Interesting how tanking skeptics are suddenly emboldened to come out of the woodwork after a year+ of being brow beaten and marginalized by the vociferous pro-tanking crowd. The Jazz tanking "strategy" has been revealed for what it's always been: Let's give our consumers a shiity product and hope and pray we beat the odds and get lucky. "Wing and a prayer" strategy is a more apt term.
My answer to the question is that we are much further away from contention than we were before all this began. Rather than doing the hard work of building a team through creative moves and calculated risk taking, the Jazz FO decided to cross their fingers, rub their lucky rabbit foot, invoke the heavens for favor, and bet it all on a roll of the dice, so to speak. They followed the lazy path of least resistance, which has the added benefit of insulating themselves from criticism because they can always sell hope that maybe, just maybe this year we'll get lucky. And, if we don't get lucky this year, there's always next year. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, fans endure season after season of a crappy, uncompetitive, unentertaining product with the most likely outcome that the Jazz more or less become the team the FO blew up just a few years ago, competitive, entertaining, with some chance of relatively deep playoff runs, but not a championship caliber team.
God, I freak'n hate tanking. It sucks all the fun out of the experience.
That said, the FO may yet salvage the situation with some shrewd moves, thereby accelerating the path back to relevance. THAT is what I'm hoping for. I'm not pinning my hopes on dumb, random luck in some future lottery. It's time the FO stops doing so as well.
