quote:
Name another small market who has built a championship contender through the draft, other than OKC

...

Also, being a small market team, he has to overpay to get those guys... its not an ideal situation, but it is what it is.

I'm not excluding large and medium market teams because I don't think the size of the market is relevant, but rather how the team was built:

Boston in the 80s - Bird and McHale were both draft picks
Chicago in the 90s - Jordan, Pippen and Grant were all draft picks
Detroit in the 80s - Thomas, Dumars and Rodman were all draft picks
OKC you mentioned
Orlando in '95 - Shaq was a draft pick and essentially so was Hardaway
Orlando in '09 - Dwight Howard was a draft pick
San Antonio - Robinson, Duncan, Parker, Ginobili and Leonard were all draft picks
Utah in the 90s - Malone and Stockton were both draft picks

Unless you're a glamour franchise like the Lakers (and you have smart ownership, which they don't have at the moment), the teams that do the best usually are built through the draft.

In retrospect, I would have dealt Gordon and used him to get a lottery pick in last year's draft. It wouldn't have been an even swap even with whatever role players we would get to make the trade work, but I see Gordon's value only deteriorating. I would have kept Noel and probably drafted McLemore (no one saw MCW coming and I'm trying to base this on what people would have thought at the time), and I would have kept Lopez and Vazquez.

That probably sends me in the tank, which puts me in a position to get Payton or maybe even Smart. You have a nucleus of Davis-Noel-Payton, and you give Rivers and McLemore another year to get their acts together. Because you've done it this way, and you didn't pick up massive contracts on Tyreke and Holliday, you have cap space to go after Parsons or maybe Stephenson.

I'm going to root for the Pelicans no matter what, but I think we went about this the wrong way. Championship teams are built in a crock-pot, not a microwave.

This post was edited on 7/16/14 at 9:47 am