I'd like to address a few of your points but first I'd like to again qualify it with me not being a big "Burks needs minutes!" guy. I'm not super high on him, but do acknowledge his scoring potential and ability to get to the line is intriguing and I very well could be wrong about him. Despite this, there are some major flaws in the way the franchise is going about mixing the present and the future on a larger scale.
With regard to other guys playing more minutes in the name of 'staying competitive' I obviously didn't do a good enough job elaborating in that. We justify playing other guys more minutes because it puts us in an opportunity to win yet we keep losing. We overestimate how much effect results from playing time decisions. If you have 18 minutes a game, how large of an impact on the outcome do you think there would be, in any direction, if it were Foye or Burks on the floor? If it actually made us less competitive, we'd still be losing. How about minutes for Favors? How big of a difference will there be if five more minutes are taken from Jefferson and given to Favors? I argue not much, which makes the justification of doing it for 'competitiveness' absolutely ridiculous, especially given that we're losing.
The bigger question is the Foye acquisition. I'm not opposed to Foye and have nothing against him, but from both a financial and basketball standpoint it was a head-scratcher. The Jazz have a long history of maintaining the team within a narrow range on the profitability curve. It's been largely successful (financially primarily, but also basketball-wise but to a lesser extent). The fanship is saturated in both quantity and devotion such that adding more to the team won't draw much more fans nor will it increase devotion, as these are typically maintained at a near saturable rate by simply being a competitive team. [I'll interject here for the impassioned idiot who wants to rail on this paragraph that I'm stating this matter-of-factly and am not regarding it as a critique]. The Foye signing does not add a large amount to the team [again I have to qualify the statement for those who read this as me saying he's worthless]. While he's talented and has abilities to strengthen the team, due to his role his impact is negligible compared to his cost (both financially and with opportunity cost in player development).
I'm going to go ahead and end my post prematurely here as I am typing on a phone waiting for my connecting flight to San Antonio and I've lost my train of thought.
