I’ve been a fan of this team since playing NBA 05 on GameCube (would score 70 points per game with Chauncey - my all time favorite player) and got really into following them when Brandon Jennings had that crazy run with us (lol). Things, obviously, have not been great since. I remember countless nights on streameast and r/nbastreams watching Ersan Ilyasova be our best player. I went to Blake’s first game and bought a jersey. Excitement and fun has been few and far between. I’ve luckily seen a lot of success with my other beloved teams in that same time span: the Lions and the Leafs.

Anyways, all of the above brings me to my thoughts on the current state of the team. While I think that all of the doom and gloom here is completely warranted, I personally feel that this team is in a much better spot than it was during that Reggie/Drummond era. In those days, I would’ve killed to have some hope in the form of a guy like Cade, a dude like JI, or players like Duren or Ausaur. Literally any single one of those guys would’ve represented the most potential/hope by a mile that our team would’ve had back then - now we have 4 of them. I think we have a good collection of young talent with potential, decent draft capital, and a healthy cap sheet. In the grand scheme of things, we’re light years better than where we were in the mid 2010s.

Now this year has obviously been the disappointment to end all disappointments. I used to watch teams that were like 9-27 at 10pm on a stream to get a glimpse of Sekou Doumbouya, but now I’m struggling to finish watching these games. I think that a lot of this can be attributed to injuries - bogie is a huge loss, monte morris would really help, etc.

Here’s my issue: while I think that these injuries are unfortunate and have certainly contributed massively to the awful start, I have to ask why injuries to a 34 year old non-core piece and a random older dude that we traded for this past offseason have derailed the team so much. Why is the roster constructed this way? Why was the linchpin keeping us from being all-time bad the health of some old geezers? Why don’t we have options as far as shooters - like is there no one in our system that we can bring up? Is anyone in our starting lineup even an above average shooter? What type of roster composition is this?

While I don’t know that I’m fully on the “get Troy out of here” bandwagon, because I do believe that injuries have derailed us here, I can’t help but wonder why our roster - in year 4 of a rebuild - was a bogdanovic injury away from being all-time bad.

TL;DR: we have more individual young talent now than we’ve had since the dismantling of the going to work team, a clean cap sheet, and potential to get better. The individual pieces, however, fit together horribly. The fact that injuries to old geezers is all it took to torpedo our season is extremely concerning in year 4 of a rebuild. By this point, we should have more quality players available to pick up the slack.