Have you considered the possibility that nobody else wanted to come play for the Kings? There is a minimum salary cap threshold and if you have 12 rookie scale contracts on your team, that means you probably have to spend $40 million on somebody just to reach that threshold. It ain't gonna be Lebron. I don't think the team was trying to shortcut their way to the playoffs by signing Zach Randolph in his twilight years and a 40 year old Vince Carter. Of the players you listed, only Rondo and Belinelli could charitably be called "win now" signings but that was with George Karl on the sideline, Rudy Gay coming off of back-to-back 20ppg seasons, and DeMarcus already an all-star and one year into his second contract. They made sense in that context.
There is no minumum cap we need to reach. If we dont reach the minimum cap, we'll just pay the rest divided to our current players. We also could've used that cap space to get those salary dump trades to get additional draft capital. And thats exactly what I'm been saying we should and should've done with our cap space. Either those guys being win now vets or not, it was absolutely a failure to pay them that amount of money considering the results and the opportunity cost.
He did exactly what you claim he didn't do. Assets, draft capitol, more bites at the apple. It didn't work because he drafted poorly.
Well absolutely not. Either you dont understand what I'm saying or I'm not making myself clear. Yes he drafted poorly, thats obvious, as obvious that he should've never ever been hired as a gm by an Nba organisation. But his poor drafting doesnt mean his strategy wasnt awfull too
I agree with you on principle that trying and failing to make the playoffs every season so that you never have a top 5 pick or establish a winning culture is a poor way to build a team,
Yes its an extremely poor way to build a team and I'm glad we agree on that.
but I don't agree that this accurately describes what happened.
Thats pretty much what happened. If you draft poorly and imagine right from the start that you have enough talent to compete, you are probably wrong. If your team is bad even when you fill up all the possible cap space with expensive vets, you should probaly take a year or two to actually grow the top end talent base. The idea of "tanking" or "rebuilding" is that you can clearly see when your young top level talent is good enough to compete. Only after that you start spending your cap to win now vets. If you dont have enough top end talent, keep drafting and biting the apple, keep growing the war chest and once you are ready then make your moves.
Cauley-Stein was 6th overall in the 2015 draft. In the 2016 draft Vlade had three first round picks and that was after he had already traded for Buddy Hield (6th overall) in the middle of his rookie season. That's 5 first round picks in two years. He also traded for Bogdan who was a first round pick. Fox was 5th overall and he had two other picks in the first round that year. Bagley was 2nd overall in the 2018 draft. Now we're up to 10 first round picks in 4 years including a 5th overall, a 2nd overall, and two that were 6th overall.
Still the mistake is exactly the same that has happened year after year. We dont plan for future. The moves we make arent for future and thats why its extremely difficult to change anything. We make unnececary moves for win now that are absolutely meaningless and worthless and hurt us via opportunity cost and draft position. Our strategy hasnt been set to "lets be competitive in couple of years when we actually could have a chance and make moves according to that". No. The strategy has been win now for year after year. I'm assuming we arent disagreeing with this?
My proposition has always been building up a war chest of draft capital by using your cap space and trading your vets. Draft as high as possible with your own pick to have the best chance possible to getting best possible players and then have a lot of extra assets and young players for when you start to have good enough top level talent to actually make win now moves.
Vlade absolutely didnt do that. Kings hasnt absolutely done that and they have been the worst organisation in the whole league for the past 10+ years without competition. For that time the strategy has never been what I've been advocating for and it certainly wasnt it with Vlade.