All this talk about trading Rondo and tanking made me want to start a thread to talk about that, so here goes.
Tanking Sucks
Ok, everyone knows that it's painful to sit through a season watching your team tank for a lottery pick. 40 minutes of Courtney Lee should be just about enough to make any grown man cry, after all.
But no pain, no gain, right? In the end it's worth it if you tanking helps your team set itself up for a championship, right? Well... what if I told you that it doesn't? That's right - it turns out winning is correlated with, well, winning, and losing is correlated with losing. Think of how many bottom-feeding teams there are in this league that fail to go anywhere DESPITE primo access to top draft picks. Charlotte Bobcats, anyone? How about those Wizards?
In fact, good teams that have good management and are consistently GOOD tend to continue to be good. Look at the Spurs, for example. When is the last time you saw the Lakers intentionally tank? Or the Heat? Or the Mavericks? Hell, even the Pacers, Grizzlies, and other teams that have been playoff threats over the last few years... none of them has "tanked" in the recent past. But this is just a lead-in to my primary example:
The Houston Rockets.
Daryl Morey wholly rejected the idea of tanking, and instead chose to persistently build the best possible team by sweeping up the good players and valuable ones (meaning good contracts on reasonably good players) until the final pieces of the puzzle fell together. He basically said to the league "Screw you, I'm better at evaluating talent. I'm going to put out a competitive team every year until free agent superstars who are serious about winning realize that this is where they can go to do just that, because I've built the perfect complementary pieces." Seems to have worked out for them.
What about the OKC model? Well, turns out that blind luck (which is what the lottery is) can't do everything for you. Sure it got them Durant, but the irony is that if they had been "lucky" enough to get the number 1 pick their prize would have been Greg Oden. What about Russell Westbrook and James Harden? Well, there goes that bad management again... OKC had a choice to make and they chose wrong, despite getting an absolute STEAL in the draft with Harden, again as a result of blind luck. Westbrook is seriously overrated, and sooner or later the league is going to catch on to that. Sure, blind luck was good enough for a finals appearance but when you lucked into getting the second best player in the league in Durant, you should be expecting more than that.
The bottom line is that both methods can work. It's just that tanking relies largely on blind luck, while doing it the old fashioned way can guarantee consistent results. Draft smart, acquire good/valuable players, save that cap room, and you're more likely to rise to the top than somebody who is collecting lottery draft picks left and right like the Pelicans.
Ok, this is Celtics Talk. How does this relate to the Celtics?
Well, Ainge has been doing essentially the opposite of that by picking up overrated, over-the-hill players and other assorted bums. Sure, he's made some great moves (bringing the big 3 together, drafting Rondo, Perk) but since then he's fallen off hard, to the point where even trying to stay competitive is an impossibility at this point. Ainge has had some success in the draft despite a lot of misses if you consider Bradley and Sullinger, so I'll give him credit there.
But his free agency moves have been flat-out horrendous. Selling high on Perk after his injury was a good idea, but what we got for him was fools gold - Jeff Green has so consistently failed to live up to the hype that now pretty much nobody expects him to do anything at all, except for the few crazies remaining who think he could be an all-star this year, who will undoubtedly be disappointed once again. The remainder of players that he has brought in is a veritable list of shame, all players past their prime or damaged goods:
Delonte West
Nenad Krstic
Troy Murphy
Jermaine Oneal
Marquis Daniels
Carlos Arroyo
Von Wafer
Ryan Hollins
Chris Wilcox
Keyon Dooling
Sasha Pavlovic
How many of those guys are even still in the league?
Now we have to deal with the contracts of Gerald Wallace (10 mil a year for 3 years, jesus) Jeff Green (9 mil a year for possibly 3 more years, ugh) Courtney Lee (5 mil a year for 3 more years) and Kris Humphries (12 mil for this year, WHAT?) Brandon Bass (7 mil a year for 2 years).
Not one of these is a high-value contract. That means we have absolutely zero assets, other than Rondo and Sullinger. We're basically in a position where it is IMPOSSIBLE for us to compete, and, hell, at this point we almost might as well tank because that's all we can do. We're in Bobcat territory now, and it's terrifying.
Compare this to the Rockets, who are paying Omer Asik and Jeremy Lin 5 mil apiece this year, and 1 mil a year for EXTREMELY solid players like Chandler Parsons, Patrick Beverly, Aaron Brooks, Terrence Jones and Omri Caspi.
That's how you're supposed to play the GM game, not the way Ainge is doing it.
