Trade Horford

[Admin]

Call it whatever you want but if you aren't losing 52-62 games in a season to get a cornerstone from the lottery, you probably aren't winning a championship. Like we saw, roughly 70% of Finals MVPs over the last 25 years have been drafted by teams in the lottery and roughly 90% of them have been either drafted in the lottery by the finals team or be top #1 overall choices that took the teams that drafted names that drafted them to the finals and have names that rhyme with Shmaq or Lebrahn.

Some of them landed in bad situations and lost big after their best laid plans to win left the rail (Spurs with Duncan); some tanked for a top choice (Houston with Hakeem); some tanked for a high pick (Miami with Wade; Chicago with Jordan; Detroit with Isiah); some grabbed a lottery stud (Celtics with PP) and then tanked for more studs (KG/Allen); etc. but none of them would have won without their high lottery pick(s) used to draft their Finals MVP.

All I'm saying is there's a difference between a team being honestly awful like the Bobcats have been and a team who had phantom injuries to star players or benched starters and threw games at times like we've seen before. To me that's the difference between tanking and sucking. The team that's tanking can get that elite player and all of a sudden get significantly better the next year while the team that sucked are only going to get marginally better in the 1st year with just that 1 player added.