Dumars: Pistons must rebuild softened roster

Dumards seems to fancy guards who can't dribble though.

I really have no idea why you two feel that way. Daye's a much better ballhandler than Tay. I say that because it's what I 've personally observed and because Tay said that.

Well, watching Tay dribble up the court is like watching a slow motion old train wreck.

So, I think you guys are on the same page.

but.... Rip isn't much of a ball handler either :P so depending on who's playing the 1, he can play some mins at the 2.

I am just not getting this. We used Daye to bring the ball up at times - because he IS a good ballhandler. I'm not saying he's a full time PG or anything like that - but while I'll stop belaboring this point, I'm convinced this kid can handle SG in many matchups because he does have great handle for his size.

I surrender.

I'm peeing submissively.

We need some kind of an icon for that.

Going back reading his DraftExpress profile, they mentioned his ability to put the ball on the floor as a positive. Maybe he's only good on a couple of bounces or maybe it's nerves but I DON't see dribbling ability. He dribbles like he's struggling to keep the ball in front of him.

Yeah, but Daye can heave the ball across the court to high heavens much more accurately than Rip.

This is an excellent post and one of the few that has some perceptions into JD's selection for CV and Gordon. The why he did it.

Here's Bill Simmons latest:

I'm just wondering if JD will go. We have some ugly years staring us in the face at this point. Will new ownership have the patience to allow Joe to dig out of his own hole?

Bill Simmons is an entertaining sportwriter. I've enjoyed the stuff he comes up with. But he's not a serious BB expert, and on the Joe D. diatribe he's been on, he's basically established himself as a know-nothing jerk.

Maybe Joe just didn't want a high contract center coming off a terrible knee injury and a guy who pre injury was considered a poor defensive player. Perhaps Mr. Expert didn't notice or give a ____ that no other team in the league made a big effort to go get Mr. Jefferson.

I'm not sold on Jefferson either, but it just got me thinking about the odds of Joe being GM in 2 years.

New ownership ovsiously doesn't want a losing team. It's a salary cap sport, so no real reason why the Pistons should be a loser. Joe has been GM for a long enough period of time that the existing situation is almost entirely his doing. And since he won a ship in '04, there is no excuse like he was dealt a bad hand, etc. On his watch, a championship team has year by year grown steadily worse for 6 years in a row without a clear turnaround in sight. While we've had a few injuries last year, there hasn't been any bad luck about our descent. No TMac/ Yao Ming type franchise player injuries or anything like that.

And the worst part about all of this is that Joe has a clear set of fundamentals that he used to get to the top and has seemingly ignored them ever since. At this point, he has no strategic differentiation or any more impressive vision than any other GM in the league. He's basically buying offensive FA's and drafting the best available player at each stage of the draft. He's holding on to vets while his a new coach every year plays them in front of marginally talented youth... because the coaches want to maximize wins and keep their jobs... to no avail.

I was highly impressed with Joe in the past, but I've completely lost faith in him. I'm not starting to wonder how much of it was him and how much was luck and/or Hammond.

I could see the new owner decide that there needs to be a strategic change. Under that scenario, they have someone to blame, which is very important.

It's a fair inquiry and debate.

However, we were at the top of the heap for a long time. Teams at the top of the heap for a long time draft on the bottom of the heap that entire time and can't sustain themselves absent some dumb lucky event. (SA drafting Duncan because Robinson was injured the season before).

Darko was an aberation - a mistake every single GM in the league would have made. Every damn one of them.

Since then, Joe has hardly missed on a draft pick. Even many of the players he picked up that didn't work out here have gone on and worked out well on other teams. Evans, Flip Murray, etc. McDyess, Stuckey, Maxiell, Daye, JJ, maybe Summers, Bynum. Hell, after this years FA signings, Gordon's and CV's contracts even look like relative bargains.

Plus Joe is held in high esteem by players and agents throughout the league.

Teams who have had long runs have to be given quite a few years to make it back to the top. Expectations that this has to happen more quickly are unreasonable.

I agree with that downward pressure point. When a team is on top, they can rarely draft a difference maker and they have to pay their FA's more and more money due to their marketability, etc. Pretty soon you have a bunch of high paid players who have lost their edge.

That's why you have to blow it up once you're on that long slow post Championship decline... unless you have a strategy in place to counter the natural downward pressure. I guess my disappointment is that I thought Joe had a strategy. I thought his vision of defense and character first and team > individual was different enough than other GM's, that he'd be able to perpetually get guys for under their true market value and get more out of them than other teams. The Spurs use that strategy somewhat + they were milking the foreign talent pools ahead of the curve for a while.

But Joe didn't stick to that strategy AND he didn't blow it up. Joe is the one who reverted to the mean and the team's success followed him. I guess the boldest move that Joe made (that I can think of) from a player perspective was to trade Chauncey and bring in AI. That was just extremely bad judgment. One guy just made the all-star team, had career high scoring numbers, and led the US team to a world championship while the other guy is considering a gimmicky stint in Europe. There's the Darko thing, which I agree would have been made by most, if not all other GM's at the time. But how many GM's would have brought in Flip-Curry-Kuester with that roster?

Joe just seems to be doing everything either exactly the same as the average GM or worse. JJ and AA were both nice picks that fit Joe's old philosophy of character, hustle, defense, but Afflalo was given away and of course we just had some back luck with JJ. The rest of the draft picks either didn't matter or were what anyone would have done. Trades? Nothing meaningful to our advantage... seems to have a tendancy to give away value to be nice to the player. FA's? Borderline idiotic. Out of focus pickups with positional redundancy and weak defensive resumes who hurt team chemistry. Coaches? Sziczophrenic.

If we had a pecking chicken toy tapping on Joe's blackberry for the past 5 years instead of Joe himself, would we be any worse?