And you still drop very quickly from Dirk/Kobe/Pierce level players to Tony Parker + Jason Terry type guys.
Tony Parker is closer to Dirk/Kobe/Pierce than to Jason Terry.
I think you're underestimating Jason Terry.
I wasn't trying to make the case against.
The team we have is not going to finish bottom 5. That's our situation.
Is it hopeless? No.
Would it have been better if Ainge tore the team down further to guarantee a high draft pick?
You might be right.
I don't like tanking, but the notion that we could finish with a crappy draft pick and still get our next franchise cornerstone is so much more unlikely than it seems to some posters (not you, necessarily) that I think it needs reiterating.
Kawhii Leonard was brought up earlier -- he went 15th to a different team, cost the Spurs their starting point guard of the future, and couldn't shoot the three until San Antonio got ahold of him. He's an example of everything tilting exactly right, not something that could be feasibly replicated.
You make the point that franchise cornerstones are much more unlikely to be picked outside the top five. The flip side of that is that "franchise cornerstone" type players are fairly unlikely to be picked in the top five as well.
If you count Pierce, Nowitzki, and Bryant as the only franchise cornerstone type players picked later in the lottery in the past twenty years, I would counter that the amount of that caliber of players picked in the top five in the past twenty years, only includes one more player.
I would say that Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Lebron James, and Kevin Durant fit that bill.
That makes seven franchise players picked within the past twenty years. Four of them were picked in the top seven, three of them were picked outside the top seven.
What this indicates to me is not that if you want a transcendent franchise changing level talent you better get a pick in the top half of the lottery, but rather that the type of player you are talking about comes along extremely rarely.
Basically, I would say that your transcendent level superstar comes around on average less than once every other draft.