Oh I would argue that its absolutely detrimental.
I consider hanging onto a young kid you think is a bust to actually be a cowardly covering of your ass, not wanting to take the hit for drafting a scrub. There are always extremes of course, but if you can figure out your guy is a bust before its common knowledge, and dump him quickly, then you get the edge in the trade. If you wait until EVERYBODY knows they are a bust, then all you get back is bust value. Meanwhile in the name of "development" you are forced to give a bad NBA player minutes. Better to cut and run. Better yet not to draft a bust in the first place. Great players aren't always great from their first game, but they always show flashes of greatness, they just have to put it all together. You know. We knew about Greek Freak from early in his first season. We know about Embiid now. We knew about Cousins from Summer League before he ever played a real NBA game.
While this may sound true in theory, the fact is we got nothing of value back for Robinson (Patrick Patterson and two expiring contracts) and we got nothing of value back for Stauskas. Those were straight salary dumps. Granted you could find reasons why they made sense (Maloofs shedding salary for a team they are planning to
steal sell and Vlade dumping the previous GMs leftovers for cap space) but we did not get any kind of edge in those trades. I'd still argue that we would have been better off letting Thompson go and actually trying to develop Robinson who would at least be a serviceable backup at this point. Since we had to give up even more picks to clear out Thompson's salary a couple years later, it shouldn't be a hard argument to make. Stauskas is supplying about the same level of production as Afflalo this year only he costs 3 million instead of 12.5 million.
The whole point of the draft is to add
talent. It's rarely possible to draft superstar talent. Obviously you kick yourself for missing on those players but what we're also failing to do is to develop competent rotation players. The George Hill, Tiago Splitter, Luis Scola, Danny Green types who fill out a team. We had no idea if Thomas Robinson or Nik Stauskas were going to be competent rotation players at the time we traded them, how could we? We're too impatient to actually put in 4 years and develop players -- we expect immediate results. Fans and front office alike. It rarely works that way. Even if you botch the draft, your scouting work never ends. There are second and third year players sitting on some other team's bench
right now who are going to be valuable players for some team in the future. We can benefit from that team's lack of patience if we have scouts we trust who believe in these players.
That's why the draft is so important. Even in a year where we have no pick, there are 30-40 players coming into the league every year who are going to be on NBA rosters for the next 3 years at least. Those players are trade options for us down the road. We need to be scouting everybody all the time, as if our lives depend on it. Years of following the Oakland A's has taught me this. Oakland isn't in the business of shopping at Tiffany's for the best of the best like the Yankees. They're prospectors, they pan for gold. They embrace who they are and they're (mostly) good at it. Every year we talk about free agents here as if we're the LA Lakers and somebody is going to elevate Sacramento to the top of their destination list. We do this despite years and years of data telling us otherwise. No free agent signing is going to transform the fortunes of this team. It's just not going to happen. We need to be doing something else. That's just the reality of our situation. We need to be digging up gems in the draft, in the D-League, and on the trade market and polishing them until they're ready to play a role of some kind on a winning team. It may be a long and drawn out process but that's the game. Nobody is feeling sorry for us. If we want to win it's up to us to figure it out.
