If Brooklyn trades Lopez in off season for draft picks, keep pick. If not, consider giving it up for a stud since I think Brooklyn will not be bottom dwellers next season.
And why would Brooklyn not be a bottom dweller next season? What significant improvements would you expect and how many additional wins would those moves translate into?
PS - Please don't use Free Agency as the main avenue of improvement. Plenty of teams have money and almost all of them are more desirable than the Nets. While it could happen, it's not a likely scenario. Nor should you use the "no incentive to tank" excuse either. They haven't had an incentive to tank the last two years and they've still been awful.
Not FA. I'm basing it on how much better they are playing, how much effort they seem to be showing. I think that now that they are healthy, they play hard for their coach. I think their record the last 15 - 20 games is more indicative of how they will play next season then the first 60 games of the season. Most of their losses the last month plus are extremely close, including to us.
Plus don't forget, they will have no incentive to tank next season either. How many teams next year will decide to tank? No idea, but it is always a factor.
I'd love to keep the 2018 pick, especially with how strong it is at the top with big men, which is our biggest need, obviously. But while I don't think Brooklyn is going to sniff the play-offs next season, I see them continuing to play at a 35-40% win clip, and not at below 30% win clip.
Let's go through this analytically.
1. Injuries can't be used as an excuse for their poor record. HOU, GS, SAS, OKC and PHO have been fortunate with injuries this year. PHI and MIA have been unlucky. Everyone else falls into the middle. Brooklyn hasn't had an unusual amount of games lost and they've been quite fortunate when you consider that their best player(s) have been healthy. In short, they've had a normal amount of injuries to actually less important players. This can't be used to excuse their current record.
2. Basing something on a small sample size and discounting a larger one is a classic flaw. Fans do this all the time and it's not usually true. Do you realize that if you flip a coin 100 times you're more likely to get 6 straight heads or tails in a row than not at some point? Yet that doesn't change the overall odds. Normal distribution takes into account both the highs and the lows, the streaks of both losing and winning. It would be one thing if a key player (say Russell Westbrook) was lost much of the year and the record showed a marked difference on his return. But that's not the case here. There's nothing analytically to suggest that their last 10-15 games is more indicative of a future pattern than their first 60.
3. The no incentive to tank has no weight whatsoever. I laugh/cringe every time someone brings this up because it's just really faulty or lazy logic. They had no incentive to tank last year. We got the #3 pick. They have no incentive to tank this year. We're quite likely getting the best odds in the lottery. This is the same BS that was posted last year and it wasn't true then and it's not true now. It would be one thing to think that future improvement was possible if a team tanked this year and didn't need to the next. That would logically mean that they'd get a couple more wins the next year because they purposely lost games this year. It's not logical to think than improvement will come from not tanking when the team hasn't been the last two years!!!
Moreover, teams don't generally tank an entire season (Philly excepted) but tend to do so the last 15-20 games of the year. Given the already low win percentage by really lousy teams that tank, this usually only equates to 2 or 3 additional losses for any given team. Thus it might have been a factor if the team was going to pace for 28-30 wins and wanted to get a slightly better pick - but not in the case of a team not tanking and winning 40 or fewer games
combined the last two years.
4. Their expected W/L isn't that far out of whack. This year it's currently 23 games which means they have under performed. Last year is was 22 games which was pretty much spot on. In short, they've earned their crappy records. There's really no significant "return to mean" on their expected W/L record.
You're posting that this will be a 30+ win team next year. I'm asking where this improvement is coming from. I'm not sure that I see the young talent that could result in that kind of jump though they've gotten younger the past year. Hollis-Jefferson, Whitehead and LaVert aren't top prospects. Their top 5 guys are all 27 or older, which means those guys have peaked. Their picks from Boston and Washington are in the 20s which means those guys aren't likely to be instant impact players. We both agree that they're not a FA destination and there's a fair chance they trade their single best player. So how do they get 10 more wins?
Is it possible for Brooklyn to win 30+ games next year? Of course - after all that's why they play the games. But it's not likely unless you have additional data points that I have not taken into account.
Topic: Don't trade 2018 pick - Look at the Unicorns!! (Read 5052 times)