Off-Season Rumblings

[SoberasHotRod]

You are becoming the master at putting weird *** arguments in places that aren’t there. I’ve laid out where I am very clearly. If you don’t understand where I am it’s an issue on your end. No where in this part of the discussion did I say trade Lauri. I’ve entertained the idea at other times… just like you have. The ideal path is to draft in the top 5 with Lauri.

You are overly concerned with being right or wrong and keeping score… this playing both sides thing you keep trying to push on me is weird. There is nuance to these things… this isn’t some political issue where I have to vote and choose a side lol.

Whoa, save it for the pod you two.

 

[Handlogten's Heros]

Very much this. I am not team Trade Lauri... I am Team Tank. We can tank in a lot of ways. Like you I doubt Lauri is signing up for another two years of nonsense. IF we did land the dude in 2025 then 2026 is less important... but it often doesn't work that way.

My position is we should tank in the most profitable ways. So if the return for Lauri is monsterous because there aren't any sellers out there then that is a legit route to consider. If not go ahead and sell off Sexton/Walker or whatever parts make sense. I might retain Dunn as he could be a trade asset and can help us not be charmin soft. If Lauri will sign the extension and play along for a year his value is still sky high... so if the draft doesn't go our way we can pivot. I would also work to set ourselves up with a huge amount of cap space next season so that when the new rules are in full effect we can take advantage one way or another.

Now this would require a real plan... and not just doing isolated moves that make sense valuewise. So DA may actually have to fit transactions into one them for a year instead of bouncing back and forth.

Well I feel like you haven’t been paying attention then lol. I’m not out here trying to trade Lauri for whatever offer comes through the door so we can tank like the OP said. I’ve been clear I’d have a high price for him. What constitutes a godfather offer is going to be different for everyone. I’m probably more willing to move him if that monster offer came in than most here. I’m flexible… I’m not so far dug in to the “we can’t trade Lauri or we will never be good again” camp. I also think if the offers are just fair that we can walk away.

The tank race is super open. There have never been more teams trying to be good. Parity and the play in means the race to the bottom is more like a jog. We would have to trade a guy or two and allocate more time to young players. Likely won’t be as bad wiz, blazers but Pistons are trying.. hornets may not want to be a dumpster fire with new owner…spurs gonna have a hard time holding back Wemby… there likely will be a team with a bunch of injuries but getting to 5-6 shouldn’t be too difficult IF we don’t make win now moves and if we sell off one key piece. Just have to start early rather than half assing the tank.

I’m all for the “pause year” where we trade both JCs and one of Sexton or Kessler. Extend Lauri and give him more than we have to this year to get some flat no raise years later. Get expiring contracts and have copious amounts of cap space to add win now talent to our young talent and Lauri. It would just suck to be like the 5th worst team and fall to 7th in the draft.

I think he really wants to be here for a multitude of reasons. The R+E is likely super high (likely number 1). I think its also a reason you can have a direct conversation and say "we aren't bringing in extra vets or help and actually might sell off a couple pieces to help us have a high pick next year... we plan on having space and making some win now moves at some point in the next 18 months or so... you cool?" and he might play along.

Later both parties could revisit the arrangement if it is going poorly but for now get the deal done. And again... I would give him all our space or as much as we are allowed to try and get some years without raises on the backend. Will be more impactful later than it is now with an extra 10-12 million in space.

I do think it’s key to be direct. I think having the rug pulled was a big part of the issue last year. Trade off one or two vets this offseason. Roll with a lot of the young guys or guys like Lofton. Manage some injuries very conservatively.

I mean we did a whole pod about it… you had to skip through all these posts to find one the one you quoted. It’s super obvious where I stand. Reducing all that stuff to say I just want to trade Lauri is the only annoying thing. Read and comprehend @Elizah Huge

 

[fishonjazz]

Hear me out, how about we draft an all star and KEEP Lauri and then we have TWO all stars.

Because that is the rub. Even if you get the one all star you still need one or two more.

HH didn't say anything about trading Lauri in this discussion

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[Elizah Huge]

I mean we did a whole pod about it… you had to skip through all these posts to find one the one you quoted. It’s super obvious where I stand. Reducing all that stuff to say I just want to trade Lauri is the only annoying thing. Read and comprehend @Elizah Huge

Ok if you want to be a dick that’s fine. You literally have said multiple times you are fine with trading Lauri. Stop riding the fence so hard because you want to be able to point back and say you were right regardless of what happens.

You literally argued with me on the pod that we could just trade for someone of Lauri’s caliber down the road when I brought up we should keep him because we will need players like him. Did this all not happen?

 

[Elizah Huge]

HH’s stance is we should tank and if that means trading Lauri he’s all for it. That means he’s ok with trading Lauri. Am I comprehending this wrong?

 

[Saint Cy of JFC]

Podcast host on podcast host violence.

 

[Ferguson_Mellochill]

Jazz should extend Lauri, give him a nice raise, and give themselves 2+ years to trade him. There's no urgency to trade Lauri. The urgency is more on the part of other teams who view him as their missing piece. I don't like the argument that we need to unload Lauri in order to lose more. We've already tanked the back third of two seasons with Lauri on the roster. We can do it for a full season if that's the direction we need to go.

 

[Elizah Huge]

Jazz should extend Lauri, give him a nice raise, and give themselves 2+ years to trade him. There's no urgency to trade Lauri. The urgency is more on the part of other teams who view him as their missing piece. I don't like the argument that we need to unload Lauri in order to lose more. We've already tanked the back third of two seasons with Lauri on the roster. We can do it for a full season if that's the direction we need to go.

I am no longer entertaining any trade Lauri talk. We shouldn’t trade him at all. Period. We need guys especially guys like him if we want to build a contender.

 

[fishonjazz]

HH’s stance is we should tank and if that means trading Lauri he’s all for it. That means he’s ok with trading Lauri. Am I comprehending this wrong?

Ok with and saying we should are two different things imo

He is also ok with keeping Lauri from what I can gather.
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[Thee Jazz Fan]

Hear me out, how about we draft an all star and KEEP Lauri and then we have TWO all stars.

Because that is the rub. Even if you get the one all star you still need one or two more.

I’m not saying we should trade Lauri, I’m close, and if it happens I won’t be upset unless the return isn’t what I want, but this helps accelerate the building of this team. Increases the chance of getting two all stars, one in the draft or trading for two. But the biggest benefit is building a team around two stars. Sometimes you have to tear it all down to build it back up.

 

[infection]

It’s more than 50%… I’m also not sure what we did do has anything to do with the current conversation.

Odds are stacked against winning a title but I do think we will have long term solid success if we don’t just try to shortcut things.

Combining these two into one response. In relation to the first one, I have an eternal frustration with our direction since 2017 in regards to draft picks. Also it's a need for recognition of how we ended up in the position we're in and acknowledging what we thought would happen when we made initial decisions vs. how it played out and how we think about it now. I know that's a bit of a run-on sentence that's pretty vague but I'll try to clarify. The first part is a dead horse I've beat for some time, that in 2017 we desperately wanted to hold our pick because we just landed Donovan with a pick and we believed we had a shot at Doncic. The reality was that it was time for our mindset to pivot from collecting assets to building a contender. Our hopes of Doncic became Grayson Allen. We continued to hold on to our picks and DL "keeping the powder dry" thought he could just run it back. Back when Hayward left, we then started looking toward future free agents and our cap space timing and we'd talk about maybe we could land Klay or Kawhi the year they would be free agents (which is obviously laughable in hindsight). So now we know that Donovan is going to be a really good player and we continue to "keep the powder dry" until we reach a dead end (a cap space dead end with guys whose extensions will kick in) and we end up exchanging that for Conley. The Conley dead was fine, which isn't my point, but when people talked about keeping the powder dry (picks and cap space), they would have never imagined it was for Conley. We eventually got to that point as we accepted the reality (frog in slowly boiling water) but our continual justification for the "powder" being dry was for someone we believed to be a much bigger name than Conley.

So fast forward to when we blow up the team and everyone is excited for what's believed to be a treasure trove of assets. The great thing about assets is that they could be anything, like a asking a kindergarten class what they want to be when they grow up, because they have their whole future ahead of them and can shoot for the sky. We have thoughts of trading for the next disgruntled super star, or that we would be in the discussion for a Luka or a Giannis. A good encapsulation of that feeling is Ryan mentioning the KD deal and saying, effectively, "oh yeah, well we can do that deal 2 or 3 times." So as time has moved on more, we've pivoted from the idea of trading for a super star as I believe most people are recognizing that won't happen. So we then pivot to the idea of having to draft one. In conjunction with this, many are realizing that, from this vantage point, there's a pretty good likelihood that none of these picks we got end up being top 10 picks (and to speak about enthusiasm for top ten picks, look at the enthusiasm we have this your or about last year's #9 pick). I understand your position about not being able to control the fate of the other picks and thus we need to control what we can, make a sacrifice for the next two years, and try to secure, as much as possible, picks in the next two drafts that yield us the best chances at drafting guys who will be difference makers. What I would caution against is the tendency for this to appear like a desert mirage. Fast forward two years and (in this hypothetical) we haven't really done much structure building for the team, we see that we don't have enough fitting pieces to start to make a push, and perhaps we're underwhelmed by our draft results up until that point, and in a way that would be consistent with a sunk-cost fallacy, we decide that we've already put enough into tanking that we may as well get more bang for our buck and continue tanking just a little bit longer because ______ [there will be logical reasons and arguments that arise to favor this].

My biggest thing is that we're going to reach a point where we will have to move forward. Where we differ is that you're approaching this from the angle of having the really good players in place first and then the secondary players later, but I believe the order of these will have to be reversed (not exclusively so but from a probability standpoint). I believe we'll have to move forward with talent and keep churning from there. It's not because I'm impatient in watching losing. I had plenty of enthusiasm and investment in the team when we were looking at the "core 4" and had a terrible coach (in addition to every single era we've thrown out since Stockton and Malone left). At least there was some semblance of knowing what we're trying to do, even if we didn't do it well. I can deal with losing. So the idea of grabbing a BI or whatever (not specifically him, but he's a good representative stand-in), for me, isn't about the idea that it's better to start being a fringe playoff team, it's that we need to actually build a team. DA had actually built a team before Tatum and Brown, even if none of those other guys are there now. Eventually we're going to have to make a move for a player with flaws, and I'm not talking about the John Collins type. We need actual talent on the team, and that will come with cost (and opportunity cost) but there's also an opportunity cost with staying in neutral. It reminds me of the partial lump-sum or full amount in installments with the lottery, and feeling like if we're patient then we can get the whole amount, when in reality the lump-sum gives us the opportunity to make more even if it's less up front. I'm ready to take the lump-sum.

[the above is a random assortment of thoughts I've put together piecemeal over the course of the day. It's not nearly as organized as I would like so I'm sure there are a lot of things in here I didn't flesh out very well... I'm not involved in whatever back and forth is going on currently...]

 

[Elizah Huge]

Ok with and saying we should are two different things imo

He is also ok with keeping Lauri from what I can gather.
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They are different but they’re not that different. It’s like when your wife asks if you want to go to Taco Bell for dinner. You say you’re ok with it but yes technically you’re not saying you should.