If the biggest black marks on Mullin’s recent moves are POB, Belinelli, AR and Maggette, then he’s not doing THAT badly.

POB was a terrible, terrible pick. It’s worth noting that a team with the ninth pick these days is more likely to get a solid rotation guy than a star or even a starter; we didn’t whiff on a bunch of All-Stars by taking POB. Still, we should’ve gotten at least a solid rotation guy out of that pick, and we didn’t. A bad move, that wasted a pick, if not money.

I’m not a Marco fan. I don’t think he’ll end up being much. Still… that was the eighteenth pick in a middling draft. No home runs were available there, and lest we forget, we also netted Brandan Wright that year. I think Marco was a poor pick, but in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much.

Randolph might never amount to anything, and if you’re not in the mood for another project, I get it. But Randolph was a BPA pick… that was a pure upside selection. I don’t put much stock in the early returns on him, but they’re certainly not negative. Randolph seems like a data point against your argument, not in favor of it.

You agree that Corey Maggette will be useful to this team. You think we overpaid for him… I do too. I don’t think it’s an overpay on the level of the Fisher signing, and it’s worth keeping in mind that we paid him that to keep him from seeing what the Brand-less Clippers would offer to retain him. If they wouldn’t have been interested, then we threw $10 million in the garbage for no reason. If they would have - and the Camby move suggests they wanted cost certainty over shooting for restricteds - it was a totally defensible move, given that this is a cap window we have to take advantage of.

I don’t consider myself much of a Mullin apologist. I don’t think he’s one of the best GMs in the league by any stretch. He’s made a lot of mistakes in the draft and has overpaid for several guys. Like you, I didn’t like how we handled Baron’s opting out… offering Arenas max money struck me as a bizarrely clumsy move.

It’s still worth pointing out the degree to which our talent level has improved over the last four seasons, without our payroll ballooning out of proportion. Worth pointing out that if Turiaf goes back to the Lakers, we’ll still be the team with the most cap space this summer. Worth pointing out that Mullin’s garnered us four genuinely interesting young talents with star potential (down the line for Randolph), despite having never picked higher than eighth. Worth pointing out that we won 48 games last year, enough to give us home-court advantage in the first round if we’d been in the East, and as many regular-season games as we won the year we won the title.

This isn’t 1975, and we aren’t in the Eastern Conference. We’re not in a great position… maybe not even a good one. But teams need real luck to become championship-level—they need #1 overall picks, cities that lure guys, blockbuster trades with sympathetic GMs on other teams, guys that become NBA First-Teamers out of nowhere, or some combo of both. (As always, the Pistons are the bizarre exception to the rule.)

How many opportunities has Mullin had to put this team on the map? I’d say one—the possible Garnett trade last summer. By all accounts, Mullin tried hard for Garnett, and by many accounts offered a better package than Boston did. It didn’t work out.

It’s not clear when another chance like that will come along. In the interim, we were, and are, a credible and entertaining team. I’d prefer “championship-level” to “credible and entertaining”, but a championship-level NBA team is pretty hard to come by. I’ll take “credible and entertaining” for now.

100% certainty on something that cannot ever be proven one way or another is no different from 0% certainty.

JRich was traded a whole year before he needed to be traded. Unless Cohan called for a pure expensive-cutting move, the JRich trade was unnecessary. Did Mullin not see Baron had an opt out clause this offseason? Did he even consider it at all, or did he just blindly refrain from taking into account all future possibilities. If Jrich wasn’t traded, and Baron still opted out, we could’ve still kept Monta and Biedrins. Instead, we used the cost-savings from trading our heart and soul away to overpay for older Corey Maggette this offseason.

If we had held onto JRich, shopped him at the deadline but couldn’t trade him, shopped him at this year’s draft and couldn’t trade him, and lost either Monta or Biedrins because of the luxury tax.. then yeah, we lost one of them for a reason and that sucks. We just lost JRich for no good reason. (We’ll see how Wright turns out).

The critical variable here is just how valuable J-Rich is.

I love J-Rich. I miss him. On a purely pragmatic basis, however, I regard him as significantly less valuable than Monta and Biedrins - not even in the same league. And, yes, I regard him as slightly less valuable than Maggette. J-Rich wasn’t particularly relevant to our future one way or another - he was a pretty good shooting guard, being paid about what he should’ve been. That’s a fine piece to have, but it’s nothing to build around. If holding onto J-Rich would’ve cost us Biedrins or Monta (and I really, really doubt we would’ve been able to move J-Rich for space at any other point), it would’ve been disastrous NOT to trade him.

Do I think we would’ve made the playoffs with J-Rich last year? Yeah, probably. There’d have been hidden costs, in that Monta might not’ve gotten the minutes to blossom the way he did… I don’t think it’s absolutely 100% that we’d have made it. But I think we probably would have, and it sucks that we didn’t.

But let’s flash back a year. If somebody told you, a Warriors fan, that

A) we’d trade J-Rich for a genuinely promising young forward and cap space,
B) we’d sign Maggette the next year with that space, who’s a good bet to at least equal J-Rich’s production,
C) and that in the season between we’d win 48 games,

I mean, don’t you think you’d have taken that deal? J-Rich for Maggette and Wright, and our winningest season in fifteen years in between? As much as I loved J-Rich, I’d have jumped all over that. We just had the misfortune to win 48 games in an absolute strike-of-lightning year, the one time in NBA history when that wouldn’t get you into the playoffs. I was disappointed as hell that we missed out this year, but I can’t fault the front office for not anticipating that it’d take 50 wins to get in.

I think it’s reasonable to complain about not getting a guy like Kurt Thomas. Again, I don’t consider it a sure thing that we’ve have made it with him, but I’d have liked our chances a little better. That said, first-round picks do have some trade value, especially when you’re not a no-brainer playoff team. I’m not personally convinced that Thomas would’ve been worth it, but it’s legitimate to claim that he would’ve been.

As for Foyle, I just don’t see the logic in keeping him, given the discount he gave us. You don’t hang on to a player you can’t use for three years, just so he becomes a commodity as an expiring… that’d have been an enormous waste of a roster spot. Not to mention that the Brown/Gasol trade is hardly business as usual… it was an absurdly lopsided trade to the point that other coaches and executives wanted trading rules to be amended as a result. We were never going to get a star with $7 million worth of an expiring Adonal Foyle. With the buyout, we got an extra roster spot for three years and about six million bucks worth of space a year earlier than we would’ve otherwise. I think most teams would’ve taken that buyout from a player they had zero interest in using, and who had zero current trade value. The Foyle extension was lunacy, but the buyout didn’t compound that lunacy, by any means.

On a general note, the idea that missing the playoffs lessened our appeal to the big names out there strikes me as odd. Players aren’t stupid - their feelings about this franchise, for good or bad, won’t be changed by us going 48-34 and finishing ninth. Stars will come here if we land the right draft pick or make the right trade or if the numbers work out. They won’t shy away because of something as trivial as missing the playoffs one year - we take that a lot more seriously than they do.

But they are going to be hurting in a few years, as the sun sets on Nash (so to speak). However, I will say this for them: they have $20MM expiring in 2010 (Shaq), the “Year of the Free Agents”. I doubt that is a coincidence. When you back out and look at that trade over the next 3 years, it might make Kerr look like a genius—even if they don’t win a title. Because they had clearly bet EVERYTHING on winning it all, and were about to get the gun held to their head by Marion. They may have traded him one year too soon, but it might still work out in the end. So, actually, maybe you’re right. Maybe you just go for it every year and let the cards fall where they may… I agree that “rebuilding” is a strange limbo to be in, because you can be there forever…

...traded away Luol Deng’s pick. They’ve traded away a number of picks for cash and gotten nothing tangible in return. If you think the Suns are “doing just fine” with their low draft emphasis policy, I have to strongly disagree with you. Maybe if they’d been a little more smart about it they’d have some young guys to fill out the roster. I don’t know about you, but the Suns don’t look so powerful to me right now, and their neglect for refreshing the talent pool through the draft is a big reason why.

The 2006 draft was horrible, but Mulgomery made it all that much worse. When you’re drafting for need, that need is a big man, you don’t have a high pick and it’s an off year, you’ve taken what’s a long shot (finding a quality big) and made it more difficult. No, there weren’t really much in the way of stars to be had after the POB, but if you abandon the notion that needing a big means you have to draft one, and if you abandon the notion that failing to get a star is the same thing as failure, you start seeing some reasonable opportunities.

Would Brewer have been better, even if he seemed to duplicate the 2-3 position you had players at? Hell yeah. Would Farmar or Rondo or Marcus Williams have been better, especially given that you KNEW you had a point guard who was fragile and no real backup? Hell yeah. I know people will say that the point guards were “a stretch” and that would have been “too high” to take them, but I suspect that’s because almost everyone has the same strategy that is shown to be flawed year after year that ignores the fact that after the top few picks, getting a guy who is solid but unspectacular is probably better than taking that one in a thousand swing for the fences.