Or you can change coaches and get Westphal, Smart, Natt, or Karl. Or you can rely on free agency and get Carl Landry and Mikki Moore. Maybe we should just throw up our hands and go home?
Bad front offices make bad decisions. But Vlade is 1/1 on the draft so far. That's a better record than his work in any other respect.
Which is why good teams don't run around changing their coaches every year. You get a good one, you hang on for dear life.
The draft is by FAR the most erratic way to add pieces if you're looking for a sure way forward. The difference between the draft or free agency/trades is that half the people in the draft pool aren't even NBA players in the end. Half of the half remaining will never be more than bit players you can pick up on any NBA free agent corner come August.
You miss in free agency, you still get a rotation player. You miss in the draft, you get nothing. A guy who actively hurts you until you bench him. Heck, half the time you hit in the draft, you STILL get nothing in that first year, as kids come in so young that they are still figuring out how to shave, let alone actually help a winning team.
One year from now we could have either a) likely lost Cuz, b) Vlade in hot water; c) the hit pieces on Joerger's failure and him starting to get that Memphis feel; d) poisonous fanbase even more poisonous; e) lost momentum from our new building, and ticket renewals suppressed int he face of a new rebuild leaving us years from playoffs.
OR we can just do what it takes to make it into the playoffs, and everything resets for a bit. The monkey is off the back, the pressure broken, hope, whether legitimate or not, in the air.
There is only one choice. And some numbnuts kid is completely irrelevant to what we need to accomplish. He can go screw himself. IF there is a 21yr old 7'1" gazelle ready for helpful rotation minutes next year? Hey, grab him. But you sit on NOTHING. You wait on NOTHING. I've said this before, but waiting for a 19yr old raw kid to maybe/hopefully/pretty please blossom and going yay! about it 3yrs down the road while in he interim he cost you your franchise player, and possibly your GM and coach too, is ridiculous. Making the playoffs THIS year is as important to us as a franchise as making the ECF was for the Raptors. FINALLY, they break through. Finally there is progress and hope. Changes everything.