Race to the Bottom thread

What makes it so much worse that the Kings didn't capitalize on this year.. The NBA is about to do a massive overhaul on the draft lottery. It's a real possibility we just end up stuck terrible for the long-term future.

We had a real chance to get a franchise altering star in the top 3, and top 5 at the worst. The idea of nearly guaranteeing adding Peterson, Boozer, AJ, Wilson, and setting this franchise up with a real future wasn't worth losing a few random meaningless games against other bottom feeders? Really?

What could they have done? extremely simple, buy out Derozan and Westbrook at the deadline. Signed a ton of G-League guys for essentially a 3 month try out to see if we could find a diamond in the rough. Let Nique shoot 20+ shots a game. Let G-league players close out "close games" that we surely would end up losing. Look at the Nets vs Warriors this week.

Instead, we are watching Demar drop 31 in meaningless games, and some fans are really pretending that this is the right way to tank. Or that somehow we are getting the youth meaningful experience while they watch Demar iso to end every single meaningful game.

We are not helping our guys in the present or the future with this nonsense.
 
Telemachus said:
They should. They started their rebuild 4 years ago.
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More like they did it the right way. They traded the 2 stars they had before it was too late, got maximum value for them. Started drafting, truly tanked for 2 years. And now they've used some of those additional assets to get JJJ. On top of that, they still have a ton of additional firsts the next 4 years which they can use to make another addition.

Compare that to the Kings. Trade Fox, but instead of accepting that the tank is coming, they panic trade a lotto pick for LaVine who is a negative asset. They refuse to move Sabonis even though the writing was on the wall last deadline, now they cant get real value for him. They continued to make bad decisions by signing Schroder to a 3 year bad contract that was a known bad contract from day. while also prioritizing 37 year old Russ over Keon Ellis who was 1 of the few success stories this team has had in decades.

The big deadline splash was to trade that success story for soon to be 29 year always injured Hunter, who played 2 games with us before being shut down lol. Mind you Hunter has never played 70+ games, and averages 53 per season.

I can understand being a fan of a team. But I cannot understand pretending like this team has done anything right, or deserves any trust in their decisions. They've been the worst nba franchise for 2 decades. They continue making the same stupid decisions. I tried to be optimistic this year, I was extremely optimistic mid losing streak. But now they've shown who they are again and again. And its likely we pass Utah before the seasons over.
 
BuddyBuckets said:
What makes it so much worse that the Kings didn't capitalize on this year.. The NBA is about to do a massive overhaul on the draft lottery. It's a real possibility we just end up stuck terrible for the long-term future.

We had a real chance to get a franchise altering star in the top 3, and top 5 at the worst. The idea of nearly guaranteeing adding Peterson, Boozer, AJ, Wilson, and setting this franchise up with a real future wasn't worth losing a few random meaningless games against other bottom feeders? Really?

What could they have done? extremely simple, buy out Derozan and Westbrook at the deadline. Signed a ton of G-League guys for essentially a 3 month try out to see if we could find a diamond in the rough. Let Nique shoot 20+ shots a game. Let G-league players close out "close games" that we surely would end up losing. Look at the Nets vs Warriors this week.

Instead, we are watching Demar drop 31 in meaningless games, and some fans are really pretending that this is the right way to tank. Or that somehow we are getting the youth meaningful experience while they watch Demar iso to end every single meaningful game.

We are not helping our guys in the present or the future with this nonsense.
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We don't know the lottery results yet. Maybe we will capitalize? We have roughly the same odds as the worst 3 teams to pick in the top 4 (with the 4th worst record our odds of picking 1-4 went down by 4%). And with some season still left, we may still finish as one of the worst 3 teams. We did not have a chance to virtually guarantee one of Peterson, AJ, Boozer, or Wilson in this draft regardless of the lottery results. That's 4 players and finishing with the worst record would have still left us with a 48% chance of picking 5th.

The only legit reason to get all bent out of shape about this late season "surge" of winning 5 games in March is if you think picking 6th or 7th overall would be substantially worse than picking 5th. I don't think it would be. Likely we'd be picking a guard there regardless and there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus right now on which guard from that group is the best.
 
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Agreed with @hrdboild. There's a lot of talent in this draft and some of them are bound to bust. I don't love that our floor has fallen out from under us with this streak but to me there's pick top 3 or pick 4-7 and as long as your talent evaluation is correct you will get a good player or you will get a "OMG I can't believe we are so incompetent we picked the only bust out of 7 straight HOF talents".

Praying we won't be in that all too familiar camp again.

But anyways, for the boomers top 4 is never guaranteed. Also if we finish 4th, yes 4 teams could leap us and we fall to 8 but it is highly unlikely that all 3 teams with worse records also get leaped. So realistically the floor is 5 or 6 for all 4 bottom teams regardless of where they end up.
 
Insomniacal Fan said:
What do you think about option 2? Taking the record from the last two years, and putting a floor on the level of crappiness that will be rewarded?
(I think it would dissuade teams from tanking, and encourage teams to commit to long term rebuilding)
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I think for the most part this just moves the target. Let's assume the floor is set at 25 wins - call that 57 losses to be a bit more clear. So the Pacers, with 9 games to play, have hit the floor, and can safely play whoever they like. The Nets need to lose one more game. The Wizards and the Kings need to lose two more games. But even then, Utah has to be careful to go 4-5, not 5-4 because then they miss being in the mix at the very bottom. You can keep raising that threshold to 30 wins, or 35, or missing the playoffs - and realize all we've done is gradually morph from the current system into the Frozen Envelope system (and nobody liked that one, either!)

I don't think the two-year average solves anything for teams that truly intend to tank (e.g. Utah who has been doing this for four years). It just means that every loss is only half-a-loss, so you have to tank twice as hard. In combination with the floor, it just makes getting all the way to the floor more important.

It's all lipstick on a pig.

Insomniacal Fan said:
Can anybody explain what the 5x5 option is supposed to do?
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If I understand from the description, it is as if they did two things. #1, they even the odds for the bottom 5 teams (currently 3), then they lotto out the top five picks (currently 4). That's just a very minor rejiggering of what's happening now.

But then, for any teams in the bottom 5 that don't hit one of the five lotto spots, instead of being placed in order, they get randomized. Imagine that teams 1, 4, and 5 unluckily all missed the top five slots. Under the current rules, the 1 team would be drafting 6th. Under this proposal, the 1, 4, and 5 teams get randomly scrambled up, so the 1 team could be drafting 8th. If stars align, the #1 team could fall as far as the 10th draft slot, though that would be really unlikely. This part of the proposal seems to be aimed at what we see a lot of around here - the idea that we have to get into the #1 slot rather than #2, because then our draft floor is 5 instead of 6. Will that prevent tanking...actually, it might do a better job of it. But it does a very poor job of helping the best pick go to the worst teams - which is the other side of the draft coin, and one of the things I've been hammering at all these years.
 
hrdboild said:
We don't know the lottery results yet. Maybe we will capitalize? We have roughly the same odds as the worst 3 teams to pick in the top 4 (with the 4th worst record our odds of picking 1-4 went down by 4%). And with some season still left, we may still finish as one of the worst 3 teams. We did not have a chance to virtually guarantee one of Peterson, AJ, Boozer, or Wilson in this draft regardless of the lottery results. That's 4 players and finishing with the worst record would have still left us with a 48% chance of picking 5th.

The only legit reason to get all bent out of shape about this late season "surge" of winning 5 games in March is if you think picking 6th or 7th overall would be substantially worse than picking 5th. I don't think it would be. Likely we'd be picking a guard there regardless and there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus right now on which guard from that group is the best.
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You are right we don't. I hope i'm proven wrong. But I suspect by the end of this we end up 5th, really good chance Utah doesn't win another game this season. I see the Kings with 2-3 wins left. If we finish 5th its pretty significant difference from finishing bottom 3.
 
hrdboild said:
We don't know the lottery results yet. Maybe we will capitalize? We have roughly the same odds as the worst 3 teams to pick in the top 4 (with the 4th worst record our odds of picking 1-4 went down by 4%). And with some season still left, we may still finish as one of the worst 3 teams. We did not have a chance to virtually guarantee one of Peterson, AJ, Boozer, or Wilson in this draft regardless of the lottery results. That's 4 players and finishing with the worst record would have still left us with a 48% chance of picking 5th.

The only legit reason to get all bent out of shape about this late season "surge" of winning 5 games in March is if you think picking 6th or 7th overall would be substantially worse than picking 5th. I don't think it would be. Likely we'd be picking a guard there regardless and there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus right now on which guard from that group is the best.
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This is exactly correct. Pre-lottery 1-3 have exactly the same odds for the first 4 spots, and 4 has only slightly worse. There's virtually nothing separating them other than (in a very unlucky situation) the highest we could drop is from 5-8 or so, and again, everyone keeps saying what a loaded draft this is...

Top 3 is recommended for the best odds, but I'm not going to have a coronary over wherever we end up. Could be we end up 4th pre-lottery and #5 jumps to #1 after the ping pong balls get pulled and then we wish DC and the players would have won another 3 games (or whatever).

If I recall correctly quite a few years back we lost a close game to a team that ended up right behind us in the standings and they jumped ahead in the lottery. Had we won that game it could have been us. You never know what will happen. More odds are better, but they don't mean much on their own when hoping for a top 3 pick. That's all luck.
 
BuddyBuckets said:
You are right we don't. I hope i'm proven wrong. But I suspect by the end of this we end up 5th, really good chance Utah doesn't win another game this season. I see the Kings with 2-3 wins left. If we finish 5th its pretty significant difference from finishing bottom 3.
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If we do finish 5th (behind Utah in the lottery odds race), that would be a significant drop-off from where we were a few weeks ago. At that point, I could understand being upset that the Kings won all these meaningless games that they probably should have lost. It's been a running theme here for most of the last 20 years that we love to win games in March and April after we've already been eliminated. But even then, teams seeded 5th in the lotto odds do tend to win top 3 spots often enough that I would still recommend saving the high-anxiety until after the lottery has taken place and we know for sure.

And even then.... I still like some of the guys slated to go 5-10 more than some of the guys slated to go top 4 so I'm not going to waste my energy worrying about our eminent demise until I see who the pick is. When that day comes, I'll either be thrilled, disappointed, or indifferent. And all of this for only one piece of a re-build which will probably see all or nearly all of the current roster get swapped out over the next few years....

Perhaps someone will get a chuckle at this coming from me, but I've come around to the point of view that being doomed is more a state of mind then a reality.
 
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