Which is More Significant: Finishing 3rd in the West or the Playoff Sweep?

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Which is more significant regarding the Blazers' level of competitiveness?

  • 1. Winning 49 games and finishing 3rd in the West.

    Votes: 16 33.3%

  • 2. Getting swept by the Pelicans in the playoffs.

    Votes: 32 66.7%
  • Total voters
    48
BonesJones said:
No were not.

Rebuilding teams are non-playoff teams that aim for top picks and are willing to trade good talent for young prospects, picks, and cash savings. We are none of those things.
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A team that gets crushed repeatedly is hardly a playoff team. Rebuilding teams are non contenders, which we became when Wes went down and turncoat left. Top picks are a crap-shoot, we are finding good talent in the draft, we just have to develop them (and Nurk). Cash savings? see Ed and Vonleh.
 
Let's re-phrase the question: Would you rather have your team get the 1st seed and then lose in the first round, or get the 8th seed and be the Cinderella team that wins the title?
 
riverman said:
You guys got fan cards?
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Sure:

nba-warning-634x845.jpg
 
HailBlazers said:
A team that gets crushed repeatedly is hardly a playoff team. Rebuilding teams are non contenders, which we became when Wes went down and turncoat left. Top picks are a crap-shoot, we are finding good talent in the draft, we just have to develop them (and Nurk). Cash savings? see Ed and Vonleh.
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So there's 25 rebuilding teams? If that's the case, the team state of "rebuilding" has no meaning, since it applies to many completely different situation.
 
PtldPlatypus said:
Anyone who places all importance on the playoffs should hang up their fan card, IMO. If 4 games render 82 completely irrelevant, then what joy can you possibly derive from any of the regular season, since it's all meaningless anyway?
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What do you compete in the regular season for? To try to win games to get a better seed to go deeper in the playoffs. Sure, you enjoy each game as it's separate entity, but if the questions about being competitiveness, then being competitive in the playoffs is more important than being competitive in the regular season.
 
BonesJones said:
So there's 25 rebuilding teams? If that's the case, the team state of "rebuilding" has no meaning, since it applies to many completely different situation.
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So rebuilding is only when you're at the foundation stage? If you haven't completed your build, what do you call that? https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rebuilding 2015, we dismantled our core (Wes, Nico, LA), The past three years we've been (albeit slowly) take your pick: replacing, restrengthening, reinforcing, revising, reshaping, reorganizing.
 
HailBlazers said:
So rebuilding is only when you're at the foundation stage? If you haven't completed your build, what do you call that? https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rebuilding 2015, we dismantled our core (Wes, Nico, LA), The past three years we've been (albeit slowly) take your pick: replacing, restrengthening, reinforcing, revising, reshaping, reorganizing.
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Even contending teams do some of those things.

Rebuilding in sports usually can be described by the saying "rebuilding the foundation". Once you have the foundation, what are you rebuilding? The bench? The foundation is the most important part of the team, so you can only be rebuilding, IMO, if you have a young foundation building themselves and the organization with them, or if you're tearing down and rebuilding the foundation from the ground up.

Altering the foundation isn't rebuilding. None of those words mean rebuilding.
 
I think you’re arguing what “rebuilding”, in sports means to different people, so you’ll get different answers. I think we all generally know what “a rebuild” looks like, and after wes went down we rebuilt. You can argue about where the Blazers are in that process but considering they’ve only made it to the 2nd round once I’d say they’re still in throws of it. They have rebuilt their core from the looks of it with Dame / CJ and Nurk, but the rest of the team has a ton of question marks right now which mean the rebuild is more or less who they’re going to fill in around the core.
 
BonesJones said:
Even contending teams do some of those things.

Rebuilding in sports usually can be described by the saying "rebuilding the foundation". Once you have the foundation, what are you rebuilding? The bench? The foundation is the most important part of the team, so you can only be rebuilding, IMO, if you have a young foundation building themselves and the organization with them, or if you're tearing down and rebuilding the foundation from the ground up.

Altering the foundation isn't rebuilding. None of those words mean rebuilding.
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The Blazers have only one starter left from the 2015 squad (Dame) and only two other guys who were on that squad still remain (CJ and Meyers). Meyers hardly played last season. I think by any reasonable metric that’s a change of foundation and a rebuild.
 
e_blazer said:
The Blazers have only one starter left from the 2015 squad (Dame) and only two other guys who were on that squad still remain (CJ and Meyers). Meyers hardly played last season. I think by any reasonable metric that’s a change of foundation and a rebuild.
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Yes it was, in 2015. It's 2018.
 
e_blazer said:
2015 was the year Hailblazers correctly referred to as the start of the rebuild. It’s not done yet, unless you’re happy with Aminu and Harkless as starters.
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Not happy with them, but they are going into their 4th year on the team. At some point what you have is what you have... there will be tweaks - but our rotation is fairly set right now.

Olshey's rebuilding plan is like a lot of my home improvement projects. They get 80% complete, and then they just languish away.
 
e_blazer said:
2015 was the year Hailblazers correctly referred to as the start of the rebuild. It’s not done yet, unless you’re happy with Aminu and Harkless as starters.
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When is the end? How the heck is it not done yet?

We're not rebuilding. People just like to use than as an excuse when we get swept with HCA...

Rebuilding teams don't get HCA.

You can improve your team and still not be considered as "rebuilding". But I guess GS decided to rebuild after their championship... every team is looking to improve...
 
BonesJones said:
What do you compete in the regular season for? To try to win games to get a better seed to go deeper in the playoffs. Sure, you enjoy each game as it's separate entity, but if the questions about being competitiveness, then being competitive in the playoffs is more important than being competitive in the regular season.
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I'm not on the team. I'm not competing for anything. I'm a fan. I root for the team. I ride the hills and valleys of each season with the team. Yes, I want them to win, and I would love for them to be competitive in the playoffs, but I don't spend all season thinking about the playoffs. I don't spend six months constantly looking forward to April. I don't discount the joy I get from a strong regular season just because of a bad week at the end. Getting swept doesn't reduce the way my kids and I connect through rooting for the team. The season-long community feel with other fans isn't lessened because a playoff series didn't go well.

Of all the things Blazer fandom brings to my life, potential playoff success is way down on the list.
 
PtldPlatypus said:
I'm not on the team. I'm not competing for anything. I'm a fan. I root for the team. I ride the hills and valleys of each season with the team. Yes, I want them to win, and I would love for them to be competitive in the playoffs, but I don't spend all season thinking about the playoffs. I don't spend six months constantly looking forward to April. I don't discount the joy I get from a strong regular season just because of a bad week at the end. Getting swept doesn't reduce the way my kids and I connect through rooting for the team. The season-long community feel with other fans isn't lessened because a playoff series didn't go well.

Of all the things Blazer fandom brings to my life, potential playoff success is way down on the list.
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I think you missed what I was trying to say.

The context is competitiveness in regard to the rest of the league, not fan enjoyment.
 
BonesJones said:
I think you missed what I was trying to say.

The context is competitiveness in regard to the rest of the league, not fan enjoyment.
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But, we're talking about "fan cards". So...
 
BonesJones said:
When is the end? How the heck is it not done yet?

We're not rebuilding. People just like to use than as an excuse when we get swept with HCA...

Rebuilding teams don't get HCA.

You can improve your team and still not be considered as "rebuilding". But I guess GS decided to rebuild after their championship... every team is looking to improve...
Click to expand...

Seriously, you’re arguing that three years is an unusually long time to complete a rebuild? That’s quite a take, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

The Blazers undertook the most unusual of rebuilds: the no missing the playoffs, no lottery picks model. I don’t think that was the plan on Olshey’s part, but Dame and CJ didn’t get the memo about tanking in 2015-16. Olshey screwed up the summer of 2016’s cap space by blowing it on guys who haven’t helped much. He hasn’t been able to make a significant trade in that period other than Nurk (and I’m not sure he really was convinced that Nurk was going to be a keeper). He’s drafted well, but mainly from outside of lottery territory (got Collins by consolidating two lower picks). I’d say the rebuild being as far along as it is after three years like that is a testament to just how good Dame and CJ are.

The Blazers are still making do with stop-gap guys at PF and SF (Aminu and Harkless). Maybe Collins grows into the starting PF this year. Maybe Harkless finally matures and puts in a full season of quality work and earns the title of starting SF. If those things happen then, yeah, the rebuild is done. If not, the team needs a trade or some real draft luck.

But then, I think you’re a smart enough guy to know all of the above and you just enjoy arguing over things ad infinitum.
 
e_blazer said:
Seriously, you’re arguing that three years is an unusually long time to complete a rebuild? That’s quite a take, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

The Blazers undertook the most unusual of rebuilds: the no missing the playoffs, no lottery picks model. I don’t think that was the plan on Olshey’s part, but Dame and CJ didn’t get the memo about tanking in 2015-16. Olshey screwed up the summer of 2016’s cap space by blowing it on guys who haven’t helped much. He hasn’t been able to make a significant trade in that period other than Nurk (and I’m not sure he really was convinced that Nurk was going to be a keeper). He’s drafted well, but mainly from outside of lottery territory (got Collins by consolidating two lower picks). I’d say the rebuild being as far along as it is after three years like that is a testament to just how good Dame and CJ are.

The Blazers are still making do with stop-gap guys at PF and SF (Aminu and Harkless). Maybe Collins grows into the starting PF this year. Maybe Harkless finally matures and puts in a full season of quality work and earns the title of starting SF. If those things happen then, yeah, the rebuild is done. If not, the team needs a trade or some real draft luck.

But then, I think you’re a smart enough guy to know all of the above and you just enjoy arguing over things ad infinitum.
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To get serious for a moment, I think what's a bit frustrating to some people is this

A. The Blazers refused to call it a rebuild, so why should we accept anything less than success

B. Rebuilds are usually saved for bad teams. The Blazers never got bad enough to rebuild. They refurbished or remodeled, so a lot of fans see no real progress since those same fans see a team that has no real chance at winning a title. This year, for example, a 49 win team added no one that will give them a legit shot at a title, and that's frustrating. They are good enough not to suck, and not good enough to be taken seriously
 
Mediocre Man said:
To get serious for a moment, I think what's a bit frustrating to some people is this

A. The Blazers refused to call it a rebuild, so why should we accept anything less than success

B. Rebuilds are usually saved for bad teams. The Blazers never got bad enough to rebuild. They refurbished or remodeled, so a lot of fans see no real progress since those same fans see a team that has no real chance at winning a title. This year, for example, a 49 win team added no one that will give them a legit shot at a title, and that's frustrating. They are good enough not to suck, and not good enough to be taken seriously
Click to expand...

It's a bit of a semantics game as to what the Blazers did. They certainly didn't follow the traditional rebuild model of dumping assets and sucking long enough to get some top lottery picks. They retooled on the fly around Dame and CJ. But when there's only three guys still on the squad from the time LA said sayonara, I think it's pretty tough to not characterize it as some form of a rebuild. We've debated the tank idea ad nauseum. You could write everything I could say and vice versa. The fact of the matter is that the Blazers are at least one major piece away from being competitive. Would they be closer if they had tanked? That's anybody's guess.

The way I see it, they've got 2-3 years to put together the right guys around Dame. At the end of this contract, if he doesn't see any progress towards a title, he's going to want out and, frankly, the team would owe it to him. I'd expect your kind of a rebuild at that point. I really hope it doesn't come to that.
 
Mediocre Man said:
To get serious for a moment, I think what's a bit frustrating to some people is this

A. The Blazers refused to call it a rebuild, so why should we accept anything less than success

B. Rebuilds are usually saved for bad teams. The Blazers never got bad enough to rebuild. They refurbished or remodeled, so a lot of fans see no real progress since those same fans see a team that has no real chance at winning a title. This year, for example, a 49 win team added no one that will give them a legit shot at a title, and that's frustrating. They are good enough not to suck, and not good enough to be taken seriously
Click to expand...
I agree; I don't buy the "rebuild" mantra. To me, it feels more like a holding pattern. Like Olshey's piloting this plane, and he's close enough to see where he wants to land, but the airstrip is occupied and there are a couple other aircraft ahead of him, so he's just circling and hoping that a window for landing will open up before he runs out of fuel.

As to getting good enough to be taken seriously, I think that all hinges on our starting frontcourt. Can Moe finally be consistent? Can Nurkic become a confident paint finisher? Can Aminu resist his urge to do Aminu things, but continue to hit from outside? If these things come together, this team can in fact be dangerous, and I think that's what Neil is hoping for.
 
e_blazer said:
It's a bit of a semantics game as to what the Blazers did. They certainly didn't follow the traditional rebuild model of dumping assets and sucking long enough to get some top lottery picks. They retooled on the fly around Dame and CJ. But when there's only three guys still on the squad from the time LA said sayonara, I think it's pretty tough to not characterize it as some form of a rebuild. We've debated the tank idea ad nauseum. You could write everything I could say and vice versa. The fact of the matter is that the Blazers are at least one major piece away from being competitive. Would they be closer if they had tanked? That's anybody's guess.

The way I see it, they've got 2-3 years to put together the right guys around Dame. At the end of this contract, if he doesn't see any progress towards a title, he's going to want out and, frankly, the team would owe it to him. I'd expect your kind of a rebuild at that point. I really hope it doesn't come to that.
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So a 6 year retooling by adding role players?
 
KingSpeed said:
It wasn't. We were losing our games to Memphis and Dallas and got swept on our 4 game road trip and still finished 3rd. How would we have fallen to 7th?? We were losing and still didn't drop. Maybe if each loss counted as 2 losses? Your argument doesn't hold water.
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If we would have lost the last game of the season to Utah, the Blazers would have been 5th or 6th. Blazers had a terrible finish to the season. That last road trip was disgusting. Fucking got trounced on by Dallas. Embarrassing. Portland held onto the 3rd by the skin of their teeth. If a couple other teams won a game or two more at the end Portland would have been 7th.
 
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