I think Jake Fisher's podcast yesterday (its a tough listen as he is soooooo dry) really pinpoints the biggest issue we have right now. The heirarchy in the front office is Ainge (a part time employee who is buddies with the owner) and then Donovan's camp... thin Quin/JZ. Maybe Ainge does the right things but he also may just tell the owner and Don's camp what they want to hear... which is where this is headed based on the rumors.
Players should have some voice and player preferences should be given some merit... but it should be well below the coach and GM... like below some of the staffers on the player personnel side. Unless they are Lebron... and even then you just have to tell them "no". It is clear Donovan's team has increased in power through the organization by slowly no one telling them no.... when the **** hits the fan he will leave us holding the bag...
Its just so clear that we should trade him and Rudy at this point and do a full scale rebuild. Was thinking about this the other day... Philly did the process and sucked for 3 years, but they didn't have a ton of stuff to sell off to get a bunch of future facing assets. I think they sold off Holiday... they made a bunch of mistakes... had a comedy of weird **** that happened... and still came away with a couple stars and enough assets to do the Harden move.... the Harris move and a bunch of other stuff.
Boston did a sell off and aimed to do the process but then had some good trades come across their desk and ended up not needing to do the process because the picks gave them the talent they needed.
OKC is the only team that really did the "sell off" with "the process". They got SGA which was huge and CP so it pushed the timeline back about a year. They have only had two years of the process and if they don't land a second guy in this draft they may not get that guy... because SGA, Dort, Giddey, and whoever they pick is likely too good to be bottom 5 again. They still have a **** ton of assets... like an embarrassment of picks they can work with. I'm curious to see how it pans out. Had they had some lotto luck or maybe sold off CP3 earlier they might have had a high pick in 2020... but anyway.
I think the media narrative is tanking doesn't really work... by itself it doesn't... but the Spurs dynasty doesn't happen without a tank... OKC got 3 MVPs on the same team by tanking (they made a horrible trade and messed other stuff up but made the finals). Sixers have had horrible luck and messed up about as bad as you can on the follow up moves... and still had a more legit contender than we did. If you do a massive sell off like Boston... and the process with it... the margin of error gets so much bigger... especially for a team that will get its star talent through the draft. You still have to get lucky and hit on at least an average amount of the picks you make... but you can get a ton of picks as they have been floated out there in mass almost like never before. Hit on a couple picks early and you can become Memphis pretty quickly.
I think you could land say 6-8 unprotected picks (maybe you take a couple lotto picks this year and have less future facing picks) from 3 different teams offloading Rudy, Donovan, Bogey, Mike and taking back bad salary. Pick up a couple salary dumps each year to gather a couple more. Sell off some reclamation projects to add a few more... it just sets you up for a ton of success.
