kekgeek1 wrote:Donavan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert as so fricking special. It blows my mind how good those 2 are. Watching Gobert play defense is amazing compared to KAT. Also is Mitchell a top 20 player in the NBA already, I mean he is leading a damn good team as a rookie. Also Ingles is also is maybe the best super role player in the NBA.
Gobert is a hell of a defensive player -- and that's not just compared to KAT. KAT is amazing on the offensive end compared to Gobert. I woudn't even consider trading KAT for Gobert, but I sure would love to have both. And sadly, it was possible for the Wolves to have both. But rather than draft Gobert with the low first round pick we had remaining in 2014, the Wolves chose to sell the pick for fricking cash. Folks on this Board will remember that I wanted to draft McCollum that year. Folks will also remember that when Flip traded down, I wanted to draft the Greek Freak and Gorgui and then draft Gobert with the pick we sold. (I'll admit I thought Gorgui would be better than Gobert, but I loved Gobert's potential And I wasn't alone. As everyone knows, last summer I would have drafted John Collins instead of Patton. I'll admit I didn't expect Donovan Mitchell and Jason Tatum to be a good as they've been this season, although I liked both as talents in last year's draft. I thought Gorgui would be better than he's been. And I didn't even know who Kyle Kuzma was before the Lakers drafted him. But I'm just a rube and yet the Wolves would still be much better off if I had been the team's PBO the past 5 years. That's troubling to say the least.
I know we all complain about certain Wolves players from time to time, but the players we have (and don't have) are the sum total of decisions made by front office executives, including Flip, Milt Newton and Tom Thibodeau over the past 5 years. There's simply no substitute for front office executives with really good judgment. Teams generally don't become championship contenders based on the obvious. The Spurs did the obvious when they took Tim Duncan with the top pick in the draft. But what made them a perennial championship contender for many years were the less obvious decisions - drafting Tony Parker near the bottom of the first round and Manu near the bottom of the 2nd round while also signing young free agent talent like Danny Green. And of course, there was the earlier decision to hire Popovich. I'm not even sure drafting Michael Jordan was the clear obvious for the Bulls back in 1984 without hindsight, but even if it was, trading for the draft rights to Scottie Pippen and drafting Horace Grant a couple years later and then eventually signing Tony Kukoc were the not so obvious front office decisions that eventually helped make the Bulls the best team in the League for a long time.
I'm still waiting for the day when a Wolves front office does something comparable to what these other teams have done -- drafting a Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert, John Stockton, Paul Millsap, Scottie Pippen, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, or Kyle Kuzma, etc., and hiring as head coach a Phil Jackson, Greg Popovic, Brad Stevens, Quin Snyder, or Brett Brown.
