I owe SVG an apology. Sounds like he didn’t want to make the Blake trade (coke head owner did), sounds like he had a trade lined up for Dre (coke head owner was obsessed with Dre). Yes, he made nostly horrible draft mistakes with picks outside top 6 (same mistakes people here defend Weaver for, “_ other teams passed on Halliburton/Maxey/etc”).

The main reason I want to apologize is that he said that tanking doesn’t guarantee anything. I remember thinking neither does what you’re doing- it didn’t but I think it had the same chance or better than this to succeed. When you’re stuck in the middle like that you’re one pick hitting away from being good>really good. Now we are 5 picks away from that it seems. The team we had with Tobias, Morris, Dre, Reggie, Bullock was more of a spacing team than this- before spacing was even this big a thing. The roster on paper at least made sense, albeit a bad one it would have smoked this team.

https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/van-gundy-explains-why-hes-strongly-opposed-to-tanking/

Interesting watch/read a few years later and after we did what Valenti and so many others called for. Just goes to show you a good GM will make whatever strategy work into a good team and a bad one won’t make anything work, into anything.