How About Some Honesty?
The best strategy is true honesty. The reality is that the Sixers were not a good basketball team, but the answer is not as simple as rant sports talk would have you believe. Injuries plagued the team in the 2015-2016 and should subside going into the 2016-2017 barring some unforeseen incident. That brings the team up to full strength of 15 players, a number not enjoyed by the team for the past three years. Young players comprised the majority of the team’s roster in the 2015-2016 season, and came from a diverse background of being undrafted and second round picks. But after experiencing the NBA, the position of where the player was selected in the NBA draft becomes nearly a non-event.
It wasn’t just the fact that this was a young roster, but a roster built of best player available, and prospects with upsides. Basketball teams are not just about building around talented players, but complimenting those players with talents that add to the teams competence. The 2015-2016 roster was just a mosaic team, a fact we knew going into the season.
Bryan Colangelo sees the Philadelphia 76ers in a different light, that of the Toronto Raptors when he first arrived. The mere hint of similarity between the two is telling, as it suggests his “fix” will track in a similar fashion – turning over 2/3rds of the roster.
Bryan Colangelo - Part 4 - sees 76ers as similar to Raptors when he got there. pic.twitter.com/47qEcz41Ly
— Steve Kyler (@stevekylerNBA) May 13, 2016
There are few similarities between today’s Philadelphia 76ers and the 2006 version of the Toronto Raptors. The speed by which Bryan Colangelo has diagnosed the teams with similar ailments is extremely alarming and troubling to me. Here’s why:
We see what we want to see. We “know” what we want to know. And there’s the rub. Ten years after the fact, Bryan Colangelo stands atop the Philadelphia 76ers, a team that has been quite austere with its outlays of salary, draft picks and roster spots – a team that not only is set up with over $60+ Million to spend on free agents, but a team with up to four first round draft picks in this year alone, and he sees the Toronto Raptors. I’m sorry Bryan Colangelo. That comment may have worked in Phoenix and in Toronto, but the “I see my last team” really does little more for the Philadelphia fan base than scare the living daylights out of us.
By our estimations, a President of Basketball Operations is hired to get us an NBA championship. There is not margin of error to detour by disassembling the existing roster without a cohesive plan. Don’t just splurge on a whim from that which has been scrimped and saved for to get us to this moment in time. We kept our cupboards bare to ensure we could spend when we needed to.
Don’t spend now just because you can.
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