We have to find our franchise player. We are still in the middle of the rebuild whether the front office recognizes that or not. Trades, draft picks, and player development. That will get us shooters. But we need new folks in the front office.
Speak to Miami. They have a few pieces that could intrigue us like Herro or go young with Ware and Kasparas. Miami look for a star every summer and they would believe that burner incidents wouldn't happen within 'heat culture'.
We didnt know we'd still be looking for that go to scorer with KD in the fold. Is he going to make a bucket or turn it over? Lets roll the dice!
Rebuild is the only logical solution, We don’t have a legit star and everyone should be on the trade block, I wouldn’t mind offering Sengun, Jabari, and multiple picks for Brandon Miller to play next to Amen and tank for 2 seasons but that’ll never happen
Lebron had 8 turnovers. LeGM out GM’d stone and I hate to say this but somehow someway that pos JJ got his team prepared and ready for the moment and Udoka had them scared and unprepared. That’s 2 years in a row of both stone and udoka and our nucleus being exposed. KD just showing us the truth.
If Donavan Mitchell is truly available, Durant and 3-4 FRP’s. Sengun either to Miami or Atlanta. Ware, Wiggins, and 2 FRP’s. Okogwu, NAW, and the NOP pick or 2 frp’s in the future. Amen, Mitchell, Wiggins, Jabari, Ware. Is a contending starting five. Mitchell, NAW, Amen, Jabari, Okongwu is a really good core to build around and still have lots of moveable contracts and draft picks.
Need to recoup the value we gave up for him in the first place. Mid contract (Jalen) Good role player (Brooks) Lottery pick Then just go full young core from here on out with a new coaching staff and front office. There’s value in accumulating assets and staying good as a 5th/6th seed every year. We’ll always be in position to trade for the superstar we’re desperately missing.
Those of you who want to tank, how do you know you want to tank without knowing what the consequences of tanking will be and how the next lotteries will be conducted? For all you know, they could throw 18 teams into a hat with flat odds and say "draw your name for the lottery draft order" (I hope not, but....). Congrats - you just tanked for a #18 pick. It's tough to put value in a first round pick if you don't know what it's going to be. And you know damn-well, the Heat are going to try to fleece you by offering nothing.
Trading KD is tanking? This team had a +8 net rating in the ~1,000 minutes on the court they played this year without KD. And we won 52 games last year without KD. Doesn't sound like a tanking team to me.
Can we just swap KD and Jabari for Giannis? Then fire Udoka and bring in Sengun's coach from Eurobasket Ergin Ataman. He also coaches in Greece so this would probably help with Giannis. I'm mostly kibbeh-ing, but could we? I'm asking for a friend.
They specifically said "tank", so I assumed that meant "losing on purpose" - whether that's with or without Durant, I have no idea.
I don't think we'd be as bad as a tanking team...depends on what we get back for him of course but the goal would be to just be honest and rebuild. we're not contending, unless some random bit of insanity favors us like the Lakers trading for Luka...like Edwards randomly coming to us for peanuts or something...then nothing we do will make contenders. So just trade him for what you can get and move on and go from there. If the team sucks and Sengun/Amen/Bari/Reed can't carry us to the playoffs oh well, we play the lottery game. If the team is good then we go from there. In order to build a contending team you first have to have a player worth a 5 year max contract. We simply don't have that right now, KD doesn't count since you wouldn't give him a 5 year contract at his age. Until we find that guy the team should be in a state of searching for that guy.
Tanking and blowing up the team is not the answer, yet. It is almost a unanimous consensus in CF, pundits, sportswriters, and former players that Ime is the main issue as to why the Rockets have performed badly in the playoffs, and frankly, through most of the season. If Tillman does not want to swallow the millions in Ime's remaining contract, at least force him to accept a proven offensive coach to help him next season. Stone has to trade for or sign up shooters to provide more offensive firepower. It is now obvious that KD cannot be relied on to help this team get over the hump. Management should remedy this error and try to trade him for shooters even if they do not have equal value, so long as they can help offensively and defensively. It would also help establish a better culture without KD. It might take a few more years to develop the young core with new offensive coaching assistants until Ime is replaced. Let's give the current players a chance to prove their worth with another year of playoff experience, more shooters, and a proven offensive assistant coach. This current regime is very difficult to watch and must change.
I love Kevin Durant. He’s been the main reason we even made the playoffs, and honestly, he had an incredible season. He showed exactly what a veteran with years of experience looks like (burner account stuff aside). But you can probably tell this is heading toward a “but.” So here it is: we traded Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks for KD, and unfortunately, JG + Dillon > KD. Why? 1. JG + Dillon provide better overall defense than KD realistically can. 2. Durability risk: if KD gets injured, his entire contribution drops to zero. With JG and Dillon, you had redundancy—if one goes down, the other is still there. That kind of depth matters, especially in the playoffs. We took a big gamble, and it backfired—KD got injured and effectively disappeared in the playoffs. So, giving up from JG and Dillon for KD was a bad choice from the start. This, of course, doesn’t mean we should trade Kevin Durant. I think we should keep him. When Sengun, Amen, and Jabari become veterans over the next three years, they’ll take the league by storm. Our problem this year was already obvious. There’s no need to look elsewhere. We couldn’t make up for Fred VanVleet’s absence. Even when he wasn’t scoring, he was defending better than Reed and was good at throwing the opponent off. He also wouldn’t have made the rookie mistake Reed made in the final moments of yesterday’s game. Right now, the priority should be getting rid of players like Jeff Green, Jae'Sean Tate, and DFS—Dorian Finney-Smith (who we got in order to contaion Dillon's absence but can’t even come close to Dillon’s level). And also getting rid of Ime Udoka, who acts like he understands basketball but is actually nothing.
We are stuck in a tough spot.. - You can run it back with FVV and Adams, and make some marginal changes along the edges, but I think we will find that this team is likely a second round exit. Plus, I don’t see this KD saga ending well. Burner gate, his body language, Jabari calling him out a bit between games 2/3, now “injured” and not even supporting his teammates on the bench like every other injured player this postseason is doing.. I don’t know how that ends. - You can try to trade KD, but you probably won’t get much back.. at this point, I’d happily take back Jalen and Dillon, though PHX obviously would never. Get a new coach in here, you might be surprised what that team could do. However, any KD trade will weaken the team from this past year, so now it’s like an in-between… not good enough to compete, not bad enough for a lotto pick. - You can just replace Ime/Stone, and run it back… but, along my first point, doesn’t solve the KD chemistry issue. Maybe if our core is in positions to succeed offensively, the team looks better, but probably still not that upper tier. - You can do a reset, and trade away 2 or 3 out of Reed-Amen-Sengun-Jabari-KD, and try to rebuild from one step back instead of starting over. Keep your “building blocks”, which from the look of things now may only be Amen. But, who are you getting back and will they be any better? Please don’t trade for Giannis, you’re still not really fixing anything by doing that. The team is in a tough spot. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have held out Dillon/Jalen/picks (maybe even Tari/Reed at the time) to get a younger star in his 20s - a Booker, Donovan Mitchell…. I would love Ant, but Minnesota isn’t do that. Why go for the 38 year old star, who has probably just a couple seasons left and has been a known problem in the locker room before? We accelerated the timeline when we weren’t really ready for that next step, and now we are kind of stuck.
You can't tank, that's asking for punishment in the current climate. I like the premise of moving on from some of our "core" (lol) to find someone with actual star potential though. I'd be looking at moving KD and then literally anybody out of the rest (much like how this offseason the Rockets would've shipped either Jalen or Sengun depending on what offers came in) if it brought back a young star in the making. We need a real one, not a "great defender" who shoots like a blind man outside of 10 feet, not a throwback who only defends well every now and then, not an undersized SG who is not remotely a generational anything and not a soft as charmin big man who only really shoots 3's at a decent rate and does solid defense. We need actual star power, a player who can turn around at any time when needed and put the team on his back. 41 year old LeBron STILL ****ing does it. Now, obviously you can't just turn around and acquire one of the greatest genetically gifted humans of all time, but there are plenty of other stars who aren't complete anomalous freaks of nature (LeBron, Wemby probably the only 2 of them in the league right now) who we could target with the right package. Preferably one under 28 years old.
I truthfully don't even blame Durant. Even with all his drama. Superstars come with supersize egos. That's the law of the sports universe. It's the front office and coaching straight up exposed themselves as bad team builders. I don't know if they can fit ANY ESTABLISHED STAR into this current setting. You can bring in good guy SGA, the actual Steph Curry & literally Amen's own clone Ausar, and they'd screw that up
