2024-2025 Tank Race
- Thread starter SoberasHotRod
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fishonjazz
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Yep. I have consistently bashed that trade from the moment it was announced until now. So dumb
Handlogten's Heros
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Looks pretty rough. It was necessary to move some guys to aid the tank and if Taylor turns out to be awesome or the Lakers struggle in 2027 then it can be salvaged. Part of the deal was increasing our chances at getting lucky and we didn't.
Handlogten's Heros
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Yeah... just gotta get what you can and move along. It also would have been helpful to have other teams seconds to substitute if we could. I think NAW will be out of their price range this summer so hopefully won't keep benefitting from that throw in.
1 (unprotected?) pick + proper tanking (Wemby, B Miller, Scoot, or a Thompson Twin) >>>>> 1 protected pick, Mike Conley saving a team whose draft futures we own, losing two 2nds that might as well be firsts, and terrible tanking (Hendricks)
Bawse Dawg
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I can’t believe we took all the Wolves draft capital and then immediately proceeded to massively help them in trades multiple times.
The Mitchell Gobert years were managed horribly, but this tank hasn’t been handled very weak either. NAW and Agbaji were two of the better assets we accumulated in this tanking stretch and those were the ones we gave away. Conley saving the Wolves season (and that outcome being super obvious) was still worse though. They just haven’t been impressive with these moves since we’ve gone in the tank. Securing the worst record in the league this year was the most we’ve seen ‘the plan’ since this has started. And even still, we were two years late.
The Mitchell Gobert years were managed horribly, but this tank hasn’t been handled very weak either. NAW and Agbaji were two of the better assets we accumulated in this tanking stretch and those were the ones we gave away. Conley saving the Wolves season (and that outcome being super obvious) was still worse though. They just haven’t been impressive with these moves since we’ve gone in the tank. Securing the worst record in the league this year was the most we’ve seen ‘the plan’ since this has started. And even still, we were two years late.
A lot of hindsight.
The year the Jazz acquired NAW he was one of the worst rotation players in the NBA. The Wolves wont even be able to afford him next year, so is it really that big of a deal?
Ochai was a 4 year senior who was one of the other worst rotation players in the NBA in his 1.5 years in Utah.
Conley looked cooked in his last year in Utah. Him still being a positive player at age 37 is crazy.
I still maintain the 2027 Lakers pick will be better value than whatever value we lost from giving the Wolves Conley/NAW (which will only have a positive benefit for the Wolves this year). 2026/2027/2028/2029 draft capital arent going to be affected by that trade.
What a **** show. We had no business being the ones including second rounders in that deal, let alone two. Now we’ve traded something worth more than a late first. I remember a lot of people always dismissing the lack of value in second rounders picks in Ainge deals, jettisoning them or leaving them on the table in other deals. And to your point about it being nice to have other people’s seconds to play with… yeah. “They’re just second rounders. Why so upset lol.”
I dont't even care our about Conley going to MIN. That was LAL's decision anyways. People cry about that for no reason.
But simply on pick value, our second this year and second next year is probably similar value to one Laker first. It is 2020 hindsight to know they would have Luka of course, but that's how this goes. NAW I pretty much see as a failure of Hardy. He played well with the Jazz but Hardy did not like him or care to play him much and this is why I can't take anything Hardy says about "defense" seriously.
It would be hard to argue that waiting got us more value though. We definitely had deals lined up for Conley, he said he though he was going to the Clippers. There's like a 90%+ percent chance we had something on the table for Bogey to the Lakers as well. Ainge's greed definitely got in the way. Without hindsight, the bad move was to wait until the last second for not great value in the first place. With hindsight, we go the worst of all worlds where we helped everyone besides ourselves and barely got positive pick value if at all.
But simply on pick value, our second this year and second next year is probably similar value to one Laker first. It is 2020 hindsight to know they would have Luka of course, but that's how this goes. NAW I pretty much see as a failure of Hardy. He played well with the Jazz but Hardy did not like him or care to play him much and this is why I can't take anything Hardy says about "defense" seriously.
It would be hard to argue that waiting got us more value though. We definitely had deals lined up for Conley, he said he though he was going to the Clippers. There's like a 90%+ percent chance we had something on the table for Bogey to the Lakers as well. Ainge's greed definitely got in the way. Without hindsight, the bad move was to wait until the last second for not great value in the first place. With hindsight, we go the worst of all worlds where we helped everyone besides ourselves and barely got positive pick value if at all.
I don't see it that way and didn't at the time. There was always something very deflating about that Lakers' pick because it was top 5 protected. Hoping for it being a good pick is like playing black jack and hitting on 18. I stated multiple times that it is very much within the realm of realistic possibility that we will have given up more than we got back, especially without a guaranteed first rounder built into the conditions. I have similar feelings to the recent Suns trade that I have yet to elaborate on. It's not out of the realm of reasonable probability that the pick ends up being of the caliber of the multiple others we sent for it. Of course everyone sees everything from the lens of now and tries to project what's happening now onto what the landscape will look like an eternity from now. So too with the Lakers. It's cute to assume AD falls off a cliff and LeBron retires and they become bottom dwellers but that's not realistic. Just because nobody could have seen a Luka trade doesn't mean that the Lakers can't pull stuff out of their ***, which they are bound to do. If you have the belief of them just sucking on one extreme and believing they'd land Luka for scraps on the other, I'd hate to say it but the latter scenario is closer to reality than the assumptions we were making on the other end. But we can repeat this about the Suns, too, but with less of a track record of quickly getting back on track than the Lakers.