Nah... in a race if you can get a head start you do it. If we had lost 2 more of the close games we'd have just as much data as we do now (maybe more if we get more of the young guys).
The Jazz have much much much bigger roster holes than Dallas.
Yeah I mean if Svi plays 25% less minutes and Lauri plays 2-3 less minutes per game then Keyonte is still a scrub.
They don't lol.
The Jazz dont have a single rotation level center on the roster. The Mavs have 3 starter level ones.
If the Jazz did that it still wouldnt be enough to stop people from going Chicken Little about the tank and you wouldnt be happy with it at all.
Nurk is rotation level lol. It doesn't matter how many great centers you have on the roster if none of them play. Their available roster on a nightly basis is worse than ours.
If we were 4-15 you wouldn't hear about us being too good to tank. The margins in the close games are close enough that those things would absolutely have flipped a couple games.
And the Jazz are playing Nurkic/Love at the 5 while giving minutes to a backup PG who cant shoot outside of 3 feet and playing several other young players who cant play any defense.
And yet, Keyonte has been developing while we did full or partial tanking for both of his prior seasons.
And we may have hurt his development because of it to some extent. The Jazz are doing things the right way. Zero reason to panic. The only time we should be anxious is on lottery night to see if we jump into the top 3 or not.
We should be nervous if we do not have a bottom-5 record as we can be forced to cough up the pick by teams jumping ahead of us in the lottery and pushing us back. We will be lucky to have the 5th worst record. There are plenty of teams legitimately worse than the Jazz at this point, unfortunately.
Bookmarked. They have a tragic offense. Like Collier would be a great replacement for the guys they are running out there. Again - AD/Gafford/Lively > Nurk but none are playing. They have a coach that is looking to transition to the front office and don't control their own pick for like 5 years. AD will come back for a few games to prove he's healthy and get shipped out. Lively may have been a Luka creation. They have losses to several tanking teams already. The schedule is going to offset them getting a guy or two healthy (if they don't stretch out the injury).
Yes, the Mavericks will finish in the lottery. They have no protections on the pick though, so they are fine winning more games than the Jazz (not to mention they have recent bias of winning the lottery despite terrible odds, so they probably arent hyper concerned like some other teams might be). They arent going to tear it all down and just be horrendous. And even if they do to some extent (like trading AD) they will still be a very good defensive team and they will get players back in any trade they do.
No, it's whining and bitching if you are whining and bitching. Crying about the Mavs out-tanking us is peak bitching because nothing suggest they will out tank the Jazz if you view things objectively.
Yeah, I'm pretty much on board with almost everything here, maybe not quite too the degree you would want, but we are close. I would probably draw my line at things that could derail Lauri's all star bid (because I'm sure it's important to him, it's not to me) or things that would derail Keyonte's career year significantly.
