As a fan of the Sixers, the past few years I must admit that I've caught myself rooting for losses. The more losses, I thought, the better pick the team will get. The better pick the team will get, the better chance we'll have of winning a championship in the future.
This season reminded me that there are really two ways to improve a young team: going to the playoffs or getting a lottery pick in the draft. The playoffs test young players like nothing else can. You get to see if the guys that look like superstars in the regular season can rise to the occasion in the playoffs. Who chokes? Who doesn't? Who rises to the challenge? Who crumbles?
The Sixers playoff run didn't exactly expose Andre Iguodala as a bad player, but it did highlight his limitations. It didn't exactly show that the Sixers' playing style doesn't work, but it did show our problems in the half-court. I learned from the playoffs that the team needs another scorer and post help; that Andre Miller may be our best player; that Samuel Dalembert is still frustratingly inconsistent; that Thaddeus Young will definitely be a stud in a year or two; and that the Sixers really need a few more pieces.
If I had known that we could make the playoffs, perhaps I would've rooted for the Sixers more loudly early in the season. But the team was boring to watch and seemed to be going nowhere. Mo Cheeks and Billy King were playing "veterans" like Reggie Evans, Kyle Korver and Willie Green and ignored the gold on the bench: T. Young, R. Carney and Lou Williams. Once the team changed its style and started to improve, people came back to watch. I know many Sixers' fans have been accused of being fair-weather fans but it's a lot to ask of someone to watch a team that plays a boring style badly. The past few years were sloppy and unwatchable. The team now has new life.
The thing is, were the Sixers to have missed the playoffs, would it have been worthwhile--like last year--to play hard and get a lower lottery pick? I guess that it can be argued that the Sixers "finished strong" last year and that it "carried over" into this year. But the early season results from this team don't show that. We lucked out by getting Thaddeus Young, but let's be honest: Kevin Durant or Al Horford would've been much better. With everyone tanking left and right last year (including the media's new darlings: the Celtics), it may have been a lost cause to join the group. But the effect of high picks on NBA teams cannot be underestimated. Utah and New Orleans are where they are today because of the point guards they snatched high in the draft. Tim Duncan was a number one pick that has led the Spurs to 4 championships in 9 years. The Hawks and Bulls, though not great drafting teams, have been able to accrue great talent through high draft picks. The Blazers look like the next in line to take the Western crown with Greg Oden and Brandon Roy leading the charge.
The Sixers have drafted very well, as I noted in a previous post. Andre Iguodala fell in our laps when the Raptors chose the dynamic Rafael Araujo. Thaddeus Young was clearly undervalued in last year's draft, as was Lou Williams when we grabbed him late in the second round a few years' back.
It's a tough line to walk when you want to either suck badly or make the playoffs in the NBA, but those are really the two ways to improve your team: improve internal personnel or gain great external people. A team like New Orleans is the perfect example of how to build through free agency and the draft. They dumped Baron Davis and Jamal Mashburn, signed Tyson Chandler and Peja Stojakovic, and drafted David West and Chris Paul. Atlanta also dumped its superstars many years ago and now has a stable of amazing talent led by Al Horford, Josh Smith, and Joe Johnson. Teams like Memphis and Minnesota are now trying to follow the New Orleans example. Rather than dumping AI for cap space, the Sixers chose a different route and now have a more battle-hardened group of youngsters due to the aid of Andre Miller. But whether this team improves greatly or plateaus will have to do with how it walks the tightwire between the lottery and the playoffs.
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