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On the record...

infection said:
Mine are similar and I’ve meant to make a more meaningful post on it. I’m not as optimistic on the potential return on Gobert when all is said and done. I don’t believe many people acknowledge the realistic possibility that it could equate to a mess of pottage. I also don’t know that people realize how good the Wolves can be, even legitimate contenders. We had Gobert surrounded by Mitchell, Conley and Bogdanovic, then pretended Royce was a valuable defensive piece. The Wolves surround Gobert with KAT, Edwards, DLo and McDaniels. That’s a much more talented cast, any way you slice it. I know we’re prone to poopoo it and “lol it’s teh wolvs,” but if we had that kind of talent around Gobert, we would have circle jerked ourselves into expecting a title this year.

Over the past few years I’ve consistently harped on specific problems that we had that were addressable:

1. Quin’s overemphasis on filtering to Rudy that had the unfortunate side effect of conditioning guys to not play defense at all.

2. Mentality. There was a huge mental hurdle that compounded with every historical collapse.

3. Rebounding in the clutch. We never really played a true power forward unless you count Favors, and that’s when our defense was better, but he still didn’t close and it was always a problem that Rudy ended up guarding the shooter and nobody could rebound, so we’d get smoked on giving up offensive rebounds.

4. We’ve justified obvious misses of easy Gobert targets by pointing to his offensive inefficiencies. Being able to hit Gobert with a lob is something that made people believe Exum could survive in this league.

If we would have addressed any of the above by even 25%, we’d be in a totally different situation. But how do the Wolves differ on this?

1. The entire team hasn’t been conditioned to not play defense for the past number of years. You take guys giving an average effort and then add Gobert and you’ll get some pretty great results.

2. Minnesota doesn’t have the mental baggage of collapsing in big moments in historic fashion. There’s very little pressure here. They’ll likely be underdogs and hungry.

3. Instead of having Bogdanovic or Royce next to him in the front court to grab defensive boards, he’s got ****ing KAT. He averages more rebounds per minute than Royce and Bojan combined, to say nothing if Edwards and McDaniels’ better rebounding abilities than the rest of our cast. Yes, I get that this will redistribute a bit, but this is worlds better with no hyperbole.

4. Russell will look significantly better as a point guard with Gobert. He averages 8 assists per 36 minutes. And KAT gives some massive spacing on n the perimeter while combining Gobert’s massive gravity at the rim.

The picks we get from the Wolves may well all be in the 20s. The pick swap may be irrelevant. People are talking about the Wolves giving up way too much. This is actually a nice bold move from Minnesota and this deal can legitimately put them on the map. This is the reason you cash in on potential (i.e. picks) because the hypothetical value is always higher than the actual value. An example is Donovan’s rookie year. Nobody wanted to give up the pick because we kept thinking it was Doncic. I kept telling everyone the pick won’t be that good. But, hey, it could’ve been Doncic, like Almost Ainge! We needed to parlay that hypothetical value into real value. Instead, we got… Grayson Allen. Then the cap space issue. We “kept the powder dry” to not act too prematurely. So we waited. I know many have perhaps memory-holed this, but for a couple years we were thinking of guys like Kawhi and Klay being who we could dump our money on. As time went on, we eventually hit a wall where we were going to lose cap space and our return was... Mike Conley. Now you can certainly say it was a reasonable deal at the time and the best available, but there's absolutely nobody who, had you told them a year or two before hand, that all that "dry powder" was to land Conley, that they would have been excited. The "potential" of what something can be is almost always much higher than the reality of what it becomes.

On the flip side, there's a consistent appeal to Ainge rebuilding Boston by getting the return he did on Paul Piece and Kevin Garnett. Kevin Garnett was 37 years old with a lot of NBA miles on him. Paul Pierce was 36 years old. Boston didn't have a supporting cast. The fact that Ainge was able to parlay that into what he did is the exception and not the rule. Had Boston not flipped something later this past season, it's also a totally different narrative on what Ainge did while he was there. Donovan Mitchell is 25 years old. Rudy Gobert is 30 years old. Both of these guys are under contract for three more years and both have a player option for the fourth. Kevin Garnett had two years left on his deal. Paul Pierce had one year left on his. These situations aren't even remotely close, and the amount of value Ainge sent out for what he got back isn't even remotely close to the kind of value ratio we're getting now. We're doing all of this for perhaps a slim chance that we get back to maybe being as close as we are now, with perhaps a theoretically higher ceiling. All yet to be determined. We could do well and make it out better off, but I think a lot of people are discounting how realistic of a possibility it is that this offseason may end up being a gigantic **** up because Ainge is going all-in on what worked for him once, much the same way that DL wanted to go all-in on Udoka because he felt getting Rudy and Donovan gave him that forecasting greatness.
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I agree with a lot of what is said here. I think the picks UTA got are overrated, because picks are always overrated these days, and not enough has been said about the fact that we just traded two star players in their primes locked into long term deals. We broke up a really good thing, and having a bunch of late first round draft picks isn't exactly the power position it's being made out to be. I never believed Mitchell-Gobert was the weak point of the franchise, they were the strength. If there was any attempt at all to improve the team around them things would have been different, but instead the FO decided to not acknowledge any kind of weakness was a brutal failure. I could not believe how arrogant the Jazz FO was. There were so many obvious areas improve, the perimeter defense is a great example. It was brutally obvious the Jazz could not guard the perimeter....what were the answers to that? Miye Oni? Mike Conley being healthy? Rudy Gay playing small ball 5? Outrageously stupid.

I like what MIN did. People are going wild over all the picks they traded. But if there were 3 less draft picks included, we're talking about an expected value of about one decent player rotation player if MIN continues to be a playoff team. Draft picks in the 20's don't turn into Gobert, they turn into Bolmaro's, Doke's, and Kessler's. That's the reality of drafting in the 20's. Everybody creams themselves over the dream scenario where those picks somehow turn into Tatum and Brown again, but if we're going to do that, we should consider the scenario where things go as poorly. At the very least, consider the scenario where things go as expected. No one wants to talk about an average or below average outcome of future picks, they only want to consider the scenario where it turns out perfect without considering the likelihood of it happening.

Whenever there's a trade between two teams going different direction, the tanking team is anointed winners without failure. You will always win the trade when the goal is to suck. It means nothing.
 
Saint Cy of JFC said:
I think KAT/Gobert is an elite fit and it's going to be lethal.
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If KAT was 6'8 and had the exact same defensive/big man impact, people would love his fit with Gobert. But because he's a 7 footer people want to believe he can be a C and do the big man stuff. Truth is, he can't and he never will be able to. The Wolves were smart to not hang onto this idea that KAT is a big man who will do the big man stuff. He never was that guy and never will be. Now he can be the superstar player he is on team that isn't devoid of all the big man qualities.
 
KqWIN said:
If KAT was 6'8 and had the exact same defensive/big man impact, people would love his fit with Gobert. But because he's a 7 footer people want to believe he can be a C and do the big man stuff. Truth is, he can't and he never will be able to. The Wolves were smart to not hang onto this idea that KAT is a big man who will do the big man stuff. He never was that guy and never will be. Now he can be the superstar player he is on team that isn't devoid of all the big man qualities.
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Well, at least he can rebound like a big man. I don't think people really have any clue what they're not aware of with having never seen Rudy paired with a real PF who both spreads the floor and grabs boards. What Minnesota does could very well be making a large contingent of our fandom asking "couldn't we have kept Rudy and done this?" and the answer to that will be yes, and the rest of everyone else will allay their concerns by saying that you could only do that with a hindsight bias and that "nobody could have ever known that you could have had a winning combination with Gobert, the Wolves just happened to find it!"
 
When all is said and done, my fear is that we will have traded away the third best player in franchise history, at 30 years old, who would have been a lifer, for a package of irrelevance, because we're seduced by possibility.
 
While I've made my peace with this tear-down and everything, I just keep asking myself: who has this actually worked for so far?

Who stockpiled a whole bunch of FRPs and then turned them into a championship?
 
infection said:
When all is said and done, my fear is that we will have traded away the third best player in franchise history, at 30 years old, who would have been a lifer, for a package of irrelevance, because we're seduced by possibility.
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I love Rudy… think he will have success… I think we will have very little to regret.

I just don’t think we had any good path forward.
 
Handlogten's Heros said:
I love Rudy… think he will have success… I think we will have very little to regret.

I just don’t think we had any good path forward.
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I think that’s where the division is. We had a flaw, didn’t correct it, failed again, didn’t correct, then failed a third time. Instead of correcting, we go nuclear, saying it couldn’t have worked even though we didn’t really try anything different. If the car isn’t in drive, hitting the accelerator won’t do anything. If someone keeps saying to put it in drive, but the person neglects that to only hit the accelerator, I’d hope after a couple times the person telling them to put it in drive would kick their *** and do it themself rather than saying “****, you’re right. Get a new car.”
 
KqWIN said:
If KAT was 6'8 and had the exact same defensive/big man impact, people would love his fit with Gobert. But because he's a 7 footer people want to believe he can be a C and do the big man stuff. Truth is, he can't and he never will be able to. The Wolves were smart to not hang onto this idea that KAT is a big man who will do the big man stuff. He never was that guy and never will be. Now he can be the superstar player he is on team that isn't devoid of all the big man qualities.
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Not only that, but most teams used their centers to guard Vanderbilt last year. It's not like KAT being guarded by 4's is new.
 
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