It's June right now. The NBA Draft is going to happen. Then free agency. Then summer league. And then training camp -- where we invariably will be inviting some guys (young and old, locks and long shots) to come out and try out for our beloved Utah Jazz. I'm looking over my years and years of personal opinions on our new additions. I've been blogging since back before Deron Williams was on the team; and been writing long style posts in messages boards since Karl Malone was knocking people out with his elbows.I only bring this up because it's given me a large enough sample size of times when I've been dead wrong, and times when I've been dead on. It's a good enough distribution for me to honestly say that I don't think I'm any more right than I'm wrong. Which is honestly what you can say about all 30 NBA front offices as well.
One thing is fair to say though -- it's that the unknown is always more attractive than the known. And it's silly, because what's known is something you can more or less factor and build around. What's unknown can be awesome, or horrible.
I tend to be very bull headed about the desire to play our youth for the dual purpose of giving them experience and seasoning them, while also giving the front office experience with them on the floor to better evaluate what we have. It's important to get guys, find out how good they can be, and then either keep them or dump them. Smart teams don't hang onto losers for very long. I want us to be a smart team. So we need to find out which guys on our team are losers or not.
Still, it's easy to fall in love with the new guy - because you don't know if he's a loser or not. I'm going to be writing a longer post detailing how right and wrong I've been about previous drafts closer to draft night. But for now I wanted to introduce the concept of the attractiveness of uncertainty. Case in point, I felt like that guy up there at the top was going to be a SURE FIRE rotation guy in the NBA. Period. Partly because of his college career, but mostly, I guess, because he was the new guy. I did not know what to expect so I had no basis in reality to know how good or bad he would be. Eventually I expected him to be way better than he was. Which is unfair to him. Not everyone we draft, sign, or work out is going to turn into gold.
Our Front Office, like most all front offices, is batting .500 -- like most fans. It's a crap shoot for us and them both. The next few weeks are going to be fun, as a Jazz fan and as a SLC Dunk reader!
More positive posts, and more making fun of Amar. Shut up.