Sure, potentially not easy, but I hate to give up on the best player we've had since Webber. Even a full 3-5 year rebuild is unlikely to land us a *better* player, so the threshold for giving up on Domas should be considerably high.
Originally the plan seemed to be to build around Domas/Fox as the two best players with Keegan as the third. This got us the Beam Team year, and the idea after that should have been to build around that. Our big add coming off of the Beam Team year was Sasha Vezenkov, and man, that seemed like a great idea at the time but fell completely flat. That said, we didn't really see that much of a drop-off in record (2 wins) and if you consider that the West was much healthier that second year, maybe we really didn't have a step back, we just didn't take a step forward. So we tried again in year 3 by shipping off Barnes to bring in DeRozan. This was a miscalculation because we didn't recognize how important of a glue player Barnes was and how badly the drop in perimeter defense moving to DDR was going to hurt us since we didn't have a rim protector. And then Fox blew the whole thing sky high.
So it was a multiply-failed build, not an impossible build. We've still got two pieces of it. And then we've got a couple of vets we need to offload. If we add a dynamic on-the-ball perimeter player then we're nearly in the same space we were before. Imagine, for instance, being in position to draft Dybantsa - you wouldn't necessarily play him as "point guard" but he can be a lead perimeter guy who can break down the defense on the dribble.
Then we're working to fill in the blanks with 4th/5th most important starters and a bench crew. One of those blanks would be a 3-and-D perimeter guy, and we kinda can see filling that with Keon or Nique. The other big blank is a rim protector that can play next to Sabonis. That, really, is the biggest ask in my mind - we know that Sabonis didn't work all that well next to Turner, but what about a Derek Lively-type guy? Could that work as a frontcourt?
Then, as for the rest of the rotation, we've got Monk (if we keep him around), the other of Nique/Keon, and Max as a starting point.
So:
Keon / Nique
Dybantsa / Monk
Keegan
Domas
Bouncy Defensive Big / Max
If that's a good start, then we really only need one piece of lotto luck and one smart FA/trade to get there. Yes, there's not a traditional floor general PG in there, but there's good playmaking with Domas and Dybantsa and all the bench guys, and all of sudden we're not at all undersized anymore. 3 of the 5 positions are defenders, with some hope at "SG" simply due to size/athleticism and maybe some DC rubbing off eventually. And this type of a core, especially given the way we're playing this year, is not really that far out of reach. I'd rather try to hit on something like this than burn the whole thing down and start over.
