If you're one miracle away from a championship, it's best to parlay that into more chances to line things up in a much more organized fashion, starting fresh, and being a dozen miracles away from a championship.
Jackpotting Around Podcast: Episode 13 - Listener Mailbag Edition
- Thread starter Elizah Huge
- Start date
If you go back and look I had a lot of back and forth with HH and others before the trades we did. I didn’t want to blow it up but after the haul we received for both I understood it.
I'm not suggesting you were, if that's how I came across. Just speaking more to the general state of things when we were the closest we'd been in 25 years and we stepped back overestimating the probability of being able to just break even and get back to where we were.
Also, the idea that everyone was so averse to spending any more first round picks because of how it could cripple our franchise for a really long time. Do you front-load that or do it on the back-end? Because right now we've had two years out of the playoffs and looking at a lot more.
This is a frustration of a new owner with a Twitter-casual approach and an outside hire that didn't exactly exit on top of his last gig, not to mention should have been a mortal enemy of the franchise. This is part of a larger issue that I'll post about some time but it's tl;dr.
It didn’t come off that way that was more of my way of agreeing with you.
Yeah, Ainge was at the top of a lot of people’s hate list pre-hire.
They got a ring because they have a player that is entering the top 10 of all time conversation. The same goes for the jazz when they had Stockton and Malone. Also the nugs didn't flame out in the playoffs. They made steady progress year after year as their young guys improved. The Jamal Murray injury threw a wrench into the equation for a few seasons but the progress overall was very steady.
17-18 season finished 9th in the west
18-19 season made it to the western conference semi finals
19-20 season made it to the western conference finals
20-21 lose Murray halfway through the season
21-22 Murray misses the entire season
22-23 Murray is back and they win nba championship
Listened to the podcast. EH absolutely wiped the floor with HH in the argumentative side of the podcast. 100000000% right on Presti. He made the PG move because he had Russ there making it happen for him as an expert recruiter.
And no, the OKC Thunder should not trade for Lauri. It's not the move that puts them over the top. The teams to beat in the West are still the Wolves and Nuggets and you need some legit beef, not two stretch bigs.
If I was the Thunder I would actually be more interested in Walker Kessler, if he was available, than Lauri.
This post is so beautiful it almost brought a tear to my eye.
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There are layers to that discussion but I'm pretty confident that Presti isn't afraid of big deals. I'm pretty confident that they got PG cuz it was the best offer out there.
Vic and Sabonis was not nothing at all. Vic was solid and improving. Sabonis was a lotto pick the year before. I mean Presti turned a declining Serge Ibaka into SGA and a billion clippers picks and got Vic, Sabonis, and PG's services during the process.
Does Presti make some bad big deals? Yup. Does he prefer getting picks in deals? Yup. Is he just lucky cuz a player was good at recruiting... stop. Dude is a good GM.
Presti has done very little besides ride the wave of KD/Russ that is still giving (and draft well).
I've gone over in length before, but Presti has been on the right side of star demands a startling amount.
Presti could never pull off the mastery of the Gobert/Mitchell deals that DA did. I can guarantee that. Every big time trade Presti has pulled off has been at the behest of a star demand. Unless you want to call the Ibaka trade a big time trade, which I would but I accept its closeish
Big facts. He also turned the Serge Ibaka package into Paul George. Like of course he would do that it’s insane value at the time.
In no world should you be able to do that.
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lol you guys are right… he’s just super lucky a lot and was able to build two contenders in OKC based on dumb luck.
Yeah, really did.
Bawse Dawg
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Luck and good drafting
The SGA trade was the definition of luck. No chance the Clippers do that deal if they aren’t guaranteed to sign Kawhi.
He also took over for OKC when they got the #2 pick and took one of the most obvious picks of all-time.
Nobody is saying he’s not a good GM but you’re off base on a lot of the stuff you said.
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Presti literally traded three meh picks to move into the lotto to ensure he got Jalen Williams. The pick they traded for they used on Dieng… when asked about it they said they had Williams higher on their board and wanted to make sure that if the trade didn’t go through they would still get their guy. So he’s done a deal very similar.
In addition to “just drafting well” he has made great trades where he gets assets coming and going for guys like CP3 and Horford. He flipped Serge for Oladipo/Sabonis then flips them for PG and then flips him for SGA and a **** ton of picks. He leveraged cap space to take advantage of teams like Utah and others that need to dump into their space. Like anyone saying that **** is luck is just not worth having a convo with. You are just going to brush off their good stuff as luck… it’s not the basis for any kind of discussion.
On top of that “luck” he’s created a great culture and hired a great coach. He’s found some undrafted gems. You want to talk about luck… how about the bad luck with the cap rules changing right when his star was hitting FA allowing him to go to a super team?
He ain’t perfect but he’d have his pick of almost any job he wanted if he wanted to leave.