You can speak for yourself, but strongly remember conversations before 22/23 talking about our depth and vets. A big reason why people thought we would suck is because we thought we would be trading those vets, it didn't happen. For 23/24, it wasn't even that big of a surprise and some thought we were going to make the playoffs. Beyond what we thought, there is also reality. You may have thought the vets in 22/23 sucked and we would have sucked without trading them. Reality was different, but we don't even have many vets this time around. Some guys have been better than expected, some worse....that is just reality. WE shouldn't keep ourselves from evaluating and just blindly assuming things will be the same despite significantly different roster compositions.
I think it's ok to use hindsight. You can very easily look at why those teams performed the way they did (whether it was a surprise or not) and learn from it. What I have learned is that vets and depth is what produces wins in the regular season, and this isn't some shocking development because everyone knows that youth is not what typically leads you to wins in the regular season. You seem to be totally fine looking back and saying "it happened before, it's going to happen again". I think it's only fair to look back and say "this is why it happened before, things are different now".
We simply do not have the same presence of depth and vets on this roster. The west is also better than it was last year and the approach to this season appears to be different. Coaching for development is not the same thing as coaching for maximizing wins. By all reports we are doing the former and not the latter. Even if we tried to do the latter, we don't stack up close to the other teams so we would probably end up quitting again and this time much earlier. If you were asking about how we'd stack up against these teams in a 7 game series or how we'd do if we didn't own our draft pick and had no incentive to tank I may feel differently....but that's not the case.
