THAT is why we need to tank to get the best chance to get as high a pick as possible so we can either use the pick to pick our next star, or trade for one. Other gm's wont be giving up the likes of anthony davis or demarcus cousins or any other promising young star big for AB and the 10th pick overall.
Tanking gives us two routes out of three to rebuilding a team, through trades and the draft. Winning the 8th seed keeps us in a perpetual state of mediocrity.
Well..
No GM in his right mind is going to trade an Anthony Davis or a Demarcus Cousins for ANY 'potential' top-10 pick prior to the lottery being set. And even after it is set, they are not likely to. MAYBE for the guaranteed #1 overall - depending on how 'sure thing' Wiggens (Parker?) look at the time of the draft.
Players like Davis and Cousins are realized bets. They have proven they can, indeed play in the NBA at a high level and thus have known high value. You don't exchange that for the risk that a draft pick entails. Too many 'sure thing' picks have turned into busts.
'Tanking' is a dubious strategy. In fact, calling it a 'strategy' is giving it too much credit. It is a double roll of the dice. Once on the lottery balls and again on the pick itself.
While it is definitely a truism that almost every single title team in the last 30 years has had at least one player who was drafted in the top 5, it is also true that only a tiny handful of those players won the title on the team that drafted them. Especially since the introduction of the weighted lottery system.
In fact, other than the Spurs, no team has won it all behind a player they drafted themselves with their own top 4 pick. Okay, Dallas won it in 2011 'with' Jason Kidd - who they indeed picked #2 way back in 1993...
This tells you that the teams that won with that talent mostly acquired it via trade or free agency.
Smart GMs, like any executives, run their business with factors they can control. You can't control the lottery balls and even top picks have big error bars of uncertainty around them.
Oden was taken right before Durant.
Darko was taken between Lebron and Carmelo.
A more deterministic model is to accumulate and develop tradable assets (players, contracts and future picks) and then leverage them for top 3 talent that was drafted by other teams - because that talent will have already shown whether it is a 'bust' or not.
Or, alternatively, use the picks of other, really bad teams to augment an already solid roster without having to be bad yourself. This is a tried-and-true Red strategy. Danny has acquired quite a few picks already. Now, certainly not all those Nets & Clippers picks look like they will be very high. But a couple of them look promising. The Nets look headed for a financial brick wall in 2016 that will take some tremendous shenanigans to avoid.
And Danny can trade others in deals and end up with other picks for teams that look like a better 'bet' to finish poorly in those future years. It is literally possible to look at the contract horizons of teams and make reasonable projections on how their fortunes might fair a few years down the road.
The point is, there is no reason to assume that the only way to 'become extemely good' is to 'be extremely bad'. Lots of title teams have managed to get there without having a single sub-30 win season in the prior 5 or so years before they got there.
Topic: Strictly Hypothetical: Would You Deal Rondo for Rose? (Read 23396 times)