Over the past decade or more, I've often expressed frustration with the utilization of recency bias in terms of having a template on winning, where we look at whoever last won the championship, employing a survival bias, and declare that to be the new and/or only formula for winning in "today's NBA." I do understand that you're drawing upon some similarities between the franchises that are relevant so I'm not 100% specifically stating this directed at you but more the larger context. Formulas don't work until they do. Winning a championship is such a rare event (one per year, and only ten in a decade) that the sample size is really difficult to extrapolate in terms of what works and what doesn't but we like to speak very definitively on what does or doesn't work for building a true contender. The reality, in my view, and the only pathway forward for any franchise, is to play the hand you're dealt as best as possible. Sometimes you get a good hand and sometimes you don't, but you have to play it, and only by playing it as best as possible do you put yourself in a situation to come out on top (and therefore become the new "model" for everyone else). Don’t pretend your hand needs to be like others’. If someone dropped a 10 and a 6, you don’t have to also because they have different cards, and likewise you don’t need to hold a jack or a 3 because that’s what someone else (or even everyone) did — again you’re holding different hands.
And I guess to beat a dead horse that's almost nearly killed a multi-decade intense fanship for me, but we had the best hand we've had in 25 years and decided to draw 5 new cards because our hand didn't look like the other hands people were holding. So we'll sit on the sidelines until we draw a royal flush. But, back to the survival bias, every team has flaws that can be exposed. Because there has to be a winner each year, it appears like those flaws weren't exposed. I think we're chasing a hypothetical where we're going to have some structure that we can move forward with in confidence without the perceived flaws. It's so much easier to have little expectation and I think there were legitimate beliefs about a championship happening after we'd been chasing it so long that being burned in the fashion we were with the previous iteration of this franchise. That has us very afraid of being vulnerable again without having great more security to allow ourselves to get to that point by hoping for a hypothetical team without perceived flaws (or as significant of flaws). It's much less emotionally painful to sit at the bottom with hypothetical assets and dream of all the ways it could be amazing if everything bloomed just right, in season, and without exposure to wind, hail, frost or storms. We balked at the idea of expending even one more asset on the last iteration of the team, as we could possibly ruin this team’s competitiveness for up to a decade taking that approach. Well, here’s the pathway we’ve opted for, three years later, looking at another tanking year, and being a contender in a best-case-scenario looks a lot closer to that ten year mark that we were somehow destined to jeopardize if we didn’t blow it all up…
But now our best bet, since dropping all five cards, is that we somehow hope like hell that we can draw a fresh hand that lands us something in the ball park of four of a kind or a full house. You know, kinda like the hand we just dropped. If we’re lucky.
And I guess to beat a dead horse that's almost nearly killed a multi-decade intense fanship for me, but we had the best hand we've had in 25 years and decided to draw 5 new cards because our hand didn't look like the other hands people were holding. So we'll sit on the sidelines until we draw a royal flush. But, back to the survival bias, every team has flaws that can be exposed. Because there has to be a winner each year, it appears like those flaws weren't exposed. I think we're chasing a hypothetical where we're going to have some structure that we can move forward with in confidence without the perceived flaws. It's so much easier to have little expectation and I think there were legitimate beliefs about a championship happening after we'd been chasing it so long that being burned in the fashion we were with the previous iteration of this franchise. That has us very afraid of being vulnerable again without having great more security to allow ourselves to get to that point by hoping for a hypothetical team without perceived flaws (or as significant of flaws). It's much less emotionally painful to sit at the bottom with hypothetical assets and dream of all the ways it could be amazing if everything bloomed just right, in season, and without exposure to wind, hail, frost or storms. We balked at the idea of expending even one more asset on the last iteration of the team, as we could possibly ruin this team’s competitiveness for up to a decade taking that approach. Well, here’s the pathway we’ve opted for, three years later, looking at another tanking year, and being a contender in a best-case-scenario looks a lot closer to that ten year mark that we were somehow destined to jeopardize if we didn’t blow it all up…
But now our best bet, since dropping all five cards, is that we somehow hope like hell that we can draw a fresh hand that lands us something in the ball park of four of a kind or a full house. You know, kinda like the hand we just dropped. If we’re lucky.
