Goodbye to the best-drafted team in NBA history
In my roughly ten years of writing about the NBA, one of the things that’s become clearest to me is that even people who don’t believe in tanking believe in tanking. That is, there are plenty of people who believe it’s kind of lame, and others who wouldn’t do it except under certain circumstances. But far fewer seem to doubt that tanking isn’t eventually an effective, maybe the most effective, way to get from bad to good. Maybe, in fact, the only way with a reasonable chance.
I’m not 100 percent sure of this myself. I think basically it’s just more hopeless than other people seem to. Others have convinced themselves there’s a reasonable way to do this because there must be a reasonable way to do this, but it’s possible there just isn’t. What if you get the 2nd pick in the 2012 draft instead of the 1st and end up with (the perfectly competent) Michael Kidd-Gilchrist instead of Anthony Davis? What if you get the 1st pick in the 2013 NBA draft rather than the 2012 draft and end up with your choice of Anthony Bennett, Victor Oladipo, Otto Porter, or Cody Zeller, instead of Davis? What if you end up with Davis but – as so often happens, ask LeBron, ask Kevin Love – you don’t manage to get a team together nearly fast enough to keep him?
It’s not that high draft picks aren’t one of the only ways to get the talent you need to compete, it’s that they may not be any more reliable than having a lot of assets to trade (ask the supposedly too-mediocre-to-improve Rockets how they got James Harden), or by already being in a position to compete (ask the Warriors how they got Kevin Durant, or the Spurs how they got LaMarcus Aldridge).
Besides, other than the years in which there’s a consensus No. 1 who is not Greg Oden, the draft just isn’t as predictable as it’s supposed to be. Just the other day, for the heck of it, I decided to look at the 5th pick vs. the 13th pick over the last few years and, while the 3rd pick vs. say, the 11th pick might yield different results, and there are certainly other years where the 5th pick was terrific, but you can ask yourself who would you rather have right now? Alex Len or Kelly Olynyk? Dante Exum or Zach LaVine? Mario Hezonja or Devin Booker? Some of these are judgment calls and some of these are too soon to tell, but the point is it can get pretty dicey.
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And then there’s the other thing, which the Oklahoma City Thunder have just now finished demonstrating. The OKC Thunder are not an argument against tanking, they are in fact the best argument for it. I could make all the arguments above and you could point out the Thunder and I would be like yeah man, you’re totally right, sorry. It’s arguable whether anyone in the history of the world has ever drafted as well as the Thunder did between 2007 and 2009. In that span they got a No. 2 pick, which became Kevin Durant, a No. 4 pick, which became Russell Westbrook, and a No. 3 pick which became James Harden, not to mention a No. 24 pick which became Serge Ibaka.
That’s nailing it. That’s the most nailing it there is. What is that, three of the top five players in the game today, and one that’s at least a fringe all-star most years? And it was a ridiculous display of either luck or serendipity. While you’d have taken either of the guys who went after Durant (Horford and Conley) , how different would the Thunder be with Beasley, Mayo, Love, or Gallo, the players drafted around Westbrook? How much worse, or different, with Hasheem Thabeet, Tyreke Evans, Ricky Rubio, or Jonny Flynn? You could play this game another way: what if they’d managed to draft Curry instead of Harden in 2009, for example. But man, what a stretch. Plus Reggie Jackson? Plus Steven Adams? Mmm, that’s some good drafting.
And now it’s over. We can debate for the rest of time whether they should have let Harden go. Obviously it didn’t net them much, but it might have been a reasonable thing to do better trade luck. But with Serge Ibaka sent to Orlando, Kevin Durant on his way to California, we can probably also assume that it’s likely that Westbrook will be on his way out soon. And then the greatest run of drafting in modern NBA history will be just a memory. The Thunder were one of the best teams in the league for six years, with three Western Conference Finals and one NBA Finals appearance to their credit. It’s very far from nothing. But it’s 100 percent over now.
The lesson here really has nothing to do with tanking – its most vigorous defenders would never claim that it guaranteed anything. It’s about how cruel the NBA is, and how hard, and that the road to being the actual top team in the league makes the Tour de France look like a skip through the daisies. That’s, after all, why teams like the Sixers go the extreme lengths they do. Normal lengths aren’t going to come close to cutting it – in fact, nothing you do might.
Sayonara and happy trails, best-drafted-team in NBA history. We will certainly miss you. And here at Upside & Motor we’ll stay vigilant to see if anyone can take your place.