WMC 24-25: What To WMC About Now? PLAYOFF TIME!

Biggest mistake imo is JJ not matching DA's minutes with Sengun ones .

 

Refs are a f***ing joke.

Should be ashamed of themselves.

Bron has 5 FTs in the series.

 

Totally agree. That was brutal watching it, must of been so frustrating playing.

Don't like Caruso anymore either.

 

What is Andrew Bynum doing for Game 4 ?

Just Barea'd one of these Thunder b****es .

 

Is it just me, my apple devices, or is anyone else finding the site has been Very slow to refresh pages lately? Often like 20 seconds or more here.

 

same this morning for me, which is pretty lucky for everyone, really.

 

slow news day, so i'll wmc about an old thing.

i saw an interview with malik beasley where he was talking about how he wished he played better here, and i was like YES!

i don't think people really appreciate how good that trade would have been if beasley was the guy from before or after that time period.

apparently, he had a lot of stuff going on off court (unsurprising, but not this current stuff). but he lost a lot of money and we lost a chance to win big. imagine we have another shooter against denver.

 

Agreed, I'm not entirely sure what they've been doing for multiple years.

Look at our trades:

- 2019: trade Zubac for Mike Muscala

- 2019: AD trade - alot of young assets, the 2019 1st, 2022 1st, 2023 Swap & 2025 1st - worthwhile trade, netted us a championship

- 2020: Danny Green + 2020 1st for Schroeder - who we let walk at the end of the season

- 2021: Westbrook trade - KCP, Kuzma & Harrell + 2020 1st - I get what they wanted to do here even if it didn't work (Westbrook was 11th in MVP voting the season before and had been an All Star for 7 years in a row)

- 2021: Trade Marc Gasol and a 2nd so he can get bought out and head to Spain - we couldn't have just not included the second?

- 2022: Pat Bev trade - we traded THT & Stanley Johnson for Pat Bev, I don't hate this in a vacuum. But we let Caruso go to keep THT, which from that lens is inexcusable.

- 2023: Rui for 3 seconds - worthwhile trade because we developed him into a good player, but now we're letting him walk for nothing

- 2023: Trade Westbrook + 1st for DLO, Beasley & Vando. This was a good trade, but NAW was moved in this trade as a dump to Utah and we didn't have scouts to know how good he would become. In the aftermath, we let Beasley go instead of retaining him, and gave Vando a silly contract.

- 2024: Trade DLO + 3 2nds (2027, 2030, 2031) for DFS. Good trade for a piece we needed. That we then let go after a season. We signed Smart instead which was a smart move who we are now letting go.

- 2025: Luka trade - AD, Christie, 2029 1st and 2025 2nd - Great trade

- 2026: Kennard trade - Gabe and 2032 2nd - Great trade, except we're letting Kennard go after half a season

We've won all the big trades, AD, Westbrook first trade (the process was good, we traded parts and a single first for a player that came 11th in MVP voting just the outcome was bad), the Rui trade for 3 seconds, the Westbrook dump and the Luka trade.

But around the edges, my gosh we've been average. The Zubac trade? We also have a habit of letting guys walk after we spent assets on them; Schroeder, DFS and now most likely Kennard & Rui. The cost of this is we can't trade for a guy like Isaiah Stewart because we just don't value having multiple seconds as real assets - even though they've netted us Rui, DFS and Kennard in the past. Mix this with being cheap in letting guys like Beasley and Caruso go - and it's disappointing.

Next year we finally make good on the 1st we traded to dump Westbrook. Then we've only got 1 pick outstanding which was the one we sent out for Luka. Hopefully with new ownership we can fix some of this.

 

I usually lean more towards the optimistic side, but with each passing day I trust this FO less and less. It doesn't seem like they can actually turn this summer into a success story. If next season we roll out basically the same team but with some overpaid dudes instead of Bron and Smart, we may actually have a worse team than last season. Yikes.

There's still time, but the lack of any meaningful moves is certainly concerning.

 

last one is important for me, and it's been ignored. yeah, we screwed up the last two drafts. yeah, we let some guys walk for nothing. but the idea that we could have just traded these guys for picks at the deadline whilst lebron was here? DOA. the fury to contend all the time, no matter what reality said, is how we ended up with a bare cupboard.

other teams screw up the draft just as bad or worse than we have, just as often (even teams with supposedly great draft credentials like, say, okc). but other teams are allowed to take small steps back personnel-wise to re-stock the asset pile, and we never are allowed that. the last time we did something along these lines was probably when absorbed jeremy lin for a 1st during the dark ages. notice it was during the dark ages. all these teams flush with draft capital and young role players had dark ages.

look, if we're back here with the danny greens of the world in a couple weeks, i'll join you all with tears in the beer. but smart to houston feels an awful like dfs to houston to me. in all ways including the initial reaction being a lot of pain.

 

I would say a mark against the FO is that we didn’t really go in on AD and LeBron again after 2021.
We were half in half out. I think we could have made moves like Turner to put around AD and Lebron. If we had kept Caruso on top of that, Reaves, Caruso, Lebron, AD & Turner is probably a contender 3-4 years ago.

Ultimately our treading water paid off with Luka, but that was luck more so than any good process - you can’t rely on other people to make generational mistakes to be great.

 

disagree again. good process creates the ability to capitalize on luck. further, all the great front offices everyone dreams about got lucky, too. okc's whole thing is built on a generational mistake of others and some tanking, otherwise, they'd be a bunch of great role players in search of a star (yes, yes, i know, the great presti was destined to get one, right? because of his good process...). the spurs' "brilliance" was really just winning the wemby lotto, else they'd be mired in the mud like everybody else.

you can't just ignore the difference in working for the lakers and dealing with lebron/rich paul versus these other situations. it is not the same thing.

 

You can spin it anyway you want. Getting Luka was not good process, the easiest way to figure that out is: can you replicate it? No, you can’t.

It would be like Spurs trading Wemby to Dallas in 2 years. Or any team trading their franchise player inside the same conference when they’re in their mid 20s. It just doesn’t happen.

You can (or used to be able to) replicate tanking to get a franchise player, you just had to be bad enough for a long enough time to increase your surface area of top 3 picks. They’ve kind of eradicated that now.

Presti’s process was impressive in that he took vets that were low on value, rehabbed that value and sold them on. He made a ton of picks doing this with good players.

Our FO so far trades for players and lets them go for no assets.

 

1h to go for this thread to be onfire

 

lol, i'll be at dinner when the deluge hits; will come back later to help do the post-mortem. but yeah, might as well get this thread warmed up...

 

We entered this summer needing to upgrade 2 of our top 6 players with a near impossible chance to do that. In all likelihood, we were going to get one guy based on how s***ty the market was and that the only talent was on the RFA market.

Now, we have to upgrade 4 of our top 6 players with about half the amount of money you need to do that and about 1/3 of the trade assets you need to do that.

I'm thrilled we kept so much optionality and flexibility open for this amazing opportunity that is in front of us this summer.

 

The writing was on the wall when we didn't get Claxton for nothing that we weren't bringing the team back. We could of legitimately had:

Luka / Smart / Bronny
Reaves / Kennard / Carr
Grimes (MLE) / Jake / Adou
Lebron / Rui
Claxton / Ayton / Hayes

• Smart is signing for 7m, we could have brought him back at 6.5m with non bird rights and a promise for another raise next year with early bird rights.
• EDIT: Kennard is signing for 6.5m per. We had rights up to 13.
• Lebron at 22m (we forced this divorce in my opinion)
• Rui at 16m
• Claxton for a 1st in exchange for them taking Vando & Knecht (he went for free)
• Ayton opted in

And we could of still had a first left over.

That's the bar I have on whether this is a successful offseason or not.