sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Sure I would agree but I would take the odds of pick 4-5 being good versus any guy 6-10.
Race to the Bottom thread
- Thread starter iowamcnabb
- Start date
Remember that Monte picked Tyrese Haliburton at #12 in 2020 and that was with San Antonio picking right ahead of us at #11 and needing a PG. I wouldn't pre-emptively say it's the end of the world if we're picking 6-10. Not until I see who is left on the board for our pick. And even then there will probably be someone surprising that the Kings and 20 other teams swing and miss on.
coolhandluke
Starter
Stop the count!
I said statistically. It could be 8 or so.
iowamcnabb
Hall of Famer
Reminder of last year’s results
QWERTYLICIOUS
Starter
Also a reminder that we don't have a Luka Dončić to hand over to the Lakers for free.
Joshyjosh31
Starter
Ya but I’m good with that would love any top 4 pick and like anything till the sixth pick at six we still get Wagler who looks extremely good. We fall to seven and I’m tracking down perry personally
There’s no reason for us to beat Indiana on the road if the FO has any brain cells, the NO games are toss ups we won’t have an answer for Zion and Murphy. Memphis are tough games as well they won’t be tanking
All I know is that our pearls are going to clutched all into dust by the end of the season
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Sure it’s a good draft but the odds are the odds.
Jazzing siting Laurie against Brooklyn
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Indiana is @Sacramento.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Depends on where you finish. If you are 2 or 1 you can’t be 8.
SacKings123
G-League
Sure. But we're probably too talented to still be at the bottom at the end of the year. At least I think so. Our talent is mismatched, but you can see that any given night we can give some teams fits. Other nights we lose by 20. And we certainly aren't going to roll over and lose on purpose.
Nobody gifted anyone anything.
Well Nico Harrison certainly gifted the Lakers with something considering Anthony Davis is (surprise, surprise) injured yet again, on pace to play less than 40 games this season, and is on the trade block a year later. It would be astounding if he plays even a full season's worth of games in a Dallas uniform before he gets traded or his contract runs out.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
We shall see who we sit for rest days when and if we can trade anyone this week. Other teams find ways to sit players and play their rookies. We shall see if the front office has the courage to do what needs to be done.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Sure there are always one offs. Your chances never go to zero but they decline precipitously after 5.
Padrino
All-Star
This is where you and I find ourselves in agreement. If you're waiting around for SGA to fall to you at #11 or Hali to fall to you at #12, well, that's no strategy at all. That's just letting each year pass you by, wondering when you might luck into a franchise-altering talent in the late lottery. It happens, yes. It doesn't happen often. And if it does, you have to have a plan in place that allows you to capitalize on that luck. The Kings surely did luck into Tyrese Haliburton, which was fantastic. Then they leveraged that luck into a trade for an All-NBA caliber center. They won a bunch of games. They made the playoffs. They became the darling of the league... and then the Beam Team ran out of steam.
Why did the Beam Team run out of steam? Well, they had few meaningful assets to leverage into further attempts to upgrade their roster. Why were they short of those meaningful assets? Well, they had never bothered to develop a strategy that would allow them to stock their cupboards with draft assets so they would always have a path forward to add talent to their roster. After all, angling for a top talent in the draft is only one pillar in a successful rebuilding strategy. There's a reason Sam Presti is regarded as a genius. He has worked to always keep the Thunder's cupboard stocked with the assets necessary to sustain a rebuild.
Yes, Presti found his late lottery luck in SGA, but the Oklahoma City Thunder don't become a perennial championship contender without snagging Chet Holmgren in the top-five. Nor do they become a perennial championship contender without having a stable of first rounders available to supplement both the luck the Basketball Gods delivered unto them (SGA) and the luck they tried to make for themselves (Holmgren). You have to be proactive. You can't just wait and hope and cross your fingers and call it a day. Luck will only take you so far in this league.
Vivek's sin as an owner is believing that you can shortcut your way to the playoffs, and believing that having a plan is for suckers. You're not getting far in professional sports with the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. Breaking things is easier than building something. We've learned it the hard way time and again.
Well, technically he traded for SGA. The Clippers found him in the late lottery and didn't know what they had yet.
Padrino
All-Star
Indeed! I suppose the way I wrote it was inelegant. SGA was a lucky late lottery selection that Presti managed to acquire, as teams often give up on those guys too soon, as the Clippers did with SGA, and as the Kings did with Haliburton.
Take the year before the beam team for instance. If they had only slightly tanked that year, they nab Franz Wagner and they're off and running. Instead they drafted in a lull where no real impact players were had until Sengun at 16.
Yeah not all of the guys in the top 8 are team leaders or true impact players but there's way more impact there than there is 9-15. Drafting higher up requires way less luck than drafting lower does. I still don't know why people even attempt to make the argument that it's not terribly important. It is.
I don’t know how else to say it but with how the draft is laid out with the lottery, teams really should be playing the odds which is finishing with the best chances to land an early pick. Of course, as we all know, you then have to nail the pick. Yes, you can pull a dude later in the draft, but if we are playing the odds, you want to pick early.
And in this draft, seems like you have a better chance to get an all-star type within the top 3 or maybe lower. Yes, someone from later in the draft can become an all-star but the odds become tougher.
Get a dude in the draft. Seemingly only way Sac has a chance to be relevant
And in this draft, seems like you have a better chance to get an all-star type within the top 3 or maybe lower. Yes, someone from later in the draft can become an all-star but the odds become tougher.
Get a dude in the draft. Seemingly only way Sac has a chance to be relevant
Jdbraver137
Starter
But having a higher pick makes it more likely you get a better player. And you only have 1 of the 6-60 picks
I'm not so much disagreeing with the premise (elite prospects rarely fall out of the top 5) so much as I'm making a parallel argument that draft lottery luck does you no good if you don't know who to pick when you get there. And I don't see this part of the equation (selecting a player) to be blind luck so the concept of odds applied to it is somewhat nonsensical to me.
We might finish tied for the worst record and end up picking something like 8th with coin flips and lottery balls ruling the day. I can live with that if it comes to it, begrudgingly. If Scott Perry and company want to change the personality of the team, it starts with the decision of who to draft and how that player will change the identity of the team. And that includes the lottery, the late first round, and the second round. Getting a star player only takes you so far -- they will still need teammates. And this is where most Kings front offices have lost the plot. Not in the top 5 pick (though there has been some of that) but more in the what comes next.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
Here's a plot showing where the best player in the top 5 for every year was picked.
What this shows is that since 1985, the player in picks #2-#5 are about equally likely to be the best player in a class. And it's slightly more likely that the best player comes in picks 2-5 than #1.
Given how flat the curve is from 2-5, my interpretation of this is, that in the top 5 picks, once you get past the first pick; it all basically comes down to probability and noise, even for the professional front offices that hire scouts and people to work players out. If draft expertise was relevant, then you'd expect to see pick 2 have a higher count than pick 3, and so on, a downwards curve instead of a cliff and valley.
How can that be? I thought that getting a top 3 pick was so uber-important that franchises folded if they couldn't attain that lofty goal? /s
The chart posted above certainly disagrees with your assertion.
