his point stands. "trying" to compete and "trying" to sell tickets are both considered "trying". may look similar on paper. but two complete different things.
the summer 2018 bucks kept their core of Giannis, middleton, bledsoe and brogdon. then brought in Brook lopez and connaughton and spent a total of about 6mil in FA. made zero radical changes to their roster. then went from 8th seed in the east to front runner almost instantly.
of course mike's ten times the coach that kidd is. but the point being, the whole concept of "trying to bring the team into championship contention" doesn't necessarily require radical changes to your roster. a few tweaks may be enough to get it done. and vice versa.
this is especially true for a team that's managed to win 48+ regular season games and had already advanced to the second round in the playoffs the last two seasons. just imagine having JC on our roster last season. or brook lopez instead of niang. the series against Hou would look a whole lot different.
all we really needed were a few minor net value additions through draft/FA(get a few solid rotational pieces like i've always mentioned instead of chasing after those big money/big name stars).
instead, we pushed from one extreme to another, made huge additions followed by massive subtractions. make the biggest buzz possible to draw attention so they can sell more tickets, as opposed to going complete quiet/passive and made zero meaningful FO signing/addition the summer before.
both resulted in a total of zero net value gain, except this time we jeopardized all the great values/chemistry that made us a good team in the first place.
neither approach were the right way of "trying" to build your team for a championship
