What kind of timescale are we talking about here?
Well considering we are riding a, what near 50-year long dry spell, I would imagine as long as you could vaguely attrribute winning a championship to a string of bad seasons, even if it was 10 years further down the road, it would probably be worth it. Now, if they let that happen and they don't have any kind of plan and it just kind of fades away and doesn't amount to anything that will be an abject failure. But if we can connect a string of points from point A - losing seasons for a couple of years, to point Z - winning the championship, then it would be worth it. So, losing seasons means we get picks A, B, and C and that leads to players D, E, and F, which facilitates trades G, H, and I, which leads to picks J, k, and L and free agent signing M, N, and O, which gets used in a trade for player P, and picks Q, R, and S, which then get flipped into players T and U, and a trade for player V, with picks leading to W, X, and a final trade for the last piece, player Y, leading to Championship Z!! Well that would be worth it.
But if it dies out somewhere at points D through M or something and the next step is basically "start over from point A", then it would have been a failure, as we have obviously seen so many many times before.
We started this path a while ago, but by about step D it ended up in DedEx, which lead us right back around to A again. Really bad moves like that short-circuit the process and cause us to start over again. Even seemingly meaningless later moves can interrupt the process, like Doke take instead of, who was it, Bane that year, or even McDaniels, both of whom would have been far better for our team at that point. Or using assets to trade up and take a player like Trey Burke, chasing a position rather than taking BPA when there were still guys on the board like CJ McCollum, Schroder, Steven Adams, and good hell, Giannis. Can't have that many whiffs like that. Imagine in a single draft picking up Giannis and Gobert. Wow.
So as long as we don't just screw the pooch the hope is that a few rough years ends in enough assets which, used wisely, can get us in a position to win the chip. As long as it does, with a direct line from point A to point Z, then it was worth it.
