So the only person who didn't "trust the process" in Philly is....

we don't know that they didn't try to make a move at the deadline. who were they going to get, exactly? and they were already out of the playoffs by then.

I'm guessing nobody was offering a first for lou or bass. short of that, why move them? they're outplaying their salaries. keep them on.

best players were young, and the coach hates them.

bad coach.

I don't know about the d-league stuff. but there's enough other young guys clamoring for minutes, so I'm not sure how useful it would have been.

no excuse for not dropping Byron, imo. but that's not tanking.

the lakers have made pitches to big FAs each summer, have signed and/or traded for veterans that could have helped them win, and have explored trades for star players. philly basically did none of that. they signed bargain basement young players and took on bad vet contracts in exchange for late picks.

you can pick on the lakers for failing miserably, but they have been trying to win games. philly most certainly hasn't.

 

They definitely did not start the season off with tanking on their minds.

But once we saw that Kobe was done and the coach sucked, the tank was on.

 

^right. again, completely different than what philly's been doing. not sure an argument can be made that they're similar.

 

The Lakers went after Aldridge, Jordan and Monroe in the off season....that's not tanking

After that failed, they acquired vets in Bass, Lou and Hibbert....stil not tanking

What did Philly do? Their roster is comprised of no name scrubs all 25 years or younger (other than Ish Smith and Carl Landry)

Did they try to acquire any veteran talent? Well, they traded for Carl freakin Landry....

 

Again:

I'm not disputing the fact that we started tanking after the season started. You said we've been tanking for the last 2-3 years intentionally.

Before the season started, a lot of us were expecting 30-35 wins this year with Kobe back healthy and a few new pieces.

What do you think Philly fans were expecting? They had to 'trust the process'...

Then the season began: We all saw Kobe was officially done and our offense was a buncha isolation crap. And after Kobe announced his retirement, the season pretty much turned into a joke in terms of competing to win on a nightly basis.

 

Well, we've been kind of stuck with Kobe's contract the last couple years. We haven't been able to rebuild properly and combine that with striking out on marque free agents the last two years, it has turned into basically riding it out until Kobe retires.

I don't see this as going into the season with a mindset of intentionally losing (like Sam Hinkie's plan)

 

can't make a good one?



your essential claim was that the lakers have been doing the same thing as the sixers. it's just not at all true. I think folks have laid that out.

where the agree to disagree part comes in is whether there's a difference between not attempting to win at all and not trying hard to win after you've already been knocked from contention. most of us are saying those are apples and oranges.

the lakers thought hibbert/lou/bass/kobe were going to make them a playoff contender. when they realized they weren't, they didn't double down on the strategy at the trade deadline, and they didn't bother installing a new coach on the fly. hell, not firing the coach who's alienating your young players is absolutely antithetical to what philly's doing, I would say.

where's philly's hibbert/lou/bass? where's the attempts to trade their prospects for established stars? nowhere. because what they're doing is unprecedented and unparalleled, particularly by these lakers.

again, the fact that the lakers' plans have all gone to crap doesn't mean they had the same plan as someone else with the same record.

 

To add to this, I'd like to believe that the reason the Lakers didn't trade away their vets is because either they didn't want to take on extra salaries to maintain flexibility over the summer, or they genuinely want these players here. They didn't get rid of Byron over the course of the season because they haven't hired someone new, and are probably waiting on Luke.

 

Another thing to bring up would be the top 3 protected pick this season and top 5 last year. This has definitely had an impact on the lack of in season moves.

Around December, it was pretty obvious the Lakers weren't going anywhere this year. What moves could they possibly have made to improve the roster at this point and what would that have resulted in? Maybe 5-6 more wins?

We tried trading Nick Young at the trade deadline.....and is not signing Vander Blue seriously one of your arguments for how the Lakers aren't trying to improve?


Instead of having the 2nd worst record, maybe they end up 4th worst and greatly decrease their chances of acquiring a valuable asset in the draft.

The Lakers philosophy the last 2 years has been to field the best team they can in the off-season given the current infrastructure of the team. And since that clearly hasn't been working, I personally think they start thinking about that top5/3 protected draft pick at some point in the season and the tanking commences.

That's the difference....Philly has been going into the last few seasons with a tanking plan!

 

How would Vander Blue have gotten any minutes with Clarkson, Russell, Lou and Huertas? If anything, that would have decreased Russell's playing time and we'd all be screaming at Byron even more.

I think Ryan Kelly having any playing time has more to do with Byron being an idiot. It's not like we're so thin that we're forced to play Ryan Kelly 20 minutes a night. He should not be playing a single minute on a team with Bass, Black, Nance and Randle all playing the same position.

Agree to disagree it is.

 

i actually responded to each of your points in a prior post.

semantics aside, the larger point was that we were doing what philly was doing, not really about "tanking", whatever that means.

the lakers didn't think having byron scott as their coach was doom. why spend that much cash on a coach if you're deliberately trying to lose? they could have paid some inexperienced assistant 1/4 scott's salary and still lost. again, not what philly's doing. hell, one of the things i LIKE about philly is that they made a sensible coaching hire. they just chose to hand that poor guy a bunch of crap season after season.

and yes, the lakers were out of contention in december. it was obvious to everyone. they weren't in october, though--at least not in their minds (or the minds of most of our fans, btw). which is what we're talking about.

it's process vs. outcomes, a fundamental distinction in many arenas of thought. philly and la's outcomes are the same, but the way in which they got there is totally different. weirdly enough, it's another reason why philly's approach sucked so hard that its author had to resign.

i believe the point i was making was that the non-firing of scott doesn't mean much to the intentional losing theory. the larger issue here is that lakers management might not be as upset with scott as fans are. in fact, it's quite likely they aren't. this probably means they think russell needs discipline, for example.

anyway, i'm drifting: bringing in a stopgap coach one month into the season wasn't going to do anything. see rockets, houston.

actually signing useful veterans and attempting to trade for others is a COMPLETELY different approach than philly's, plain and simple. the roy hibbert trade and subsequent retention are basically mortal sins in hinkie's playbook.

and at this point, you've sort of conceded the argument, imo. somehow, you morphed it into a tanking/not tanking argument, which is useless, as tanking has no formal definition. what shoe and I have argued (quite successfully, based on your last two paragraphs) is that your assertion of equivalence between philly and la was fundamentally erroneous: