I’d like to hear your thoughts on Troy, I know we’ve celebrated moves like Duren and getting Bogey for nothing, but this team won 17 games last year and looks even worse this season.
What drives me the most insane and it has since last summer, is we were sitting on $30mill in cap space. He has a 17-win team with very young players. And instead of grabbing some guys that can help with W’s (Strus, Oubre, Grant Williams, G Vincent, C Wood, Watanabe, Torey Craig, etc.) he basically said…nah, WE GOOD. And traded for an expiring deal with the corpse of Joe Harris and 2 second round picks. (Before free agency even started.) Basically, setting the stage for the current shit show.
Do you think Troy should be bounced now?
Do you give him until the trade deadline?
Do you trust him to spend all that salary cap this summer? (This scares the shit out of me.)
Does he deserve to see this through until next season?
He’s a good evaluator of talent but poor at putting it together as a cohesive team. Way too patient in FA. You cant keep punting the ball into next offseason. Some point soon he has to make a big move
Pros: (relatively chronological), drafting Stew and Bey at 16 and 19 in a very weak draft class.
Signing Jerami Grant as a free agent.
Getting Bojan for a bag of peanuts.
Drafting Duren and eating salary to obtain the pick that yielded him.
Getting compensated to take Burks in a Knicks salary dump.
Drafting Ausar where the draft was wide open.
Getting Monte Morris for about nothing.
Cons: tying up a future draft pick for the Beef Stew pick in 2020, that’s ensured Detroit is not a capable trade partner for a high quality player.
Drafting Hayes over Hali and Maxey.
The maniacal trades following his hiring. Giving Bruce Brown away for nothing. Trading for Dedmon, only to cut him and sign Plumlee, as an example.
Turning Bey into the human crime against basketball that is Jimmy Wiseman.
Having to trade down from a high value 2nd to trash just to move off Plumlee’s final 2 years.
TBD: Hiring Williams (Gores bares much responsibility here as well)
Jaden Ivey and Sasser’s future with Detroit.
Weaver’s cap space management. He’s only utilized it as a dumping ground and has yielded a few good players.
Conclusion: there’s a lot more he’s done. We still aren’t 100% certain where Cade will land on the talent spectrum, but he was going 1 regardless of who was picking.
Weaver has made some choices that haven’t paid off. But it’s unreasonable to expect any GM to just hit home run after home run.
I’d give him a grade of C. He hasn’t been a catastrophe like SVG was. He has made plenty of choices with hindsight that were mistakes.
I’m not going to tell anyone to approve or disapprove of him. It’s just sports, it’s literally entertainment. Your opinion is just as valid as mine. But I will advise caution that if he’s fired, the same guys who hired him will be in charge of the next hire. So you’re probably not attracting a better pool of candidates.
Instead of drafting Bey and Stewart he could’ve drafted Tyrese Maxey and Desmond Bane. And, of course, Halliburton instead of Killian. Your Pros are not as great as you think.
Lmao
We could theoretically currently run out a squad of Jerami Grant, Tyrese Haliburton and Evan Mobley if he was a better talent evaluator.
But we have Cade and Killian instead.
Fire him now because there is nothing to lose. Don’t wait to bring a new GM in. He can come in now and have plenty of time to evaluate the roster and how to move forward.
Lots of great analysis about Weaver, but to answer your question, yes, Weaver needs to go along with Tellum and any other upper management stooge who put us in this position. Gores should ask for help from Adam Silver to right the ship.
Gores is the problem
I know how desperate we are to cling on any shred of optimism right now but if we’re being honest, right now we cannot say with confidence that anyone he’s drafted besides Cade would ever be a starter on a good team.
Ivey can’t even start on the worst team in the league right now. This is touchy, but honestly he’s a bench player for good reason. He is a horrific defender and non-factor off the ball.
People talking about Saddiq Bey as a “hit” or a notch on Troy’s belt is ridiculous. He shipped him off for arguably the single worst player in the NBA
Ausar and Duren are hits. I would argue Duren is the single least valuable type of player in the NBA and easy to replace, but he’s young and team controlled for a while so that’s cool.
And honestly, Troy has done such a horrific job putting this team together that the limitations of the FEW players he’s hit on hold the team back.
He’s drafted 5 guys in the lottery. Cade, Ivey, Ausar, Killian and Duren. Not A SINGLE ONE OF THEM is an average NBA 3 point shooter. Drafting “best player available” and shoehorning them onto the team to figure it out surrounded by former draft busts is not a legitimate team building strategy.
I want troy until next season. Some of yall seem not to understand the hole we were in as a franchise when troy took over. This was never gonna be a quick fix. It was gonna take years just get to ground level as a franchise again. The first 2 years were just shuffling to get rid of bad contracts and get shots at young guys. We now have some good young talent and we have 0 bad contracts going forward. No this team isnt good. We are among the youngest teams in the league and we are in the first year of a new coach. Yes im disappointed with how we have started but its still november and its a long season. Firing a gm right after he hires a new coach is a good way to set us even further back then we already are. Over reactive choices will only make the process take longer.