The first couple times I thought you were making a joke...
From here on out are you cheering for us to win or lose?
- Thread starter The Midnight
- Start date
Yup, you’ve got Danny Ainge, Austin Ainge, Sam Presti, Troy Weaver and Popovich all figured out, Tremendous Upside.
You should write each of them a letter with your ideas. I’m sure they’d appreciate it and change their approach.
It always amazes me how many "fans" think tanking will get us a player that is good enough to help us win a championship and will stay long enough for that to happen. If there is a way to tank and win a championship a team would have figured it out.
Cheering for your team to win has 0 effect on the team winning. I get wanting a high draft pick. It has a little bit higher chance of turning into a star that is needed to win a championship. But I would still rather cheer for a win and not be upset if we lose than to actively cheer for a loss against my own team. Imagine being the embarrisng fan in the stadium wearing a Jazz jersey telling everyone you are a more die hard or serious fan and know more while cheering for the other team and cheering when we lose. You can cheer for a win and want a high draft pick. It is not an either/or choice.
Not every fan is championship or bust. I would love to see us win it all. That takes extreme luck even with a talented roster, especially for a small market and a market with a very negative perception by most players. I would rather float around the 3-5 seed in the west regularly and hope one year we get on a hot streak at the right time and/or injuries help us a bit. Fans can be smart and closely following the team and have different opinions from you. Sports is just a lot of opinions. Being a fan is just being passionate about those opinions. Some fans get really hyped over possible draft picks and possible potential of players, some do not and get hyped over other things.
LogGrad98
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From this poll nearly 70% are of the same opinion so it isn't just meaningless banter. People want a better chance at a franchise player, that involves losing to very a better chance at a great pick since we already know big name players don't want to be here of their own volition.
I agree with you, I'd love to see us continually in the top 3-5 and get on a hot streak. How do we get from current state (around 5th to 7th pick - so, bad) to 3-5 spot in the playoff race? Is it more likely to get us there sooner by winning more this year and straight up losing our pick, or losing more this year and keeping our pick with an actual chance at a better player in the draft. Which do you think gives us the best odds of being competitors in, say, 3-5 years from now, from actions taken this season? I know what nearly 70% of the fans on this site think will be more likely to help us get there. That's what you're seeing in this poll. So tell us how winning 30 games this year and having no first round pick at all in what looks like a deep draft class will be more helpful for getting us to that 3-5 seed level than losing and keeping the pick, when we are frankly already bad and, without an influx of talent, likely to remain bad for the foreseeable future? If not from a deep draft, where does the talent come from?
I am well aware that many people have that opinion. But it is meaningless banter. It has no effect on the team or what happens. I know lots of people think that is the only way and have strong opinions about it. But that doesnt mean its the only opinion and others are wrong or it makes you a better fan like what was being described by others. Also 70% of this board tends to have similar opinions based on reading the same opinions over and over. This board does not speak for all of the fan base and there is no reason to look down on others, let them be a fan in their own way it doesnt change anything.
I prefer to get a high pick this year, I would like to win the lottery. That is the most likely (although still less likely than likely) of getting a good player in this draft that helps us improve. As far as the draft goes it is a complete crap shoot and good picks come from everywhere and nowhere with a slightly higher chance the higher the pick. So I prefer the higher odds. But again I think you missed my point about cheering for wins or not. It makes 0 difference if I cheer or not for wins.
As far as the rest of your post goes I dont think its doom and gloom of no hope if we dont get a pick this year. We have players developing from high picks. We have lots of other picks. We have trade options and FA options that could turn into something great. Last year more than 70% of this board thought Keyonte was basically worthless and/or not part of being a good team. That has changed. When we traded and got Lauri more than 70% of this board didnt think of him as a building block, things changed. But sure a pick is better than no pick. But if we suddenly go on a huge win streak and win the season out and make the playoffs and either make some noise or upset a team I will be very happy and the future is bright. Granted I put that at .0001% chance but still ill happily cheer, unlike most of this board until its too late.
I happily cheer for wins and am happy when we lose as well.
Had last night’s Vivint Arena (or whatever the hell it’s called these days) been empty, pretty sure we lost that game with the Mavs leading by 10 points with something like 5 minutes left.
10 more wins like that and we probably lose our pick.
Instant gratification trumps all for some, I guess.
We need a better tank commander.
Every player is slowly progressing so it makes it hard. Also Anderson is just sitting on the bench, but he's probably still a quality 9th/10th guy on most teams.
If we are going to play Lauri and Key then we really need someone like Poole to take possessions away from them while on the court and to ruin vibes.
LogGrad98
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This is the quote I was talking about (below). The Spurs have this pretty well figured out, they have done it 3 times, with a dynasty as a result.
As far as the other comments, no one, not a single person, thinks that our cheering or not cheering for wins has any effect on win rate, that is a straw man. But I think more people hope we would be prudent in planning and realize that tanking, stealth or otherwise, is a more likely route to a big name player for our franchise than nearly any other route. I mean go back 20 years, and even back to the 80's, how many actual stars have we been able to sign, and how many have we drafted? And frankly got lucky drafting. I mean it could be argued that we traded for or outright signed exactly one star level player: Boozer. But we got lucky with Rudy and Donovan. We traded up in the draft, meaning a higher level pick got us our guy, when we drafted Deron. I guess if you go back to the 80's we signed 2 star-level players: Boozer and Hornacek. And we got lucky again with Malone and Stockton. And the literal only #1 pick we ever "earned", through having the worst record, was handed to the Lakers and became Magic Johnson. So yeah, tanking and improving your odds at a good player is the objectively best method we have to get better.
But I agree I want to watch wins, they are way more fun. And watching guys like Key get better and better is awesome, his 39 point night was spectacular. I love watching Lauri play. But we keep ourselves in this middle ground and we are just working on hope to get better instead of taking action. You know, it feels like being back in the days of the offseason acquisition being touted as "internal development" that brought us exactly bubkes. And continually being in the even 9-14 range for picks will never get us into the 3rd to 5th playoff spots (or at least it is very unlikely) as we would love to see, and hoping they can trade/sign to get us there is an even bigger pipe dream to be honest. I mean I guarantee you that Ainge has been very active in this regard, especially considering when he got here he had a pile of assets to use, that have slowly dissolved into middling picks, as most picks outside the top 3 are likely to be frankly, until the pile is now just a bare handful. So he has struck out thus far, and why? No good targets, sure, no one wanting to deal, sure, and how much of it is players in essence communicating "you go play in Utah". I mean, no way to know really, but this has been a prevailing attitude for our franchise for a long time, so likely at least a small part of the reason we haven't seen any success from his "big game hunting" so far.
So yeah, I would hope they do what they have to in order to keep our pick this year and hopefully we hit on the 5th pick better than we did with Ace (at least thus far). That is a far better outcome than just missing the play-in and giving the 10th pick to OKC, or then burning even more assets just to keep a middling pick.