We did have a chance at both. The chance for Wemby may not have been high, but it wasn’t high for anyone. We would have been closer, but not as close as many seem to think. People are acting as if we would have had Wemby if only we acted earlier on Lauri.
This isn’t a video game. We weren’t going to sit Lauri for half the season. How about this, if you were there raising your hand saying we should sit Lauri 30 games into the season you can complain. But if you didn’t, I don’t want to hear any complaining about not sitting Lauri earlier for better (but still bad) odds for Wemby. It’s not a real thing that was going to happen early on in the season. Fact is, Lauri was the biggest thing at odds with our tanking chances. Yeah, it would have been nice to have a higher pick, but I’m not mad if our pick was lower because we have Lauri Markannen. I think it’s silly to try to split hairs and declare when the perfect time was to give up and call it quits on his season. I doubt Lauri would have liked us quitting on him any earlier than he did. He wasn’t the only one sitting out either. Clarkson and Sexton missed a ton of games during tanking time.
Having said that, with the Conley stuff….yeah everyone was calling for that. I feel like it’s fair to question if it was worth it to have him and all those vets on the team for half the year. I was on record saying I don’t see the point of Conley on this roster. Maybe we got a better trade deal by waiting. But to me that’s a more fair question. Was the waiting worth whatever tanking benefits we lost out on? It’s not obvious when to sit your budding star, and it’s hard to do that. Trading Conley and the other vets, however, was a much easier decision for the reasons you mentioned.
