a premier big man.
Remember Detroit landing Rasheed Wallace in his prime?
The perennial first-round-losers Minnesota (the very definition of the type of team that Arnovitz dreads) grabbed both Cassell and Sprewell in 2003 for basically a bunch of expiring deals, and won 61 games in a ridiculously tough western conference. If Cassell had not gone down, I'm about certain they would have defeated the Lakers that year -- the Kings team they beat in the semis was a better team than that Laker team. Admittedly the Wolves had some luck that year with Wally's injury, he was terrible but got lots of minutes, but his injury forced management to play the fantastic Fred Hoiberg lots of minutes instead.
The Spurs lucked into Tim Duncan when they already had David Robinson, but for the 3rd ring, Ginobli and Parker were pretty instrumental, and they got those players through shrewd drafting. Perhaps they were just flukes, but the fact that the Spurs also grabbed the amazing DeJuan Blair as well makes me suspect otherwise.
Remember the Rockets grabbing Clyde Drexler? Yeah, that was a good move.
Remember the Heat trading for Shaq? Yeah, that was smart too.
Now quick, name six "rebuilding teams" that went from zero to contender without luckboxing the #1 pick. What I find especially funny is everyone claiming that they want to use "the OKC model". You know what you need to use that model? Sam ****ing Presti. The OKC model is nothing special, it's just "being better at evaluating talent than all the conventional-wisdom pundits on the other teams". The reason it works is because a) Presti is smart and b) there are teams like the Celtics run by GMs dumb enough to think that Jeff Green is good who are willing to trade with the smart Sam Presti. It should be immediately obvious why this is not going to work for everyone else.
I agree with his points. Don't blow it up just to tank; it probably won't help.
the fact that tanking is not a guaranteed way to get back to the top doesn't change the fact that it's also the most likely way to get back there.
as the article points out, the financial side of things is really the main determining factor. can your team take the financial hit of intentionally being bad for a few years? many teams can't, which is why they maintain the status quo even when their roster is clearly not good enough to be better than middle-of-the-road.
boston's owners want to win and they have deep pockets, so hopefully they're willing to be bad for as long as it takes to get the assets required to get good again.
also, i wholeheartedly disagree with the assertion that Sam Presti is just so much smarter than everybody else and Danny Ainge is dumb. that last bit of the article smacks of bias. Danny Ainge is not David Kahn. the Perk trade may not look great in hindsight, but there's a reason that hindsight is 20/20. it was a gamble at the time, but a reasonable one, given Perk's impending free agent status and Ainge's desire not to lock up long term cap space on role players (yes, Perk is a role player).
Presti is smart, but his model is possible to follow if you have good talent evaluators in your front office; whatever anybody wants to say about him, I don't think you can argue that Danny is not a good talent evaluator. I trust Danny to make good decisions when the team is drafting high again.
