2019-2020 NBA Season Thread Basketball • Page 145

Full disclosure, I absolutely love AD. For a few years now, I have considered AD and Dame to be my "favorite" players. As such, I am obviously very high on him and I do rate him higher than Harden, but I have them in the same tier.

My primary argument for AD is that you can put him onto any team and in any system and he works. In contrast, Harden needs a very particular cast around him, playing a particular style of basketball in order to reach his maximum potential. And he fucking excels at that, to be sure. I do rate Harden very highly. But I tip the scale in favor of AD due to his portability. In other words, I think adding AD to a good team would make that team better given what he brings to the table. I don't necessarily think that's true for Harden.

That said, I would entertain an argument that AD's durability and insistence on playing the 4 rather than the 5, his optimal role, should tip the scales back the other way. But that is probably where my bias comes in.

 

Nah LeBron is gonna play point just like the Lakers said lol

 

No one questioned the Adams contract until this year from what I’ve seen.

did anyone know at the time Vic and Sabonis were going to be this good?? That was a no brainer of a trade especially with no picks given.

Same for Harden, not even the Rockets knew he was going to be this good.

At the time a lot of his trades and deals made sense.

 

We can't talk about how people feel about him in this exact moment without talking about the things he did in the past. Every gm gets the same treatment when they make mistakes, even retroactively.

 

Vic, Sabonis and Harden were all Presti's guys! He had a chance to see them every single day and still blew em all. Like, I get mistakes happen, but he has a knack of getting rid of people who get seemingly better in every way as soon as they're gona, while keeping the wrong people.

 

Your job as a GM is to project talent and to try to best understand they're ceiling. He's bad at that it appears.

 

You can't only talk about good things a gm does and pretend the bad moves they made didn't happen. It's an incomplete picture. He got extremely lucky that his team was tanking enough to be in position to get KD, harden and Westbrook in the first place and he got all those picks right. His management of the talent around them and choosing what to add or remove is not great. Ibaka may have been his best pick IMO.

 

Didn't he draft Westbrook, Durant, and Harden? I mean ... hard to say he's that bad at projecting talent with that on the resume.

 

Our Way-Too-Early Projections For The 2019-20 NBA Season

 

The owners being cheap cost the team that went to the finals a chance to win it all. Think it's probably unfair to put all of that on Presti.

The trade for PG doesn't really look that bad looking at it at the time. Oladipo had gone through a whole bunch of teams and not shown that yet and PG's still being talked about like one of the best 5 players in the game (and what he got back from the PG trade now was a record haul). I'd probably want all those picks compared to Oladipo and Sabonis right now anyway.

 

Joe Schmo could've taken Durant, harden and westbrook were 3rd and 4th overall picks. At the time everyone knew thabeet was going to be a bust, Westbrook was a creative pick so I'll give him credit for that because that draft was not good at all. He was kind of like hinkie before hinkie but not as obvious, considering they were leaving Seattle for Oklahoma so they had to create the facade of being competitive.

 

First, I don't think its fair to say Vic was "his guy." He spent one year in OKC after relatively underperforming in Orlando. He was then able to trade Vic and Sabonis for a Superstar and then got that superstar to agree to stay in fucking OKC and then flipped that superstar for one of the biggest asset hauls we have ever seen.

In no world are they better off if he did not trade Vic and Sabonas. So that seems like a weird thing to hold against him.

 

I mean that's just not true.

 

He had Vic for a season and he wasn’t that great while there. I don’t think we see the Vic today if he was along side Russ. Harden the same way if he had stayed with Russ and Durant, I don’t think we see the player we see today.


I’m just very grateful he made the Harden trade.

 

Presti isn't the best GM ever or anything. But he is, without question, a hugely successful GM.

Drafting Durant, Ibaka, Westbrook, and Harden in consecutive drafts is probably one of the greatest three year draft records of all time.

 

So often I find myself reading PeacefulOrca posts praying to the forum gods no one is confusing our kind of similar usernames

 

He also drafted the amazing Reggie Jackson.

 

The trade for PG was praised at the time, especially when PG went on to re-sign. It’s not Presti’s fault Kawhi Leonard made a phone call

 

He was the 24th overall pick and has had a productive 8 year career. That's a very good pick for that range.

If you want to come for Presti, at least bring up Cam Payne.

EDIT: I should add that Presti then used Payne, arguably his biggest draft miss, as the centerpiece of a deal to fleece the Chicago Bulls.

 

And what he got back from PG was like a buck fifty for a dollar. He got back one of the biggest hauls ever for a player.

 

Lol. The second round pick we gave up, along with Taj and Dougie, to get Cam Payne turned out to be...Mitchell Robinson.

 

the west is a straight up blood bath

 

Lol the Trailblazers with the same record as OKC. L O L

 

In fairness the blurb did say they expect the Blazers to make the playoffs and that the model consistently underrates them hahaha so I'm sure they're expecting them to be better than the projection showed

 

Haha nah definitely. It’s just hard to take anything serious that projects that.

Although obviously it’s just all in good fun!