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Does Lauri Get Traded?

Does Lauri Get Dealt Before The Season Starts?

  • Total voters
    134
  • Poll closed .
sip said:
Trae
KAT
Beal ( past his prime now but he was pretty special for a few years but unfortunately was surrounded by mediocre talent )
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I'm sorry, but this is borderline trolling now. You list guys who aren't even All-NBA types(you know, top 15 in the league in a given year) and who have struggled to lead teams to even just a playoff berth as #1 options as players you could build a title winner around?

I get you have a boner for the idea of trading Markkanen for any offer that comes in, but this is just stupid.
 
idiot said:
It's often assumed that most reliable way to get a player who is talented enough to be a number 1 on a championship team is to draft one through a top-5 pick. This may be true, but just a reminder that the odds of this happening in any particular year are quite low.

Over the last 15 drafts (75 top-5 picks) I count 9 players who have shown this type of talent: Wemby, Anthony Edwards, Williamson, Morant, Doncic, Tatum, Jalen Brown, Embiid, Anthony Davis (if you don't agree that one or more of these is talented enough to be a number 1 on a championship team, then the odds are even lower). This works out to 12% chance of getting a #1 championship piece through any particular top-5 draft choice -- or about one in every 8 years of having a top five pick. In these past 15 years there was only one year where as many as two players qualify (Williamson and Morant, two of the shakiest on this list).

(For full disclosure, the jury is still out on some of these picks, but I don't think anyone not on the list really is a true championship #1 from among other top-5 picks. This list of comes-close-or-still-has-potential-but-probably-not-a-championship-#1 includes: Banchero, Holmgren, Mobley, Barnes, Cunningham, Cousins)
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Good list. Good post.
I would say that not all drafts have the expectation of having one of those guys in it. Like this past draft for instance.
Where as next draft the expectation is that there should be at least one and maybe more of those guys.

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sip said:
There are certainly no guarantees but I think next years draft is pretty special. Also I think you are missing a few that could be a number 1 on a championship team if surrounded by the right guys.

Kyrie
Trae
KAT
Beal ( past his prime now but he was pretty special for a few years but unfortunately was surrounded by mediocre talent )
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Nah. His list was a good one and those guys don't belong on it. Other than maybe Kyrie.
The others? No way in hell.

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idiot said:
It's often assumed that most reliable way to get a player who is talented enough to be a number 1 on a championship team is to draft one through a top-5 pick. This may be true...

Over the last 15 drafts (75 top-5 picks) I count 9 players who have shown this type of talent: Wemby, Anthony Edwards, Williamson, Morant, Doncic, Tatum, Jalen Brown, Embiid, Anthony Davis (if you don't agree that one or more of these is talented enough to be a number 1 on a championship team, then the odds are even lower). This works out to 12% chance of getting a #1 championship piece through any particular top-5 draft choice.
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Of course it's true. Essentially, you are confirming that having a top-5 pick is by far the most certain way to drafting "a number 1 on a championship team". Because if the team decides to acquire such a player via free agency, trade, or drafting in the 6-30 range, the chances are going to be way, way lower than 12%.

In the last 15 years there were only 5 players "who have shown this type of talent" drafted in the rest of the first round (Curry, Leonard, Giannis, Jokic, SGA), 5/(25X15)=about 1% chance per pick. And only one, Jokic, was drafted in the second round - 0.2% chance. On average, you will have to draft for a century in the 6-30 range (1 pick per draft) to draft a championship player, and for 500 years - by using only a single second-round pick per year.

Most of these players remained with their own teams, with only SGA, Leonard, and Davis changing teams via trades. I will be generous and add to this the Paul-to-Clippers trade, which happened within the same timeframe. So, there were 4 chances to obtain that caliber of players in 15 years. Almost all of the teams would be ready to trade for such a player every year, so we will conservatively estimate the trade chances as 4/(25X15)=1%. Finally, here are the chances for a free agent signing ( LeBron in 2010, 2014 and 2018, Durant in 2016 and 2019, Kawhi in 2019) - 6 cases. Almost every team would gladly create space for such signing, so the conservative chances are 6/(25X15)=1.5%. And these are extremely generous estimates, assuming that a small-market team like the Jazz and the Lakers have the same chances of getting LeBron or Durant via trade or free agency.

So, trying to obtain "such a player" by securing a top 5 pick has the 12 times higher probability of success than through picking 6-30, 60 times higher chances than drafting in the second round, 12 times higher chances than getting him in a trade, and 9 times higher than signing him as a free agent.

In short, no other strategy comes even close to simply getting the top 5 pick.
 
jazznik said:
In the last 15 years there were only 5 players "who have shown this type of talent" drafted in the rest of the first round (Curry, Leonard, Giannis, Jokic, SGA), 5/(25X15)=about 1% chance per pick.
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Except for these players fill a lot of the "best player on a championship team" slots for a good portion of those 15 years. Take out just Lebron (who was drafted more than 15 years ago) and I'm not sure you are making the point you think you are. There are like 3 guys a season that fit this definition and Lebron is one of them every year. Obviously a top 5 pick would be grand, but the downside of just dumping good players for more lottery balls also has a chance of you not going to the playoffs for a dozen years.
 
jazznik said:
Of course it's true. Essentially, you are confirming that having a top-5 pick is by far the most certain way to drafting "a number 1 on a championship team". Because if the team decides to acquire such a player via free agency, trade, or drafting in the 6-30 range, the chances are going to be way, way lower than 12%.

In the last 15 years there were only 5 players "who have shown this type of talent" drafted in the rest of the first round (Curry, Leonard, Giannis, Jokic, SGA), 5/(25X15)=about 1% chance per pick. And only one, Jokic, was drafted in the second round - 0.2% chance. On average, you will have to draft for a century in the 6-30 range (1 pick per draft) to draft a championship player, and for 500 years - by using only a single second-round pick per year.

Most of these players remained with their own teams, with only SGA, Leonard, and Davis changing teams via trades. I will be generous and add to this the Paul-to-Clippers trade, which happened within the same timeframe. So, there were 4 chances to obtain that caliber of players in 15 years. Almost all of the teams would be ready to trade for such a player every year, so we will conservatively estimate the trade chances as 4/(25X15)=1%. Finally, here are the chances for a free agent signing ( LeBron in 2010, 2014 and 2018, Durant in 2016 and 2019, Kawhi in 2019) - 6 cases. Almost every team would gladly create space for such signing, so the conservative chances are 6/(25X15)=1.5%. And these are extremely generous estimates, assuming that a small-market team like the Jazz and the Lakers have the same chances of getting LeBron or Durant via trade or free agency.

So, trying to obtain "such a player" by securing a top 5 pick has the 12 times higher probability of success than through picking 6-30, 60 times higher chances than drafting in the second round, 12 times higher chances than getting him in a trade, and 9 times higher than signing him as a free agent.

In short, no other strategy comes even close to simply getting the top 5 pick.
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Good post.

No doubt the odds are much better with a top-5 pick. I have two responses. One might change the math a bit, though not the overall conclusion. The other is more philosophical.

First, I think you were being rather more stringent with your list than I was with mine. If I followed my original way of thinking, I might add players like Butler, Booker, Mitchell, Brunson, maybe even Haliburton and others to your list (players that haven't achieved the pinnacle, but appear to be the key pieces on contenders or near contenders if they can get the right teammates around them). Another reason I think you may have been a bit more picky with your list is that my list of top-5 players drafted in the past 15 years is accountable for one actual championship where the named player was clearly the team's best player over the course of the season. Your list of non top-five choices accounts for 8 championships (actually 4 if we exclude Curry who was drafted more than 15 years ago).

But, in any event, my larger point is more about the futility of relying on any single strategy, and maybe even questioning whether "strategy" is the right word to describe what's going on. The point is that luck is a much bigger factor than strategy in any of this. You might have a strategy of trying to maximize the odds that you'll be lucky, but the odds are going to be quite low in whatever direction you take. I'm more responding to the sentiment that the path to success is necessarily through a "real tank". Yeah, you might get lucky in that type of tank by getting a true champion-level #1, but odds are pretty heavy that you won't in any sort of reasonable timeline.

I'm not a dogmatic anti-tanker, but I think I'm wise enough to acknowledge that any success from tanking requires not only (maybe not even) "going all in" and making wise choices, but also a whole lot of luck that is beyond any one team's control. Tearing it down to the studs and trying to build back up could lead to years at the bottom, to growing back to a mediocre team, to getting a good but not great team, or (only least likely I think) to true championship contention.

If the odds of even going full-Hinkie are not really on your side, I'm not going to lose any sleep over keeping Laurie this year.
 
Also something that gets lost in translation is that even Hinkie who is the only gm to truely min/max the art of tanking did it in an era where worst record gave you 25% of the lottery balls.

I can guarantee you even he wouldnt do it for 14%.
 
HermanG said:
Also something that gets lost in translation is that even Hinkie who is the only gm to truely min/max the art of tanking did it in an era where worst record gave you 25% of the lottery balls.

I can guarantee you even he wouldnt do it for 14%.
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He would. Because even at 14%(at the no. 1 pick exclusively... you still get great odds at top 5 pick - guaranteed if you are the worst team), this is still the best way to get "the guy" type of player.

Ideally, we can tank with Lauri on the team, because once the tank is over and we have our guy(s), a player like Lauri is going to be super valuable in our roster build. The question is - does he make us too good to tank?

I personally can understand the FO going either way. But some other moves would need to be made if we are keeping Lauri IMO.
 
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