Don't panic. Just accept that this team is irrelevant for the long haul. Your favorite team is an also-ran. You're rooting for a perpetually mediocre treadmill squad with no hope of contending. Half the league is like that. Accept that we aren't special. Our crappy assets are the same as everyone else's crappy assets. Ainge spoiled us. We lost sight of how impossible it is to trade into a contender. Aside from our little 3.5 year window of contending, we have been like that more or less for 25 years. We will make the playoffs sometimes. We will miss the playoffs sometimes. We will add some garbage players. We will stumble into a fringe star like Al Jefferson every 10 years... But we will not matter. This team will not matter. We will be on the outside looking in. This is not our league. It belongs to teams like Cleveland, golden state, Oklahoma... And eventually it will belong to teams like Minnesota and Philly. We are the Washington Generals. If you see our face, it will probably be on the other end of someone's boot in dunk posters and sportscenter highlights.
The sooner you accept that the sooner you can start celebrating the moral victories... Like stumbling into a Delote West from time to time in the draft, or landing a serviceable big man like Rodney Rodgers or amir Johnson... Or making the playoffs with a losing record.
We spent the majority of the last 3 decades in this spot. Welcome back. Rub KG's pixie dust out of your eyes... You have been here for a few years now and didn't even notice it. Time to accept it. There's no easy way out of it. Here's hoping one of these years we bottom out and finally luck into a cornerstone. Accept our futility and this will all be easier to stomach.
Or you can sit here for the next 20 years and keep waiting for that "other shoe" to drop that never comes. That will just lead to disappointment.
Let's see about that...
I don't necessarily disagree with your evaluation at the top, and the path to get there is really hard, but I think the Magic, the Jazz or the Bucks, the way they have been managing their franchises, have a lot more chances of getting a title than the 76ers or the Wolves.
Before last season started, I would have put the Spurs, Thunder, Clippers, Rockets and maybe even the Mavs ahead of Golden State. To me, at the start of 2014-15, they had as many chances as the Wizards in the east...
It's hard to tell in advance what it takes to make the jump from a very good team to a champion. But I'm certain that by the time the Wolves and 76ers develop those supposedly good players they have... they'll be all jumping ship.