Writing “more palatable than this meandering assortment” IS “dissing”. I mean, I know you don’t think of it as damning with faint praise, but in the context of your article, and in the overall scheme of the world, it’s not a nice thing to say about something you “don’t mind watching.”

I hope your guess was sarcastic. If not, please turn the greys on and be prepared for sorrow.

Excellent point.

I have a friend who introduced me to the use of -tard as a suffix. It is often combined with the jack- prefix of jack-ass to create the neologism jack-tard as an insult. Occasionally, we use jack-hole as well.

Very important on both sides. I think we have to assume that GS thought of both those.

It isn’t a trade. It’s a free agent signing. League can’t do anything about that other than the existing cap limit.

Well, there is this:

But owners can actually make money at all of those tiers, if they’re competent, if that’s your angle.

Precisely—because there isn’t a sure way to get great players to come to your team, defining a nebulous “Process” that hopes to get them is dumb. It’s a better, smart, saner strategy to keep on trying with what you have, every season that you have it. Year in, year out. Keep plugging away. Hinkie was egotistically…

It’s explicit.

Bingo.

But that’s actually an argument against tanking. The original argument—counting the individual number ones that have won—makes more sense, because it compares apples to apples. If getting any old number one pick was valuable, more number ones would win, not fewer. What this shows is that some number one picks are more…

But tanking is not a good base strategy, and there’s no evidence that it is. Cleveland got lucky, there’s no doubt about it. The Process as a strategy was “get lucky, like Cleveland did.”

And a once-in-a-generation talent who transcends even the draft. Tanking in hopes that you may eventually get the next Lebron James is not a strategy.

We don’t have any evidence that he had a general strategy at all. Amassing picks isn’t a strategy. It’s a capitulation to luck.

Exactly. The problem with TheProcess is that it’s focused on the wrong probabilities. Think of it like this—you put together a good team and that increases your probability of making the playoffs, winning through, getting to the championship, and winning the championship. None of those things is guaranteed. But he’s…

You’re doing the Lord’s work here, Albert.

Do those numbers include the dressing and the croutons and the bacon bits? Some of us do remove, or never get, those items.

Another way to look at “cheating”, or perhaps a separate rule is: allow yourself to fail. If you want to call it cheating, that’s fine, but even if you think of it as a failure, don’t let it make you give up. It’s okay to mess up.

Starred, you bastard. Still months away from the end of the hiatus.