Re: Tankapalooza 2012-2013 Edition!
we spent the entire season targeting Kyrie on this board
You people are totally missing it. We aren't going to be the Atlanta Hawks. You know why? Because we have something they never did. A superstar.
If our young guys improving ends up leading to wins, so be it. It's a lot better than our young guys sucking and continuing to lose. Because if thats the case, what good does another draft pick do? The rebuild would already be over because we would have blown it in the last two drafts.
There have been plenty of teams with a superstar that didn't win it all and were Atlanta Hawks-esque in how far they progressed in the playoffs. My point isn't to say that we don't have a superstar, but that we could end up being a team that never wins a championship because we don't have the overall talent to do it, and and that includes the fact that we already have a future MVP candidate.
And if the young guys keep on winning, then that's fine, but only if they get Speights and Ellington the fuck outta here. If Scott is throwing out the tank brigade in the 2nd unit like he's done before and genuinely making it hard for our core to win games, and our young core is still winning us games, then I guess there's not much you can do and just enjoy it, but when you're throwing out short-term players out there who are going to win us games only this season and no seasons past this one, then I see that as counterproductive.
Let me put it this way. Let's say in situation A, the Cavs never made the Memphis trade, and we end up with the worst record in the league and win the overall 1st pick because we have no bench and are usually in too much of a hole for our core to crawl out of for a win. In situation B, we do the Memphis trade (like we did), end up with the 3rd worst record and end up with the 3rd pick because we won some extra games because of Speights and Ellington. There's likely no way we could even trade our 3rd pick plus the Memphis pick in order to pick 1st in the 2013 draft because the value between the 3rd and 1st pick is often pretty large (as we've seen). Even if we could, that's a completely wasted asset (the Memphis pick) and a waste of a trade because we could've ended up with the 1st overall pick (or at least the 1st overall seed coming into the lottery) if we didn't make that trade. Now I know that there's a lottery, and I'm not saying that we will or would end up with the worst record, but I'm just making an example to show how, statistically speaking, if Speights and Ellington are truly going to win us more games than if we didn't have them, then these extra wins could offset the value of what we really wanted in the trade, the Memphis pick, because our own pick will be worse this year.
Feel free to have us getting the 4th pick in situation A and the 7th pick in situation B or whatever. My point still stands that we could miss out on our guy because of some short-term players winning us games, not to mention off-set the value of the Memphis trade. That's why I loved the Sessions trade--we got future picks, AND we lost more games because of his absence. It was a double whammy.
Long story short, get Speights and Ellington out of here, and, if we are still winning despite putting out a 2nd unit of Livingston, CJ, Boobie, Kevin Jones, etc., then so be it. I wouldn't like it, but I would know that it's solely because of our young core and not some rent-a-bench-players.
we spent the entire season targeting Kyrie on this board
Even so, that doesn't mean that anyone thought that Kyrie would be as good as he is or is going to be. It only means that we thought he was the best player in the draft.
I hope the rumors are true that other teams are interested in Speights.
Even so, I think it's safe to say that Kyrie Irving has literally surpassed the expectations anyone here had for him already. I was totally in favor of the Cavs taking Irving, but I had no idea that kid was going to be this fucking good this soon, and I know I'm not alone.
Exactly.