Zack Lowe article on rebuilding vs reloading

[LGC88]

Well, I think it's not Danny's fault that those compiling assets bring us to the middle. Usually those types of assets result in a lottery type of team. But for that to happen we should have taken a mediocre coach and probably not being a franchise with team oriented spirit and fight hard.
We are the opposite of that, you can't tank AND collect assets in the mean time in Boston apparently.
So we are in the middle waiting to strike gold with one of our young or picks, or get a star via trade.

[PhoSita]

Well, I think it's not Danny's fault that those compiling assets bring us to the middle. Usually those types of assets result in a lottery type of team. But for that to happen we should have taken a mediocre coach and probably not being a franchise with team oriented spirit and fight hard.
We are the opposite of that, you can't tank AND collect assets in the mean time in Boston apparently.
So we are in the middle waiting to strike gold with one of our young or picks, or get a star via trade.

It's all about the assets you choose to compile.

In the last six months, Danny has added Thomas, Jerebko, Amir, and Lee.  That has improved the product on the court, and it's possible the team can build up those guys and get more value for them in the future, either on court or in a trade, than they gave up for them.

At the same time, acquiring established players carries a cost.  It diminished the value of the Celts' own first round pick this year.  Reportedly, Danny valued the #9 pick so much more than #16 he was willing to trade a fist-full of picks for it.  It will probably diminish the value of the Celts' own draft pick next year.

Are Thomas and Jerebko, plus whatever nebulous value was added by the Celts' making the playoffs, worth the four or five first round picks Danny was willing to trade to move up in the draft?

Adding veterans also prevents the younger players from getting time, which limits the opportunity for their value to increase.


What looked like a youth movement a year ago now has veered decidedly away from developing young talent and toward putting together players with larger contracts and more present-day value. 

The most plausible explanation is that the focus has shifted to making the team more attractive to free agents and setting up a trade for a big name established player.

My position has been and remains that this is premature given that the Celts have not yet put together a young core that has the talent and potential to give the team a high ceiling.  It feels like putting the cart before the horse.  But Danny has a great deal of faith in his own ability to hit a home run with a trade, it seems.

[BballTim]

  I don't think there's such a thing as a "typical rebuilding period".

Sure there is, it's just a wide range.

But I can tell you that at a minimum it's longer than 2 years.



I think what I appreciate about the Philly rebuild plan is what Lowe describes as Philly's lack of interest "in any team-building path they can’t control almost completely."

That commitment to a process that has as many controllable factors and certainty as possible, with a path to a talented roster that is easily charted and predicted, even if it's impossible to say in any given year where in the top 4 or 5 picks they'll end up.

If Philly is really willing to do this for five, six, or seven seasons, it almost cannot fail. It will either land a superstar or draft so many good players that they will gather a solid NBA team.

There's a lot of appeal to that, instead of sitting here just hoping that eventually this middling roster of role players will get shuffled around enough times that it will begin to make sense.

Sure, Philly might stink for 5 years, but the Celts might be muddling around in the middle for 10, or 15.

Of course, the problem is that a talented roster is only one part of the equation, and Philly's commitment to that same process could make it very difficult to retain and maximize that talented roster.

  I doubt that there's a minimum on how long a rebuild takes. Also, that view of the the likelihood of success of the Philly plan sounds like it was written by someone unfamiliar with the history of the nba, including teams like the Kings, Clippers, or the post-MJ Bulls (who were awash with high draft picks). Players get hurt, players don't pan out, players become budding stars and decide to leave for greener pastures. I don't think the odds of Philly making a lot of noise in the next 5 years  is overly high, especially with Embiid's health issues.

[PhoSita]

  I doubt that there's a minimum on how long a rebuild takes.

Can you give me an example of a team that rebuilt from one contending core to a different one within one or two years?


Note that I mean an entirely different core, as the Celtics are trying to do, not keeping your main guy and shuffling the rest of the roster around him.

[fairweatherfan]

If your owners are only willing to punt on two seasons, you are at the mercy of lottery balls and injury luck. Blow one draft, or fall from no. 1 to no. 4 in the Anthony Davis lottery, and the teardown gives way to panicked spending toward mediocrity.

Was that a response to my post or just some extra info for the thread?

It was another quote I found interesting.  I don't think it really applies to the Celts, but it's closer than I like.

I don't think it applies. Even the Amir and Lee acquisitions are one-year commitments, and we have a bunch of draft picks that will be completely independent of our record next year (setting aside our own).

Or, look at it this way. Danny hasn't made a single move so far that puts us in a worse position to trade for or sign a star. I'd argue he's put us in a better position. Suppose next year we want to put together a package of IT, Amir Johnson, Terry Rozier and a couple 1st rounders to swing a deadline deal. Isn't that better than any package we could've offered at the deadline this year?

I'd characterize Danny's moves so far as patient, actually.

I agree - the whole idea of getting stuck in the middle or on the treadmill includes locking up your future salary on a roster core that just isn't good enough to legitimately contend.  You can even argue this is happening with teams that are considered fringe contenders, like the Clippers - they just don't have enough horses and lack the cap space to get more.

While we had a classic stuck in the middle record and seed last year, we have zero albatross contracts - all of our long-term deals are at very market-friendly prices, and we didn't commit ourselves to much of anything this offseason, other than Crowder, who again is fairly cheap.  Add to that a bunch of future picks, some of which have a chance to pay off in a major way, and I think Danny has done a great job of putting us in a position where we can actually be a decent team while still getting good draft picks AND having the contracts to trade for or sign better talent along the way.

It's true, the Celts aren't stuck in the middle, but apparently they are content to be there.

Again, I think the best comparison for this Celts team is the Rockets circa 2009-2012 (post-Yao, pre-Harden).

If the Nets picks turn into gold or a Harden opportunity comes along, we're in business.  If not, we could be hanging out in the middle for a while only to wave the flag and bottom out again a couple years from now.


Maybe it's silly to sound bitter about the team deciding to try and be decent this year.  A few weeks ago I was convinced that after a 40 win season that hurt the team pretty significantly in the draft (based on Ainge's offer for #9), Danny would find a way to engineer this thing upwards or else engineer it in the opposite direction. 

Instead, the Celts have apparently decided that just treading water is the best option.  No, they're not locked into their current position, but it looks like they may be in substantially the same position in June 2016 as they were in June 2015.  That's still purgatory in my eyes.

See, I think this is an overly cynical characterization.  Look at our roster situation at the beginning and end of each of the last two seasons, and our likely roster at the beginning of the next.  Three things stand out:

- The talent level is increasing.  Even while shedding guys like Rondo and Green, our roster has more or less continually improved, though it's hard to separate that from our system making guys look fairly good in bigger roles.

- Salary flexibility is increasing.  Partly because of the salary cap expanding and Wallace's bad deal winding down (and now gone), but we have more room each season than we did the last.  The only salary commitments we've got for 16-17 are IT, Bradley, Crowder, and some modest rookie deals.  All solid, fairly low-dollar deals.

- Trade resources are increasing.  We don't have any clear blue-chip prospects to throw around, which is admittedly bad, but we have young guys on rookie deals.  We have established rotation players on cheap contracts.  We have big expiring deals and small expiring deals.  We have big, medium, and small unguaranteed deals.  And our stock of picks is staying fairly constant, and some are looking better as the teams they came from appear to be falling off. 

While there's that glaring hole of a clear #1 centerpiece for a big deal, there's basically no conceivable trade that we wouldn't be able to enable for a willing partner.  There's no player or players we couldn't sign this offseason, or probably the next one.  And we don't even have to suck to be able to get one or more lottery picks next year.

All of this doesn't strike me as "content to stay in the middle" or "treading water", it looks very much to me like a team that keeps improving its immediate position without tying its hands for the bigger steps forward it needs to take later.  Of course there's no guarantee a great player will become available for us, but there's no guarantee that'll happen through any other approach either. 

Bottom line, I wish we'd been able to make one of those gamechanger moves already, but we're in an extremely strong position to do so for the foreseeable future.  The only thing I can really fault Danny for is not taking a bigger risk to nab one of those potential blue-chip pieces like Giannis that teams might be more willing to build a star trade around.  Outside of that, we can continue to improve modestly and win games in the short-term while maintaining a ludicrous number of angles for trying to make that big leap later.  I don't think we can ask for much more at this stage. 

[BballTim]

There's Buford Presti Hinkie Riley and everyone else. Hinkie and Presti took the right path for a mid market team while the Spurs took that path a long time ago with tanking for Duncan they have sustained it and hit on seemingly every single pick. Riley is the best salesman in professional sports. He can get anyone he wants to come to Miami and I have zero doubt that Durant will be wearing a Heat jersey in 2016. He's just that good. Everyone else is playing a different game. Hinkie took a team with no assets besides Jrue and turned it into an asset laden squad. If they all hit you will have an all star team there. I Wish that Boston took this approach more. I get that Ainge needs to collect what he believes are assets. But they really aren't anything more than fodder.

Spurs tanked for Duncan? I'd disagree. The Myth of the Tanking Spurs is a good write-up of why that would be the wrong term. They lucked into Duncan.

To be honest, I'm much happier with what Ainge is doing than Hinkie. It may work for Hinkie, but to suggest that there's a formula, "process" as they call it, that is fool-proof and that the Sixers will undoubtedly become champs is misunderstanding history.

I think the 2nd part of your Spurs comment is the missing element to this discussion usually: whether you're tanking for high picks or picking from the mid-to-late first round, consistently hitting on your picks is IMO the most important determiner of future success.

  I don't agree with cb8883 but there isn't much meaningful in that article.

[BballTim]

  I doubt that there's a minimum on how long a rebuild takes.

Can you give me an example of a team that rebuilt from one contending core to a different one within one or two years?


Note that I mean an entirely different core, as the Celtics are trying to do, not keeping your main guy and shuffling the rest of the roster around him.

  Contending with an entirely different core isn't exactly a mainstream view of what rebuilding means. That would mean the Celts never rebuilt between the PP/Antoine ECF team and 2008 because PP stayed, or the Lakers never rebuilt between the Shaq and Gasol titles because Kobe was still there.

[PhoSita]

  I doubt that there's a minimum on how long a rebuild takes.

Can you give me an example of a team that rebuilt from one contending core to a different one within one or two years?


Note that I mean an entirely different core, as the Celtics are trying to do, not keeping your main guy and shuffling the rest of the roster around him.

  Contending with an entirely different core isn't exactly a mainstream view of what rebuilding means. That would mean the Celts never rebuilt between the PP/Antoine ECF team and 2008 because PP stayed, or the Lakers never rebuilt between the Shaq and Gasol titles because Kobe was still there.

It's the only definition of rebuilding that's relevant to our situation, which is why I specified it.

[PhoSita]

  Outside of that, we can continue to improve modestly and win games in the short-term while maintaining a ludicrous number of angles for trying to make that big leap later.  I don't think we can ask for much more at this stage.

I think Danny has done a fantastic job with the peripheral stuff.  In baseball terms, he's Brock Holt.  Hitting tons of singles and doing lots of little things well.

I just don't like waiting for circumstances to make acquiring a star possible, because in the meantime our roster is like a beach -- constantly eroded and built up by waves and tides and wind.

I have the fullest confidence that Danny can make all kinds of smart moves to maximize the roster around a talented core.  I'm just not very confident in the current method he's employing to get that talented core.

That said, if he goes ahead and Moreys some hapless GM in the next couple of years, I'll be proven dead wrong. 

Still, couldn't we have a heaping pile of assets and plenty of financial flexibility while prioritizing player development and getting top 10 picks in the draft?  I just don't think guys like Isaiah Thomas and David Lee are going to outweigh the value of that.

[fairweatherfan]

  Outside of that, we can continue to improve modestly and win games in the short-term while maintaining a ludicrous number of angles for trying to make that big leap later.  I don't think we can ask for much more at this stage.

I think Danny has done a fantastic job with the peripheral stuff.  In baseball terms, he's Brock Holt.  Hitting tons of singles and doing lots of little things well.

I just don't like waiting for circumstances to make acquiring a star possible, because in the meantime our roster is like a beach -- constantly eroded and built up by waves and tides and wind.

I have the fullest confidence that Danny can make all kinds of smart moves to maximize the roster around a talented core.  I'm just not very confident in the current method he's employing to get that talented core.

That said, if he goes ahead and Moreys some hapless GM in the next couple of years, I'll be proven dead wrong. 

Still, couldn't we have a heaping pile of assets and plenty of financial flexibility while prioritizing player development and getting top 10 picks in the draft?  I just don't think guys like Isaiah Thomas and David Lee are going to outweigh the value of that.

I see where you're coming from, but we've seen Danny turn a bunch of singles and doubles into home runs before - though at that point he already had a home run (Pierce at #10) on the roster, which goes a long way.  And I just don't see those players that would benefit tremendously from more minutes right now.

Overall there are just 3 ways to get a star/stars - draft, free agency, trade.  To me we're well-positioned for all 3 of those, though with the caveats that our drafts are relying on other teams, especially Brooklyn, sucking, our cap space will not be very distinctive since almost everyone will have it, and while we probably have the most trade options in the league we do lack that really desirable young prospect to dangle. 

The only real alternative I see, though, requires 4 rolls of the dice to all break our way: being worse than most other bad teams, the lottery, a superstar being available for us, and picking him.  2 of those are basically uncontrollable, one is a mix of our behavior and other teams', and the other (making the right pick) is fully in our hands but still notoriously unreliable.  And that's also without accounting for putting the right players around that superstar and keeping him here long enough to win a chip or two. 

That level of uncertainty to me is not worth suffering through 2-3 more seasons of godawful basketball, especially since we already failed at it once in 13-14.  And I don't see the likelihood of success as higher than the approach we're taking now.  I respect your perspective, and I definitely share your frustration that that real push toward a contending core hasn't happened yet, but I think we're not going to see eye-to-eye on it.

[PhoSita]

That level of uncertainty to me is not worth suffering through 2-3 more seasons of godawful basketball, especially since we already failed at it once in 13-14.  And I don't see the likelihood of success as higher than the approach we're taking now.  I respect your perspective, and I definitely share your frustration that that real push toward a contending core hasn't happened yet, but I think we're not going to see eye-to-eye on it.

Right.  I think it comes down to a difference in philosophy, or maybe just faith.

Do you believe more in trades / free agency or more in the draft?  How much do you value getting to watch a halfway decent team in the meantime?

The answers to those questions determine how you feel about the current path, and there isn't really a wrong answer, because there is no path that leads to a certain result.

My point is I respect where you're coming from, and I certainly don't think you're "wrong."  I can see the logic behind the way the Celts appear to be going, it's just not the way I'd have chosen.

[LGC88]

If your owners are only willing to punt on two seasons, you are at the mercy of lottery balls and injury luck. Blow one draft, or fall from no. 1 to no. 4 in the Anthony Davis lottery, and the teardown gives way to panicked spending toward mediocrity.

Was that a response to my post or just some extra info for the thread?

It was another quote I found interesting.  I don't think it really applies to the Celts, but it's closer than I like.

I don't think it applies. Even the Amir and Lee acquisitions are one-year commitments, and we have a bunch of draft picks that will be completely independent of our record next year (setting aside our own).

Or, look at it this way. Danny hasn't made a single move so far that puts us in a worse position to trade for or sign a star. I'd argue he's put us in a better position. Suppose next year we want to put together a package of IT, Amir Johnson, Terry Rozier and a couple 1st rounders to swing a deadline deal. Isn't that better than any package we could've offered at the deadline this year?

I'd characterize Danny's moves so far as patient, actually.

I agree - the whole idea of getting stuck in the middle or on the treadmill includes locking up your future salary on a roster core that just isn't good enough to legitimately contend.  You can even argue this is happening with teams that are considered fringe contenders, like the Clippers - they just don't have enough horses and lack the cap space to get more.

While we had a classic stuck in the middle record and seed last year, we have zero albatross contracts - all of our long-term deals are at very market-friendly prices, and we didn't commit ourselves to much of anything this offseason, other than Crowder, who again is fairly cheap.  Add to that a bunch of future picks, some of which have a chance to pay off in a major way, and I think Danny has done a great job of putting us in a position where we can actually be a decent team while still getting good draft picks AND having the contracts to trade for or sign better talent along the way.

It's true, the Celts aren't stuck in the middle, but apparently they are content to be there.

Again, I think the best comparison for this Celts team is the Rockets circa 2009-2012 (post-Yao, pre-Harden).

If the Nets picks turn into gold or a Harden opportunity comes along, we're in business.  If not, we could be hanging out in the middle for a while only to wave the flag and bottom out again a couple years from now.


Maybe it's silly to sound bitter about the team deciding to try and be decent this year.  A few weeks ago I was convinced that after a 40 win season that hurt the team pretty significantly in the draft (based on Ainge's offer for #9), Danny would find a way to engineer this thing upwards or else engineer it in the opposite direction. 

Instead, the Celts have apparently decided that just treading water is the best option.  No, they're not locked into their current position, but it looks like they may be in substantially the same position in June 2016 as they were in June 2015.  That's still purgatory in my eyes.

See, I think this is an overly cynical characterization.  Look at our roster situation at the beginning and end of each of the last two seasons, and our likely roster at the beginning of the next.  Three things stand out:

- The talent level is increasing.  Even while shedding guys like Rondo and Green, our roster has more or less continually improved, though it's hard to separate that from our system making guys look fairly good in bigger roles.

- Salary flexibility is increasing.  Partly because of the salary cap expanding and Wallace's bad deal winding down (and now gone), but we have more room each season than we did the last.  The only salary commitments we've got for 16-17 are IT, Bradley, Crowder, and some modest rookie deals.  All solid, fairly low-dollar deals.

- Trade resources are increasing.  We don't have any clear blue-chip prospects to throw around, which is admittedly bad, but we have young guys on rookie deals.  We have established rotation players on cheap contracts.  We have big expiring deals and small expiring deals.  We have big, medium, and small unguaranteed deals.  And our stock of picks is staying fairly constant, and some are looking better as the teams they came from appear to be falling off. 

While there's that glaring hole of a clear #1 centerpiece for a big deal, there's basically no conceivable trade that we wouldn't be able to enable for a willing partner.  There's no player or players we couldn't sign this offseason, or probably the next one.  And we don't even have to suck to be able to get one or more lottery picks next year.

All of this doesn't strike me as "content to stay in the middle" or "treading water", it looks very much to me like a team that keeps improving its immediate position without tying its hands for the bigger steps forward it needs to take later.  Of course there's no guarantee a great player will become available for us, but there's no guarantee that'll happen through any other approach either. 

Bottom line, I wish we'd been able to make one of those gamechanger moves already, but we're in an extremely strong position to do so for the foreseeable future.  The only thing I can really fault Danny for is not taking a bigger risk to nab one of those potential blue-chip pieces like Giannis that teams might be more willing to build a star trade around.  Outside of that, we can continue to improve modestly and win games in the short-term while maintaining a ludicrous number of angles for trying to make that big leap later.  I don't think we can ask for much more at this stage.

TP
It's tough to explain it better than you did.
(about Giannis, I'm still wondering what makes Danny change his mind. After all he personally travel to Greece to scout the kid, that says something. I hope we'll know one day).

[InameallmyanimalsLarry]

Awesome thread, respectful, reasonable, articulate and cogent. Let this be the model going forward.

[TheTruthFot18]

If the Suns landed LMA on top of Chandler, everyone would being calling them geniuses. Half the people on this board would say we could do the same thing in 2016 (Durant and Hortford). If the Suns can do it so can we! 

[JBcat]

I think we have had our feet in both a rebuilding and reloading mode the past 2 years since we hit the reset button with the KG, Pierce, and Terry trade.

When that trade went down we new Rondo wouldn't be healthy until around February so essentially it was a tank year then grabbing the 6th pick.  Especially if you look at the roster to start the 2013-14 season which was subpar at best. 

Rondo-hurt
Bradley
Crawford
Bogans
Brooks
Lee
Pressey
Green
Wallace
Babb
Bass
Humphries
Sullinger
Olynyk
Faverani

Then during the season we had the likes of Bayless, Vander Blue, Chris Johnson, and Joel Anthony on the roster.   

Especially with Rondo out half the year it was essentially a rebuild year, and we got the 6th pick.

Last year at the beginning of the year I think it was the same thought process as we traded away Rondo and Green especially knowing they would most likely not re-sign as free agents.   Then something crazy happened the last 36 games we started winning, Ainge went for a win now move in Thomas, and I think we changed gears from rebuild to reload.   I think we are continuing to reload now.   What the second half showed us is there was enough promise we could reload especially knowing the future picks from the KG Nets trade, the Green trade, the Rondo trade ect effectively is kind of our safeguard for a rebuild as we try to get better on the fly with a reload if that makes any sense.

I agree with that sentiment.  If you look at our roster now verses the roster I just showed you from 2 years ago it is improved with more upside players.   We can play the game of trying to improve with so many of our future draft picks coming from other teams.   Also, it's not like we are reloading with mostly veteran players.   We have lots of young players with various degrees of upside left in their games.