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I stand chastened.

Update: To be fair to Leif, he did much better today in accurately expressing the lottery odds.

Sober reminder: our (and the Wizards's, for that matter) chances of ending up with Cooper Flagg in the draft are lower than for the Wizards winning any randomly chosen game.

Recently saw a headline from an article or video a couple months ago asking whether Traore was intentionally tanking his draft stock to end up with the Spurs. I haven't noticed anything like that here, so am I right to believe that was just clickbait?

This is why I'm always suspicious of betting on another team to be bad. There's so many ways in this league to get out of what look like bad situations. I don't hate the bet we've taken against Phoenix, but I'm not treating it like or expecting it to be some prime asset that pays off well for...

I was not thinking of your argument when I made the post you responded to. I was thinking solely of Leif. He was worried especially about falling out of the top 3, so the post you're responding to here reflects that. As for whether we fall to 5 or to 7: yeah that's a difference. But, as I...

Stuff I'm hearing (though I won't pretend to be any type of expert here) is that this is a 2 and a half player draft if we're looking for clear, great talent. Flagg is it, and Harper looks likely to at least be very good, if not transformative. Bailey has a chance, but the odds of getting him to...

I've worried before that sometimes we don't understand lottery odds very well. Today on Locked on Jazz, Leif Thulein gave at least two statements that lead to misunderstanding: - "... once the odds reach 4th, they drop precipitously" & "once you reach 4th, you are in a scary position" - then...

How much more of a disaster is picking 7th/8th than 5th? I get that, as things look now, the prospects looks a lot better at 5 than 7. But is 5 likely to be good enough to be a 1st or 2nd option on a winning team (and thus justify this year's tank, you might argue), or are we more likely hoping...

I'm becoming more and more convinced that @Handlogten's Heros is not who he claims he is ..... True story (that maybe I told before): when I first started noticing @Handlogten's Heros, I was such an idiot that thought he was perhaps David Locke. Took me a while to persuade myself that he wasn't.

Nah, they're getting closer to Flagg because 4th in lotto odds is going to end up with the #1 pick.

My apologies. Forgot the "The" and just went with the only "midnight" that appeared.

That's exactly what I said.

Yeah, it's not easy. Franchises can't keep rolling the dice year after year until they get snake eyes. Just not enough patience in the market for that.

You're right in that this post was playing with the argument that tanking by itself is THE path to contention. But that is not an argument I believe in myself. Part of why I did this is to be more realistic about how long it takes for a tank-primary strategy to pay off. I totally agree with you...

With this definition, I'm curious as to which tanks you regard as successful. By my accounting that's maybe about 5 guys in the last 15 years -- or about one every 3 years? If you assume 4 teams tanking per year, that should take about 12 years on average? Or maybe you're more generous than I...

Yeah, this is an important consideration.

A brief summary of how I valued players: 7 were over 50, so about once every 2nd year: Wemby 100, Doncic 95, ANT 65, Embiid 65, AD 60, Tatum 60, Trae Young 55 (I'm having second thoughts on this one) 5 at 50 (once every 3 years) 14 over 30 and less than 50 (once nearly every year) 14 at 30 (I...

I didn't hear any. But perhaps there should have been when they talked about the Mavs trade.

Yeah, I agree that these things are worth thinking about. Part of the problem is it's hard to figure out (especially for us not involved with the finances of the NBA). How much money does the team forego because of long term losing? Is it money mostly out of the owner's pocket or does the impact...