Paulo Alves

Especially so because when you look back, you know, when you think about, oh, the 10th pick, if you call it the 10th pick, people might argue, oh, why we wouldn't have the space for another young guy.

Well, I would counter you with this.

With a 10th pick, you could likely have made the trade the Pacers made.

I think it was the Pacers made with New Orleans where they got that unprotected first next year.

So with a 10th pick, that trade proves that you could have made a move to delay that pick further into the future and kept the asset.

Right.

It's not a situation like the Josh Christopher slash Usman Garuba situation where they wanted to trade back but couldn't or trade to the future but couldn't or the Tai Tai Washington situation where they wanted to trade back and only able to trade into the future but were only able to trade back.

It's not one of those situations.

So you could have, you know, pushed that pick along and perhaps got another prime asset there.

So since we didn't and since we made that investment into KD, you've got to be better.

than what I would have considered a successful season to be for the team we had previously.

Now, successful season is different from me being comfortable running it back for the most part next season.

Because the reason why that changes is because of the injuries, right?

A successful season is in spite of injuries to me.

What you do moving forward, you've got to address the injuries and qualify those as upgrades moving forward.

So if you do get to that second round and you lose to the Spurs, you could convince me that the team that lost to the Spurs in the second round, which are in that case turning out to be a better team than people expected because they're going to make the Western Conference Finals,

If you're going to lose to that team, you could convince me that with President Fleet and Steven Adams, and perhaps, you know, a Dorian Finney-Smith and Clint Capella trade for a rotation piece, you could make the argument that that's enough of a jump for it to be a championship contender the year after, right?

And so if you do make that, I'm like, okay, you can convince me that those are enough upgrades.

And I don't consider trading Dorian Finney-Smith and Clint Capella for a mid-size level role player to be a massive overhaul of the roster.

So I do think that that's basically running it back.