Should we go full rebuild?

[KqWIN]

What's the timeframe for "in time"...

This is pretty much what bad franchises have been doing in the league for ages... they stock up with mediocre upgrades over their youth thinking they will be able to compete(at least for playoffs) then by mid-season they realize they are actually not good enough... so they turn to tanking. This is a failure of self-scouting and a failure of projecting your strength compared to your competition. In a lot of cases this is MUCH WORSE than actually purposefully tanking. Because when you tank with purpose, you actually have a plan and you can better maximize your assets and reset the timelines of expected contention. But when you are doing what we are doing, this is not a plan... this is a failure turned into a last resort. This was Sacramento's special for 15 years before their recent rise to semi-success. They think they can compete, they make stupid decisions incongruent with the big picture of their roster, they are wrong... turn into tanking half-way through the season. Pick 6-10 in perpetuity! Rinse and repeat.

I actually think the idea of "purposefully tanking" is highly overrated by fans and you can build from the middle. Realistically, we put too much emphasis on where we are drafting versus simply making good moves. However, my big gripe with what the Jazz are doing (half and half) is that they are limiting the rewards of anything we are doing. If we are actually trying to win something (I don't mean only championship), we get half a season of that and realistically cannot win anything for only competing half a season. Any winning is pretty much thrown in the can. If we are trying to tank for a draft pick, we cannot get a high lottery position by only doing it for half a season. If we forget about the draft and simply see playing time as a resource for development, we only get half of it by doing it for half the season. You're getting the worst of all worlds by doing half and half.

It may be true that the Jazz have squeezed some extra trade value by waiting until deadline 2x in a row (they may have lost value for all we know), but was it worth using up two seasons on? I feel like we didn't get the most out of these two off-seasons+deadlines. My request to the Jazz FO would be to decide to do something (any direction at all) and then do it. This half and half business has to end.

Like I said in my earlier posts, what they've done just hasn't inspired much confidence.

 

[KqWIN]

Like what if the Jazz actually just traded Lauri/Sexton last year and ended up getting the 3rd pick? We get Scoot Henderson and we are in a much worse position for the future despite doing the thing so many people here are clamoring for.

But instead they did what they did and now Sexton has a much higher value profile than he did this time last season. If we can successfully extend Lauri, his value goes up.

I get the idea of just playing the numbers in the draft and going for broke with high picks, but doing what the math says isnt always the best. There's more nuance in real life.

I don't think the Jazz need to operate in these extremes. They probably should have moved the old vets they moved at both deadlines in the summer. It's fine to keep the younger/unproven players and see what they may become, but for these vets where there are no questions about who they are as players....it's basically useless to have them half a year. I don't think the Jazz need to be rigid, they just need to stop doing half and half and thus limiting the effect/reward of anything they do.

 

[HermanG]

What's the timeframe for "in time"...

This is pretty much what bad franchises have been doing in the league for ages... they stock up with mediocre upgrades over their youth thinking they will be able to compete(at least for playoffs) then by mid-season they realize they are actually not good enough... so they turn to tanking. This is a failure of self-scouting and a failure of projecting your strength compared to your competition. In a lot of cases this is MUCH WORSE than actually purposefully tanking. Because when you tank with purpose, you actually have a plan and you can better maximize your assets and reset the timelines of expected contention. But when you are doing what we are doing, this is not a plan... this is a failure turned into a last resort. This was Sacramento's special for 15 years before their recent rise to semi-success. They think they can compete, they make stupid decisions incongruent with the big picture of their roster, they are wrong... turn into tanking half-way through the season. Pick 6-10 in perpetuity! Rinse and repeat.

Between 2003 and 2018 Nuggets and Bucks combined for 4 bottom 3 finishes in their conferences and 17 playoff appearances with only 1 of those 17 going beyond first round. That is the definition of being "mid".

They got into the tournament with over 50% success rate and fell in the first round almost 95% of the time. Bucks had 4 bottom 3 finishes while Denver had ZERO. Always at the bubble, or always exiting in the first round. I'm not gonna go check their closing records from the seasons when they were outside, but I bet they did late tanks as much as the rest. So 5-6 years ago you would have labeled them both in that "bad franchises" category, yet now they are recent champions coming from small markets.

Now your turn to provide evidence of a deep grinding tank leading to a championship. Minimum requirement could be say.... 3 consecutive years of picking in top 7?

PS:
During that same timeframe (2003-2018) Sacramento had 3 playoff appearances and 7 bottom 3 finishes in conference. So your logic holds absolutely no water. Both Nuggets and Bucks were 100x more mid than Sacramento.

 

[KqWIN]

We have got to stop looking at other franchises. Drafting Giannis/Jokic isn't a plan. We cannot model anything we've done after them. Same goes for OKC or any other situation you want to follow a step by step plan for. Stop looking for a blueprint, just make good moves and decisions plain and simple.

 

[stitches]

I actually think the idea of "purposefully tanking" is highly overrated by fans and you can build from the middle. Realistically, we put too much emphasis on where we are drafting versus simply making good moves. However, my big gripe with what the Jazz are doing (half and half) is that they are limiting the rewards of anything we are doing. If we are actually trying to win something (I don't mean only championship), we get half a season of that and realistically cannot win anything for only competing half a season. Any winning is pretty much thrown in the can. If we are trying to tank for a draft pick, we cannot get a high lottery position by only doing it for half a season. If we forget about the draft and simply see playing time as a resource for development, we only get half of it by doing it for half the season. You're getting the worst of all worlds by doing half and half.

IMO the root cause for the half and half are the decisions made in the summer. Thus the real culprit here is the original idea/plan of the FO. What in fact is happening is - they have some idea about how the new additions/retentions will make us competitive and they go for it without much regard for where we are in the rebuilding process. They don't care that they are relegating a freshly drafted top 10 pick to the G League from the get go. All they care about is the few more games we will win with Collins and Olynyk. So ... December/January comes and we are nowhere... the highly prized rookie is deprived of opportunities to grow with your highly regarded HC, the new additions have surprisingly not made you a contender and now you are left with 2 options - do you continue going for it fighting against the likes of AD and LeBron or Steph/Draymond/Klay for a playing... or try to salvage your pick. And I absolutely agree with you here - neither is a great option. Both are on the low end of rewards you could get for the path chosen. But again - the seeds have been sown in the summer. That's the real problem. What you do in the winter is less consequential... UNLESS... you follow it next summer with moves that go against what you just did(like... sell off the vets in January... only to replace them with new vets in July... but this time probably even crappier vets).

It may be true that the Jazz have squeezed some extra trade value by waiting until deadline 2x in a row (they may have lost value for all we know), but was it worth using up two seasons on? I feel like we didn't get the most out of these two off-seasons+deadlines. My request to the Jazz FO would be to decide to do something (any direction at all) and then do it. This half and half business has to end.

Like I said in my earlier posts, what they've done just hasn't inspired much confidence.

I'm not even sure they've maximized the value they've gotten. Maybe they have. I just don't think there is some plan or even direction we are going, I think they've allowed themselves to be thrown around by currents whatever way the winds are blowing in that particular moment. And I agree... I was really impressed by the two moves they did with Gobert and Mitchell... but after that... not much has inspired confidence.

 

[Handlogten's Heros]

We have got to stop looking at other franchises. Drafting Giannis/Jokic isn't a plan. We cannot model anything we've done after them. Same goes for OKC or any other situation you want to follow a step by step plan for. Stop looking for a blueprint, just make good moves and decisions plain and simple.

These aren't the model so much as examples of how it can work building in the middle. Lots of ways to get there... tanking, middle build, build a super team, etc. but they all fail way more often than they work. You have to make good moves and you also have to get really luck. Whether that luck involves a 6% chance at #1 hitting or nailing a pick in the late lotto like an SGA, Haliburton, or Giannis or whether that involves nailing a second round pick like Green and Jokic... It all requires lots of luck so do whatever you can to increase the odds of that luck through smart management. In reality you need to hit on 2-3 things that are like top 5% outcomes of a given transaction to end up being a title team. I think Boston is the team that has done the most with the least amount of "luck".

Its all so hard and the margin for error is so low if you want to win a title. Anyone that says "this is the only way" is wrong. Some ways may be more predictable or reliable than others but they are all unpredictable and unreliable so chose your gamble however you want imo.

 

[KqWIN]

IMO the root cause for the half and half are the decisions made in the summer. Thus the real culprit here is the original idea/plan of the FO. What in fact is happening is - they have some idea about how the new additions/retentions will make us competitive and they go for it without much regard for where we are in the rebuilding process. They don't care that they are relegating a freshly drafted top 10 pick to the G League from the get go. All they care about is the few more games we will win with Collins and Olynyk. So ... December/January comes and we are nowhere... the highly prized rookie is deprived of opportunities to grow with your highly regarded HC, the new additions have surprisingly not made you a contender and now you are left with 2 options - do you continue going for it fighting against the likes of AD and LeBron or Steph/Draymond/Klay for a playing... or try to salvage your pick. And I absolutely agree with you here - neither is a great option. Both are on the low end of rewards you could get for the path chosen. But again - the seeds have been sown in the summer. That's the real problem. What you do in the winter is less consequential... UNLESS... you follow it next summer with moves that go against what you just did(like... sell off the vets in January... only to replace them with new vets in July... but this time probably even crappier vets).


I'm not even sure they've maximized the value they've gotten. Maybe they have. I just don't think there is some plan or even direction we are going, I think they've allowed themselves to be thrown around by currents whatever way the winds are blowing in that particular moment. And I agree... I was really impressed by the two moves they did with Gobert and Mitchell... but after that... not much has inspired confidence.

I just don't know how they expected this season to go. I'm pretty sure I said this in the presesason expectations thread, but I expected exactly what happened to happened. We had a team that was scratching the play in at best, and I believed that we would once again quit half way through and tank because that's what this team was set up to do entering the season. Is this what the FO wanted all along? Did they expect us to be better than this? How good would we have had to have been to not do a complete pivot? Or did they just have no plan at all the whole time.

 

[Bawse Dawg]

The most frustrating part of the last two years is that the second half of each season has been 100% all in on tanking. But neither season has started that way, meaning we can't even get close to the top 5 of lottery odds, despite easily being bottom 5 teams by the end of both years.

This year it made a bit more sense, see what we have, it is a bad draft anyway. I wonder if anyone really knew how much losing Simone and Olynyk would hurt. But regardless at the end of the season you have players who thought they were competing for the play-in lose every single game for the last few months instead which can't be good for morale, and you still don't sniff the top 5 anyway.

Last year was much more egregious with Wemby sitting there, and a very obvious direction to go in. Starting the season with Conley on the roster was malpractice. I am convinced that Ainge thought we would suck anyway and when we started hot he just completely froze until the trade deadline. It ended up being a really poor half assed plan. We can only hope we salvaged three rotation level players out of the draft anyway.

I really have no clue how you move forward. The team will have gotten incrementally better the last two seasons just by adding 6 first round picks and young players growing a bit. Add in Lauri, and Flagg seems like an impossibility for next year. But the team might not even make the play-in if they max out the other way either.

IDK, on the one hand the path to contention is simple. We just need to somehow get a top 10 player in the league with a pick not in the top 5. Which is really not uncommon, that can be done. And we'll have a ton of bonus shots at the dart board to do it too. But it's just not something you can expect or assume will happen. So instead it just feels kind of rudderless, and like we are just hoping something falls into our laps miraculously.

Personally, I'm ready to just be interested in watching the team again. And being moderately competitive for a playoff spot, and having exciting young talent to root for would be more than enough. So hit some draft picks, become a fun team and I'll be there. This season and last doesn't do it for me though. At the start of the year seeing Keyonte, Hendricks, and Brice all start would have been a dream. It's been happening and I haven't seen a second of it. I have just had no interest in watching the team since the all star break at all. And I end up just getting interested again in draft season.

 

[stitches]

Between 2003 and 2018 Nuggets and Bucks combined for 4 bottom 3 finishes in their conferences and 17 playoff appearances with only 1 of those 17 going beyond first round. That is the definition of being "mid".
They got into the tournament with over 50% success rate and fell in the first round almost 95% of the time. Bucks had 4 bottom 3 finishes while Denver had ZERO. Always at the bubble, or always exiting in the first round. I'm not gonna go check their closing records from the seasons when they were outside, but I bet they did late tanks as much as the rest. So 5-6 years ago you would have labeled them both in that "bad franchises" category, yet now they are recent champions coming from small markets.
Now your turn to provide evidence of a deep grinding tank leading to a championship. Minimum requirement could be say.... 3 consecutive years of picking in top 7?
PS:
During that same timeframe (2003-2018) Sacramento had 3 playoff appearances and 7 bottom 3 finishes in conference. So your logic holds absolutely no water. Both Nuggets and Bucks were 100x more mid than Sacramento.

Do you know what's the commonality between the Bucks and the Nuggets? They both drafted their MVPs in the draft... and both drafted them way outside of the top 10. They didn't become great from the middle because of trading for Jonh Collins or Kelly Olynyk types... they became great because they picked MVPs in the draft... and then built around them. The hard part is the MVP part. A while ago I went back about 30 years in the past and looked at all the NBA champions in that timespan. I think only one or two didn't have an NBA MVP on their roster. If you have faith that we can get an MVP level player drafting in the middle.. then... sure... lets do it. I would always go for as high of a pick as possible... especially in drafts with clear generational talents.

 

[KqWIN]

These aren't the model so much as examples of how it can work building in the middle. Lots of ways to get there... tanking, middle build, build a super team, etc. but they all fail way more often than they work. You have to make good moves and you also have to get really luck. Whether that luck involves a 6% chance at #1 hitting or nailing a pick in the late lotto like an SGA, Haliburton, or Giannis or whether that involves nailing a second round pick like Green and Jokic... It all requires lots of luck so do whatever you can to increase the odds of that luck through smart management. In reality you need to hit on 2-3 things that are like top 5% outcomes of a given transaction to end up being a title team. I think Boston is the team that has done the most with the least amount of "luck".

Its all so hard and the margin for error is so low if you want to win a title. Anyone that says "this is the only way" is wrong. Some ways may be more predictable or reliable than others but they are all unpredictable and unreliable so chose your gamble however you want imo.

I feel as though winning a championship is so rare/requires so much luck, it's often going to be a situation where people don't think it can be done until it is done. And people aren't wrong for saying it probably won't work, because it probably won't, but I think it's a fools errand to try to copy one situation and look at it as an example. The only thing you can really take from the successful situations is that you're going to have to make a sequence of several great moves in a row and be very lucky.

I do feel like we put too much emphasis on where we're drafting...but the half/half thing does make me somewhat skeptical of the FO's judgement and their ability to make good moves going forward. They also have some weird evaluation with making Key the chosen one, Clarkson being the actual chosen one, Sexton getting benched at every opportunity, Kessler just being some guy etc. "Not inspiring confidence" is the best way I can describe the last two years tbh. Maybe you can make Hardy the boogeyman in all of this, idk.

 

[Saint Cy of JFC]

Do you know what's the commonality between the Bucks and the Nuggets? They both drafted their MVPs in the draft... and both drafted them way outside of the top 10. They didn't become great from the middle because of trading for Jonh Collins or Kelly Olynyk types... they became great because they picked MVPs in the draft... and then built around them. The hard part is the MVP part. A while ago I went back about 30 years in the past and looked at all the NBA champions in that timespan. I think only one or two didn't have an NBA MVP on their roster. If you have faith that we can get an MVP level player drafting in the middle.. then... sure... lets do it. I would always go for as high of a pick as possible... especially in drafts with clear generational talents.

So teams should just put every other aspect on hold until they get a guy they think can develop into a MVP?

 

[Handlogten's Heros]

I feel as though winning a championship is so rare/requires so much luck, it's often going to be a situation where people don't think it can be done until it is done. And people aren't wrong for saying it probably won't work, because it probably won't, but I think it's a fools errand to try to copy one situation and look at it as an example. The only thing you can really take from the successful situations is that you're going to have to make a sequence of several great moves in a row and be very lucky.

I do feel like we put too much emphasis on where we're drafting...but the half/half thing does make me somewhat skeptical of the FO's judgement and their ability to make good moves going forward. They also have some weird evaluation with making Key the chosen one, Clarkson being the actual chosen one, Sexton getting benched at every opportunity, Kessler just being some guy etc. "Not inspiring confidence" is the best way I can describe the last two years tbh. Maybe you can make Hardy the boogeyman in all of this, idk.

You forgot Ochai is a starter next year lol. They have had some odd messaging but I am not sure what to make of all that.

I think the best way to give yourself a chance at a title is to set yourself up with a portfolio of picks and to tank for a few years. Even then if the picks don't jump into the top 4 in the right year or you get "the guy" and then he forgets how to shoot or can't stay healthy and you are in trouble. I do feel in that situation you likely would have a hard time not building a decent playoff team if you are competent as an org, but enduring the tank years is likely not worth building a solid playoff team. In the next 9 months I'd say we should get more targeted, but I will leave it up to them to decide what they want to target.