Race to the Bottom thread

[twslam07]

Again it can be manipulated and most likely by the team that finishes the highest in the lottery. As long as you have control you have a path to maximizing your draft results. And trust each team employs enough mathematicians to figure it out.

I mean…can it? Can you demonstrate that it can be manipulated?

At the ends of the day, you need to win to have a chance at getting the best pick, if you go 0-82, you’ll be left with 0 points and not have a high pick. If you go 41-41 and are the 9th seed, you also probably have minimal points with no chance at a high pick.

It’s a balancing act between both losing and winning games. If you “tank” you’re not picking up points frequently and if you keep “winning” the points you get continue to get discounted based on games back from the 8th seed.

As Capt simulated, I’d expect that teams that lose an egregious amount of games get punished a bit while teams who lose a healthy amount of games but are still picking up some wins here and there are getting rewarded (which disincentivizes tanking but still rewards bad teams with high picks).

 

[sactowndog]

I mean…can it? Can you demonstrate that it can be manipulated?

At the ends of the day, you need to win to have a chance at getting the best pick, if you go 0-82, you’ll be left with 0 points and not have a high pick. If you go 41-41 and are the 9th seed, you also probably have minimal points with no chance at a high pick.

It’s a balancing act between both losing and winning games. If you “tank” you’re not picking up points frequently and if you keep “winning” the points you get continue to get discounted based on games back from the 8th seed.

As Capt simulated, I’d expect that teams that lose an egregious amount of games get punished a bit while teams who lose a healthy amount of games but are still picking up some wins here and there are getting rewarded (which disincentivizes tanking but still rewards bad teams with high picks).

Under your model the teams that don’t have the ability to win games are stuck being bad for perpetuity.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

And that’s fair, but to clarify, your idea is to let each GM cast a rank order of who should pick 1st, 2nd, etc. (apologies if I have that wrong)?

If so, how do you propose this system works when picks are traded? NOP is objectively bad but do GMs now vote for NOP to have a later pick because they know it will go to ATL? I feel like that now devalues the idea of trading 1st round picks and that any 1st round pick you trade for will just default back to the range other GMs think you deserve. Thoughts on that?

Yes, that's the basic idea. You can think of plenty of different ways to implement it, the important point is the framework of a consensus ranking, as opposed to a W/L metric.

The notion of traded picks is a detail, and shouldn't be a distraction to the main point. Kind of like, if I said, "Hey, we ought to jump in the car and road trip to Austin for the next Kings game" the question is "should we go and do we have enough time to get there?" not "should we gas up in Phoenix or in Flagstaff?" We can work out the Phoenix/Flagstaff question once we've decided the trip is a good idea.

That's not to say that I haven't given traded picks some thought. My current thought is that what would get ranked would not be teams, but the picks themselves. So if the Thunder have three picks in an upcoming draft, they would be labeled OKC-A, OKC-B, and OKC-C. Teams could rank those wherever they wanted, as long as they keep the labeling. So, it could be [A-28, B-29, C-30], or it could be [B-5, A-17, C-24], whatever. And of course, the A pick is say one they got from HOU, and the B pick is their own, whatever.

That does lead to some complications. The value of a pick you trade for becomes tied to your OWN record and not to the record of the team who gave it away. That does potentially give strong teams a bit more leverage in selling off picks, because even if they end up good, the pick might have more value because the recipient is bad. But again, the rankers would know which teams have multiple picks, and adjust accordingly. Protected picks are also a bit complicated, but the scheme above works from a mechanistic point of view. The OKC/HOU-D pick which is protected top-8, gets ranked. If it ends up top-8 it goes to HOU, otherwise it goes to OKC. (Obviously both OKC and HOU would be ineligible to vote on this pick.) Careful thoughts about the implementation of protected picks might lead to the conclusion that if we adopted this system we should place restrictions on or even ban protections from traded picks, but again, that's a Phoenix/Flagstaff issue. If I say we should gas up in Phoenix and you say you wanted to gas up in Flagstaff so you're not going to go on the trip, well, you didn't really want to go on the trip, did you?

 

[Capt. Factorial]

Thanks for doing this! Do you have the full draft order rank along with their records?

I ran it several times with different "team strengths", each time was a 1000-season simulation.

Here's a wins total for 30 teams with some very bad teams at the bottom (red, spoilered for readability, wall-o-numbers is hard otherwise):


Columns 1 through 10:

56.6630 56.1830 55.8100 54.8620 54.0350 53.4880 53.1590 51.9280 51.3170 50.6100

Columns 11 through 20:

49.5690 48.6090 47.6420 46.5710 45.4010 44.0430 42.9370 41.9200 40.1310 38.5240

Columns 21 through 30:

36.7450 34.7930 32.5040 30.2570 27.7870 24.9000 21.3850 17.8040 13.1020 7.3210


Here's the rank order of the draft, where 30 is the worst record (green):


Columns 1 through 20:

27 26 28 25 24 29 23 22 30 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

Columns 21 through 30:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 2 3 1


Here's another run, where the records look more like real league records:


Columns 1 through 11:

53.058 52.660 51.989 51.541 51.068 50.182 49.587 48.768 48.063 47.630 46.624

Columns 12 through 22:

45.716 45.404 44.402 43.313 42.496 41.483 40.245 39.470 38.027 36.526 35.718

Columns 23 through 30:

34.168 32.666 31.670 29.342 27.216 26.124 23.786 21.058


And their draft rank order:


Columns 1 through 20:

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

Columns 21 through 30:

10 9 8 7 6 5 3 4 2 1


That second one shows that in the long run, this proposal maybe doesn't do much, except for it hurts very bad teams (as seen in the first run).

 

[BuddyBuckets]

I don't mind a few of these propositions. But its really stupid how the Spurs had 3 top 4 picks in a row. And due to those successful drafts, they were able to get a star to demand a trade to them. But now we have a massive tanking problem lol.

But stopping the draft order at the trade deadline
no back to back top 4 picks
no top 4 picks off a conference finals

This alone should help. I don't think you need to be that aggressive.

Now that the no man land clowns like the Jazz/Kings have decided the only way to compete is to truly tank, the NBA is pissed. When it was LAL, Philly, Boston, SA, OKC, Houston, Detroit nobody cared.

Kings need to hopefully secure a top 2 pick this year, because who the hell knows what the NBA is going to do.

 

[QWERTYLICIOUS]

Kings need to hopefully secure a top 2 pick this year, because who the hell knows what the NBA is going to do.

I don't understand this whole "Kings need to secure a top 2 or 3 pick this year" mentality, simply because that outcome is not something that we can directly control. Indirectly? Yes. And we are well on our way to indirectly controlling that outcome. Because I don't see anyone "passing us by" for the worst record in the league...

I am very cautious when it comes to claiming that the Kings need to secure a certain pick in the draft for this reason. It's not in my hands. It's not in your hands. Nor is it in the Kings' hands.

It's in the ping pong balls' hands. And the machine's hands.

I would like the Kings to secure a top 3 pick. Heck, I would like them to secure THE top pick in the draft. I will even settle with a top 5 pick considering how deep the very top tier of the upcoming draft class runs.

 

[Mike]

That is down to pee-poor decisions on the part of our front offices, not due to the system. It gave us every opportunity to ascend.

True, there’s been some bad decision making in the draft like passing on Luka Doncic (Jaren Jackson and Trae Young!), and there’s been some head scratching trades like Tyrese Haliburton. Had we paired Fox with Doncic or Jaren Jackson, then we would have potentially been better off. So does that mean that the system is fine and the blame lies with inept management causing teams to remain ‘bad’, or is the system flawed and ultimately encourages teams to tank?

For me, although we can place some of the blame on inept management, what we shouldn’t overlook is that the current system encourages teams to dismantle their rosters up and start over by tanking. As long as we have a system that works in this way, then we will always have teams that tank because they believe the only way out is through top draft picks as that is seen as the norm.

 

[QWERTYLICIOUS]

True, there’s been some bad decision making in the draft like passing on Luka Doncic...

I will never forgive the "minds" behind this decision. Not even a single one of them.

 

[Mike]

I don't mind a few of these propositions. But its really stupid how the Spurs had 3 top 4 picks in a row. And due to those successful drafts, they were able to get a star to demand a trade to them. But now we have a massive tanking problem lol.

But stopping the draft order at the trade deadline
no back to back top 4 picks
no top 4 picks off a conference finals

This alone should help. I don't think you need to be that aggressive.

Now that the no man land clowns like the Jazz/Kings have decided the only way to compete is to truly tank, the NBA is pissed. When it was LAL, Philly, Boston, SA, OKC, Houston, Detroit nobody cared.

Kings need to hopefully secure a top 2 pick this year, because who the hell knows what the NBA is going to do.

Question… would we have a problem if they had 3 top four picks and wasted them?

We’ve had consecutive top five picks twice (Evans and Cousins, Fox and Bagley) and between them we had six top ten picks (Biyombo, Robinson, McLemore, Stauskas, WCS and Chriss). That’s TEN top TEN draft picks and we won nothing.

The Celtics got lucky in their trade with the Nets because it landed them Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Had those picks landed 4th or had they chosen Bender and Josh Jackson, the Celtics we see today would never have happened. The reason we resent them is because they’ve won a championship and could add more if they remain healthy.

Sure the 76ers had four consecutive top five picks, but only one of them is still there - Embiid. The other three ultimately failed to live up to expectations (Okafor, Simmons, Fultz). They've also not won anything or appeared in the finals, so one could argue they, like us, have wasted their opportunities because they only hit on 1 out of 4. That changes if they win a championship.

Essentially this argument comes down to success. If you do well and win a championship there’s a big problem. If you do well but don’t win a championship there’s a small problem. However, if you waste it then the problem is your team’s decision makers.

 

[Joshyjosh31]

I will never forgive the "minds" behind this decision. Not even a single one of them.

I hate 77 now they’re forgiven for me

 

[QWERTYLICIOUS]

I hate 77 now they’re forgiven for me

Good for you.

 

[sactowndog]

Yes, that's the basic idea. You can think of plenty of different ways to implement it, the important point is the framework of a consensus ranking, as opposed to a W/L metric.

The notion of traded picks is a detail, and shouldn't be a distraction to the main point. Kind of like, if I said, "Hey, we ought to jump in the car and road trip to Austin for the next Kings game" the question is "should we go and do we have enough time to get there?" not "should we gas up in Phoenix or in Flagstaff?" We can work out the Phoenix/Flagstaff question once we've decided the trip is a good idea.

That's not to say that I haven't given traded picks some thought. My current thought is that what would get ranked would not be teams, but the picks themselves. So if the Thunder have three picks in an upcoming draft, they would be labeled OKC-A, OKC-B, and OKC-C. Teams could rank those wherever they wanted, as long as they keep the labeling. So, it could be [A-28, B-29, C-30], or it could be [B-5, A-17, C-24], whatever. And of course, the A pick is say one they got from HOU, and the B pick is their own, whatever.

That does lead to some complications. The value of a pick you trade for becomes tied to your OWN record and not to the record of the team who gave it away. That does potentially give strong teams a bit more leverage in selling off picks, because even if they end up good, the pick might have more value because the recipient is bad. But again, the rankers would know which teams have multiple picks, and adjust accordingly. Protected picks are also a bit complicated, but the scheme above works from a mechanistic point of view. The OKC/HOU-D pick which is protected top-8, gets ranked. If it ends up top-8 it goes to HOU, otherwise it goes to OKC. (Obviously both OKC and HOU would be ineligible to vote on this pick.) Careful thoughts about the implementation of protected picks might lead to the conclusion that if we adopted this system we should place restrictions on or even ban protections from traded picks, but again, that's a Phoenix/Flagstaff issue. If I say we should gas up in Phoenix and you say you wanted to gas up in Flagstaff so you're not going to go on the trip, well, you didn't really want to go on the trip, did you?

I have thought about this also. I think you make all traded picks top 4 protected. Then you just rank them off the teams competing. I think other complicating factor that needs to be clarified are:

1) how do you chose to define and deal with outliers?

2) are we rating off the roster for this year or in total with Indy being a clear example?

3) are their penalties if your vote is consistently an outlier in any direction?

4) do you let GM’s rank teams in their own division or conference where they might not want to see player X 4 times?

5) if you decide to just do opposite conferences what is the best way to merge the rankings?

 

[sactowndog]

Question… would we have a problem if they had 3 top four picks and wasted them?

We’ve had consecutive top five picks twice (Evans and Cousins, Fox and Bagley) and between them we had six top ten picks (Biyombo, Robinson, McLemore, Stauskas, WCS and Chriss). That’s TEN top TEN draft picks and we won nothing.

The Celtics got lucky in their trade with the Nets because it landed them Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Had those picks landed 4th or had they chosen Bender and Josh Jackson, the Celtics we see today would never have happened. The reason we resent them is because they’ve won a championship and could add more if they remain healthy.

Sure the 76ers had four consecutive top five picks, but only one of them is still there - Embiid. The other three ultimately failed to live up to expectations (Okafor, Simmons, Fultz). They've also not won anything or appeared in the finals, so one could argue they, like us, have wasted their opportunities because they only hit on 1 out of 4. That changes if they win a championship.

Essentially this argument comes down to success. If you do well and win a championship there’s a big problem. If you do well but don’t win a championship there’s a small problem. However, if you waste it then the problem is your team’s decision makers.

Not completely. Picks between 5-10 could be argued to actually have negative value. The frequency of those picks hitting is not much greater than 10-15 and the salary you have to pay them is greater.

 

[hrdboild]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2024609966104162592

Great idea that won’t happen

I don't think she intended this as a serious proposal, more as a "let's be honest about what the real problem is". If two of the best run organizations (Spurs, Thunder) are tanking as a team-building strategy and also some of the worst, what does that tell you about the effectiveness of this strategy? Teams are tanking out of necessity because it appears to be their best opportunity within the current rules to elevate their long-term winning potential. You can change those rules to make it "illegal" but is that actually addressing the underlying problem? No. It's just removing one of the only avenues bad teams have left to radically change their circumstances.

 

[twslam07]

Under your model the teams that don’t have the ability to win games are stuck being bad for perpetuity.

No, not necessarily. The further they are back from the 8th spot, the more weight each win has.

 

[twslam07]

Yes, that's the basic idea. You can think of plenty of different ways to implement it, the important point is the framework of a consensus ranking, as opposed to a W/L metric.

The notion of traded picks is a detail, and shouldn't be a distraction to the main point. Kind of like, if I said, "Hey, we ought to jump in the car and road trip to Austin for the next Kings game" the question is "should we go and do we have enough time to get there?" not "should we gas up in Phoenix or in Flagstaff?" We can work out the Phoenix/Flagstaff question once we've decided the trip is a good idea.

That's not to say that I haven't given traded picks some thought. My current thought is that what would get ranked would not be teams, but the picks themselves. So if the Thunder have three picks in an upcoming draft, they would be labeled OKC-A, OKC-B, and OKC-C. Teams could rank those wherever they wanted, as long as they keep the labeling. So, it could be [A-28, B-29, C-30], or it could be [B-5, A-17, C-24], whatever. And of course, the A pick is say one they got from HOU, and the B pick is their own, whatever.

That does lead to some complications. The value of a pick you trade for becomes tied to your OWN record and not to the record of the team who gave it away. That does potentially give strong teams a bit more leverage in selling off picks, because even if they end up good, the pick might have more value because the recipient is bad. But again, the rankers would know which teams have multiple picks, and adjust accordingly. Protected picks are also a bit complicated, but the scheme above works from a mechanistic point of view. The OKC/HOU-D pick which is protected top-8, gets ranked. If it ends up top-8 it goes to HOU, otherwise it goes to OKC. (Obviously both OKC and HOU would be ineligible to vote on this pick.) Careful thoughts about the implementation of protected picks might lead to the conclusion that if we adopted this system we should place restrictions on or even ban protections from traded picks, but again, that's a Phoenix/Flagstaff issue. If I say we should gas up in Phoenix and you say you wanted to gas up in Flagstaff so you're not going to go on the trip, well, you didn't really want to go on the trip, did you?

I don’t really consider it a minor detail though. Trading picks is a very heavy component of team building.

If you were to switch to a model like this, you’d have to “set the flag” maybe 7 years out when everyone has their own picks again and then allow teams to continue making trades with the new upcoming rules in mind.

Furthermore, you might just need to do away with pick protections all together since the picks you trade for will now be more so tied to your own record and only allow the “clean” trade of the entire pick.

Pick swaps would also probably need to sunsetted as well as GMs will simply vote knowing a team has the option to swap.

I wouldn’t be opposed to this model, but to make it fair (since many teams have already traded future 1sts), you’d have to wait to switch to this idea until 2033 (while notifying all teams immediately that is the plan).

Is the league willing to wait that long to try and address this “issue?” I’m not so sure. Perhaps they could position this idea as the long term vision while trying to do something else in the meantime to curtail it more.

 

[Mike]

Not completely. Picks between 5-10 could be argued to actually have negative value. The frequency of those picks hitting is not much greater than 10-15 and the salary you have to pay them is greater.

True, but there were some pretty good alternatives in those drafts compared to who we went for. Some of those players have been multi-time all stars and made all-NBA rosters, whereas most of our picks in the 5-15 range failed to move the needle. So in that ten year stretch we failed to utilise the draft to build a play off team let alone a championship contender.

 

[Mike]

I don't think she intended this as a serious proposal, more as a "let's be honest about what the real problem is". If two of the best run organizations (Spurs, Thunder) are tanking as a team-building strategy and also some of the worst, what does that tell you about the effectiveness of this strategy? Teams are tanking out of necessity because it appears to be their best opportunity within the current rules to elevate their long-term winning potential. You can change those rules to make it "illegal" but is that actually addressing the underlying problem? No. It's just removing one of the only avenues bad teams have left to radically change their circumstances.

The Spurs and OKC have built good teams through the draft, smart trades and FA additions. So it does show that it can be done with the right people, but how many times have teams hired GMs out of those organisations and not seen the same level of success?

Hennigan never achieved success with Orlando, nor did Weaver with Detroit. It’s like teams hiring Patriots employees to be GMs and HCs, no one has really managed to replicate the Patriot way elsewhere. I suppose the closest was Vrabel and O’Brien at the Titans and Texans respectively, but both were fairly short windows.

Regarding changing ownership, I’m not sure that would make a difference. New owners don’t always equal good owners.

 

[sactowndog]

True, but there were some pretty good alternatives in those drafts compared to who we went for. Some of those players have been multi-time all stars and made all-NBA rosters, whereas most of our picks in the 5-15 range failed to move the needle. So in that ten year stretch we failed to utilise the draft to build a play off team let alone a championship contender.

We picked Haliburton at 12!

 

[sactowndog]

The Spurs and OKC have built good teams through the draft, smart trades and FA additions. So it does show that it can be done with the right people, but how many times have teams hired GMs out of those organisations and not seen the same level of success?

Hennigan never achieved success with Orlando, nor did Weaver with Detroit. It’s like teams hiring Patriots employees to be GMs and HCs, no one has really managed to replicate the Patriot way elsewhere. I suppose the closest was Vrabel and O’Brien at the Titans and Texans respectively, but both were fairly short windows.

Regarding changing ownership, I’m not sure that would make a difference. New owners don’t always equal good owners.

Spurs and OKC both tanked for top 3 picks. Our problem was not tanking after Haliburtons Rookie year.

 

[QWERTYLICIOUS]

Spurs and OKC both tanked for top 3 picks. Our problem was not tanking after Haliburtons Rookie year.

Our problem was/is not tanking at all, period.

 

[hrdboild]

Spurs and OKC both tanked for top 3 picks. Our problem was not tanking after Haliburtons Rookie year.

In retrospect, yes. We should have kept Haliburton, traded the rest, and found a complimentary star to play alongside Haliburton. But it's easy to say that now when we know that the path Monte took instead did not work out. Most of us were fine with the trade when the Beam Team was the toast of the league for a brief moment in time.

I think our current circumstance, if anything, is further proof that the draft itself and tanking are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fixing competitive balance and making sure teams don't fall off the map entirely. Because, based on what the league claims they want, for his first 3 years on the job Monte did everything right:

He inherited a bad team but he didn't resort to tanking.
He drafted well with the draft slots he had.
He traded for an All Star who matched the age of his best player.
He found a couple of steals in free agency.
He signed a coach who had fallen off the radar and revived his career.

And ultimately he put together a young team that won 48 games and looked like it had a path to winning more. After that he ran up against the typical small market problems of not enough cap space, not enough free agent interest, the general intransigence of other GMs -- and two years of stasis allowed a dozen teams to fly by us in the standings. But even so, for his last full season as GM (2023-2024), the core group he put together were: Fox (26), Sabonis (27), Murray (23), Monk (25), Huerter (25). It certainly appeared like he would have several more seasons to find the rest of the pieces doing things the right way.

Look what happened instead -- a bunch of close losses and injuries piled up between November and December of 2024 and the coach was fired, then the star player forced a trade to a team which did tank and landed their superstar because of it. A superstar who is so talented that the NBA just rebuilt their All Star game format to feature him. What does that tell you? Tanking may be the only way this team and 90% of the league has to actually win a championship. It is a manufactured problem and now they want to blame us for it.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

I have thought about this also. I think you make all traded picks top 4 protected. Then you just rank them off the teams competing. I think other complicating factor that needs to be clarified are:

1) how do you chose to define and deal with outliers?

Definitely something to be worked out. Could go all the way from "accept all points, regardless" to something that looks at standard deviations, or whatever other metric is useful. My gut says only extreme outliers should be dealt with.

2) are we rating off the roster for this year or in total with Indy being a clear example?

Oh, definitely is done on the basis of "who you want to get the pick", that's all-inclusive. Indy is getting Hali back. The Spurs were getting David Robinson back. We know they had a poor record for one year, but it's the future and only the future we care about. For my money, if a team won the championship on the basis of 9 rotation players who all had ending contracts and was absolutely decimated for the upcoming year, I move them up higher than a team I expect to compete next year.

But yeah, since it's subjective, there can be subjective "penalties". If you think that Utah deliberately lost games to make themselves look worse, you can "punish" them by putting your ranking of their draft position even higher than you would based on their future alone. If the Bucks just traded away Giannis at the deadline and now look tanked, you can rank them badly because you don't want to reward them immediately for a half-season dip; make them sweat it out another year of being bad before ranking them for a high draft pick. It's all up to what the owners want!

3) are their penalties if your vote is consistently an outlier in any direction?

I would say only if there's evidence of collusion of some sort, or maybe very consistently "unsporting" rankings.

4) do you let GM’s rank teams in their own division or conference where they might not want to see player X 4 times?

5) if you decide to just do opposite conferences what is the best way to merge the rankings?

I think ranking own division/conference is fine, because every division and every conference has the same not-in-my-division bias, so it should cancel out. Ranking only opposite conference and then merging is an idea you laid out - wouldn't be my first preference, so I haven't thought about how to merge. So I can't answer that yet.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

I don’t really consider it a minor detail though. Trading picks is a very heavy component of team building.

My point is that it's minor relative to changing to an entirely new framework. There's the higher-level question of "do we go to this framework?" Once that decision is made, we can then finalize traded-picks solutions. There's nothing mechanistically impossible, but details need to get ironed out. Again, if your position is "We gas up in Flagstaff or I'm not going on the trip", well, you didn't really want to go on the trip. That's fine, but Flagstaff wasn't the problem.

If you were to switch to a model like this, you’d have to “set the flag” maybe 7 years out when everyone has their own picks again and then allow teams to continue making trades with the new upcoming rules in mind.

Yes.

Furthermore, you might just need to do away with pick protections all together since the picks you trade for will now be more so tied to your own record and only allow the “clean” trade of the entire pick.

I'd have to think more carefully about it, but I think pick protections could still work. They would be strategically different, for sure. But we're seeing pick protections come into question even this year with teams trying to hit the "sweet spot" with their own record (Silver is even already making noises about Top-4 or Lotto- being the only protections allowed going forward), so I think this issue may be addressed regardless.

Pick swaps would also probably need to sunsetted as well as GMs will simply vote knowing a team has the option to swap.

Yes, I haven't thought real hard on that but if pick swaps were allowed what might happen (via just how teams would naturally react in the rankings) is that two teams' picks that would normally have been far apart (say one team top-5, the other team bottom-5) could end up closer to each other (say both around 15-16).

I wouldn’t be opposed to this model, but to make it fair (since many teams have already traded future 1sts), you’d have to wait to switch to this idea until 2033 (while notifying all teams immediately that is the plan).

Is the league willing to wait that long to try and address this “issue?” I’m not so sure. Perhaps they could position this idea as the long term vision while trying to do something else in the meantime to curtail it more.

That's fair.

 

[Mike]

We picked Haliburton at 12!

Haliburton came after that ten year stretch (2009-2018). He was drafted in 2020.