The takes about had we kept Hali we wouldn’t have made the right moves to build the team are pretty sad rationalizations. Sometimes all you need is to make 1 right move that will snowball in your favor and change the trajectory of the franchise.
Our current state is the outcome of doubling/tripling down on 1 major assumption that the organization and many fans had: that Fox is a superstar that could lead you to deep playoff runs and contend. Some fans contended for years (and got ridiculed along the way) that he lacked certain skills, showed inconsistent effort, and wasn’t the leader that you would otherwise see in a superstar. That we were setting ourselves many years back with the choices we made thinking he was that star.
So the tough learning here is the front office and owners have to get their assumptions right. And when they’re wrong, they need to course correct ASAP instead of digging bigger holes. We’ve made so many wrong moves and been so short-sighted, we’re unfortunately stuck and in that mode of hoping some miracles happens: Keegan turns into Kawhi, Carter turns into Jrue, LaVine turns into Vince Carter and not just be a Kevin Martin type. In our case, we had a miracle fall on our lap when we drafted Hali. We just kept making the wrong moves, and hopefully there’s a lot of self critique going on with Vivek and now Perry