Golden State built around high draft picks and got a star
Steph Curry was picked 7th, Klay 11th, Draymond 35th.
Cleveland was able to re-build by getting two #1 picks and clearing cap space for LeBron
They got Kyrie and Anthony Bennett by being bad, they had only a 1.7% chance for Wiggins, and if one of the best players of all time had not been born in Ohio, they would still suck. This is not a replicable strategy, "be bad, win the lottery with a 1.7% chance and then have your hometown near GOAT come back'
Boston had a star in Pierce
picked 10th
Its not necessarily about tanking it's about getting a star.
I agree, that's what I'm saying. If you actually look at the history there's been basically no team who said "oh, we're winning 40 games a year, let's trade everyone away, draft top 5 for a couple years" and then had success. But the narrative is that because good teams have great players, you need to tank to get that. But historically, championship teams come from continual incremental improvement, windfall luck, or a combination of both.
When you look at Miami and Boston in your examples, they didn't make big moves for several years as a rebuild so when they saw the opportunity they could make big moves at once
Yeah, exactly. But they didn't tank. Miami in the years before the Lebron era had 44, 15, 43 and 47 wins. And their 15 win season yielded them 1 brand new michael beasley.
Boston in the years before KG had 44, 36, 45, 33 and 24 wins. These teams were the definition of "middle of the pack, neither bottoming out or going anywhere" and they pulled it together because they had a good player and were good enough to assemble a great team when the trade opportunity arose.
If these teams took the approach of boom or bust that everyone around here seems to recommend, Miami might have tanked more and been unable to entice Lebron and Bosh. Boston might have tanked more and been unable to convince KG to come (since he had to commit to re-sign for it to be worth anything). I mean look at [this](The clincher, though, was Garnett's willingness to back off his well-chronicled refusal to play in Boston. Garnett's unwillingness to make a long-term commitment to the Celtics abruptly took this deal off the table in June, but McHale and his Boston counterpart, ex-teammate Danny Ainge, managed to resuscitate the trade and quickly move it to the brink of completion.) article.
The clincher, though, was Garnett's willingness to back off his well-chronicled refusal to play in Boston. Garnett's unwillingness to make a long-term commitment to the Celtics abruptly took this deal off the table in June, but McHale and his Boston counterpart, ex-teammate Danny Ainge, managed to resuscitate the trade and quickly move it to the brink of completion.
So if Boston was winning 20 fewer games, do you really think you can swing that Garnett trade and convince him to stay? If Miami was winning 20 fewer games, do you think Bosh and Lebron come?
I think in principle it makes sense to get good players through the draft, but intentionally bottoming out has not been demonstrated to work and being a terrible team has considerable disadvantages to being a "fringe" team wrt team building.