Natebishop3
Don't tread on me!
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The current one in which we are overloaded with young lousy players who don't know how to play, but supposedly will someday, somehow. For example, Webster, Bayless, and Fernandez. I define experience as having learned more than one system in one's career. The way a player learns is to go through more than one coach. Barring a coaching change here, a player can get that only by changing teams. Batum and maybe Cunningham look like the only ones who will amount to anything without getting experience around the league. McMillan's coaching style isn't succeeding with the other youth players. (Aldridge would vastly improve under a different coach, too, but I'm not including him as tradebait.)
The core is rotten. Webster, Bayless, and Fernandez need further coaching to become reliable wandering journeymen, which is their ceiling. Pendergraph will be the same. Management should have started long before they won 21 games, by not giving away the experience we had for too little. For years, we have given up wins each season because of the strategy of a youth drive instead of an experience drive. New experienced guys might only last with the team a couple of years before they fade, but they're cheap, so if we keep them coming in, we have a better team than we do now, in which we count on players who don't know how to play.
...Because for several years, management shed veterans (beginning with Sheed) and replaced them with youth (or lesser experienced players). You say we needed to wait for the team to make the playoffs before adding age, but it's the opposite. Lacking experience was what caused us to leave the playoffs, and then delayed the return of the playoffs. So we needed to accelerate adding age, not wait on it.
I can almost guarantee that Rudy Fernandez will go somewhere else and be a borderline All-Star the rest of his career. He doesn't fit Nate's system. Not at all. He would thrive somewhere like New York or Phoenix. It's funny because if Phoenix had kept him, I think he would have been the perfect fit next to Steve Nash. One day Blazer fans will look back and wish we had kept Rudy, similarly to Drazen. He is not going to be a "wandering journeyman."
