- Teams don't evaluate talent well. For instance, if you are the GM of the Minnesota Timberwolves going into the 2010/11 season with a ton of capspace, you could, after being terrible a few years, bring in a good player to join Kevin Love and start your way to contention, or you can blow $4 million a year on three different terrible players and just torpedo your team back into the land of suck for 4 more years. Of course, if "you" are "David Kahn", then the odds are that you really don't have the player evaluation skills to take option 1), so there you are. Might have maybe helped if you had hired a coach who was smart enough to recognize that Kevin Love was your best player.
- Teams often don't know when it is time to change gears and put the pedal to the medal. You get to keep rookies for about 7 years (4 on rookie deals, one restricted free agent deal). If one of your rookies happens to become the superstar you were hoping for, you better figure it out early and shift gears now.
The last two points illustrate why so many teams fail. Let's evaluate Minnesota as an example of what not to do. In Love's second year, all the signs were already there that they'd stumbled upon a superstar: best rebounder in the NBA (per minute), great ability to get to the line, 3 point-range. Randy Whitman forbade Love from taking 3s his first season after he started so poorly from beyond the arc, despite the fact that he showed range in college, or his 3-point range might have shown up earlier. They had, thanks to Kevin McHale's earlier trade, acquired just the type of franchise-level talent that only comes along in the draft once a year or so, and often less. Much of the nation had not yet caught on, because Love's minutes were limited, so his per-game numbers were small. But close followers (like me) had already recognized that he was Minnesota's franchise player in the 2010 offseason.
But the Timberwolves management failed to recognize Love's talent. Kurt Rambis spent the first 10 games of the 10/11 season inexplicably limiting his playing time (including zero minutes in the fourth quarter of a close opening-night loss), leading the Wolve's largets fan site, cannishoopus, to post an image that went viral:
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Imagine how the fortunes of those Timberwolves might have gone differently. Imagine an offseason where the management team says:
- Love is our best player, we should make sure we have a coach that gets him 35 minutes a night (Love took care of this himself; he pulled down 31 boards in the 10th game of the season, and the highlights were on SportsCenter for 2 days straight. This forced Rambis to either play him more minutes, or look like a fool in every post-game press conference from there on out).
- Love is our best player, we should find some guys that compliment him (instead, Kahn paid 2 midlevel deals for 2 big men in Pekovic and Milicic, and still tried to get David Lee after that). I like Pekovic a lot, but he's a horrible fit next to Love.
- Love is our best player, maybe we should move Al Jefferson to center (nobody in Minnesota wanted to do this, but for some reason Utah and Charlotte had no problems with this strategy). Maybe we don't have to trade him to Utah?
- Love is our best player, maybe we should lock him up for the maximum number of years? (Kahn refused and extended Love for 3 instead of 5 years. How he got out of Minnesota alive ahead of the pitchforks and torches after this inexcusable display of stubborn pride is beyond me).
By the time the front office found a coach who recognized the obvious (yes, this was obvious even then), the damage was done. Side note: looking through Minnesota's transaction history is truly depressing. They passed on Stephen Curry in favor of Johnny Flynn and Ricky Rubio (I love-love-love Rubio, but Stephen Curry is the better player today and was the recognized better pick at the time), they sold (not traded, SOLD) Ty Lawson and Chandler Parsons for cash. They ended up essentially just selling both the picks they got from the Al Jefferson deal. It's truly depressing.
At the end of the day, if you have a roster full of 21-year olds winning 30 games, you are looking at a potential championship contender in 2-3 years. It's probably time to shift into "win-now" mode. But if you have a roster with 2 rookies and a bunch of aging veterans winning 30 games, you've still got a lot of work to do.
Um...hey, you aren't paying any of those useless veterans $5-10 million a year for 4 years, are you? Ah. Well, good luck with that!
