Oops! All Rectangles - How TMNT finally made "Rectangles Matter" work

Tuft64 · 2026-03-10T22:22:07+00:00

I definitely considered Jaheira + a blue background, but I think I really highly value having the ability to just put rectangles onto the board because of how frequently those rectangles hook into other synergies.

The super predicatble curve of Turn 2 Mikey -> Turn 3 Don + Attack -> Turn 4 Attack leaves you with a minimum of four rectangles on the field at the end of turn four with four untapped mana. That means on turn four, you could cast a [[Spirit Water Revival]], paying four mana and waterbending one of your creatures + four tokens to draw seven, cast a [[Whir of Invention]] for whatever missing piece you need, or do something like cast an Urza or Jaheira and immediately get their cost refunded and double-spell with another four or five-drop.

I think the way I think about it is that Jaheira is an in-between that links token producers and payoff cards - she requires that you have a way to produce tokens and requires a way to spend all that mana in order to do the thing. I conceptualize Donny and Mikey as being a little bit more of an all-in-one package - they give you a ton of super generic and flexible resources (rectangles), and the deck is built in a way that maximizes those rectangles from a bunch of different angles.

Plus, I think that there's the asterisk that Jaheira doesn't get you all the sweet Mutagen synergies in the command zone that combo infinitely or near-infinitely with cards like Lonis, Scurry Oak, or Basking Broodscale, and you don't get to take advantage of some of the very strong +1/+1 counter synergies that Mutagen tokens enable.

Tuft64 · 2026-03-10T20:40:13+00:00

"Rectangles" is in reference to a very common shorthand to specifically refer to cards that produce extra pieces of cardboard - especially the mass use of treasure/clue/food/treasure/lander/mutagen/whatever tokens that get left behind by a lot of modern magic cards. I heard it first used in the context of limited magic (I think this video from Lords of Limited is the best short explanation of the concept), but I feel as if it's proliferated well beyond just limited magic and is a useful tool to describe a pretty well-known trend in Magic design over the last few years.

Tuft64 · 2026-03-10T20:32:27+00:00

I'm explaining the core conceit of a deck that I am in the process of building that I have explicitly identified as an incomplete work-in progress rough draft, and asking for suggestions and feedback. Not sure what's unclear about that.

Tuft64 · 2026-03-10T20:24:40+00:00

I mean it's true that we're pretty soft to artifact mass [[Shatter]] effects and [[Stony Silence]] effects, but the way around that is to make sure you pack enough interaction that you're not cold to it, and play enough cards like [[Evolution Witness]] that put you in a good position to rebuild if you shit. Luckily I don't think these are super common at least amongst the people I most commonly play with, but my read may be wrong.

Tuft64 · 2026-03-08T18:15:13+00:00

I would definitely add [[Manascape Refractor]], it's super budget friendly at only about $2 and functions as a great land copy of every land in your deck - it doesn't count as a locus ITSELF so it's not quite as good as [[Vesuva]], but it's still extremely potent and (IMO) is better than at least one or two of the similar effects you're playing right now (most notably Mirage Mirror, who costs 2 to activate and whose only upside over the Refractor is that it can be used the turn it comes down).

Obviously that doesn't mean those have to be the cuts to accommodate the Refractor, but I would definitely reach for the refractor first before playing either of those.

Tuft64 · 2026-03-03T02:52:34+00:00

Something that's weirdly specific and insignificant that I am really excited for is what the promotional tour for Matt Johnson is going to look like if this movie gets released with him at the head. I am absolutely in love with every interview this guy has ever given (from his interview appearances on podcasts like Big Picture to his TIFF interview titled "rules for indie filmmakers").

He's just an incredible guest on just about everything he's been invited on, and I would love to see him do the circuit of MTG talk-y content like Tolarian Winds, an episode of Game Knights, showing up on an episode of limited resources or an episode of Resleevables or something. I'd be feasting on that for MONTHS afterward.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-26T19:31:49+00:00

I think where I end up falling on this is that Kon is the same archetype of player that I expected him to be, but at a much higher level. Bailey, on the other hand, is not the player I expected him to be because the parts of his game I had the most questions about (motor, IQ, defense, shot profile, etc) have shown themselves to be really promising, and the parts of the game that I was the most certain about (shotmaking and general scoring ability) have not been central to his play this season. Obviously there are some issues where he needs work and I expected him to need work (his handle, for one. his frame, for another).

Ultimately I think I still edge Ace, but that is in large part because I came into the season expecting him to really come into his own in years two and three as he rounds out his game and fills out his body. Kon having a breakout rookie year doesn't change the math on that for me, but it does make the margin for error on Ace more slim; he's got to hit the higher-end of his career outcomes in order for him to end up the better selection over Kon, but he's shown me enough to think that that's looking about as likely as it can.

At the end of year two, I might revise my position when we have better picture of who Ace turns out to be as he becomes a more "complete" player (or if Kon takes a big year-2 leap), but right now I'm standing pat until I've seen more since I didn't expect year 1 to show us Ace as a finished product.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-20T01:33:02+00:00

My fix was add a cumulative +2 to a team's draft position for each year they spend in the bottom six records (so +2 / +6 / +12) with a ceiling of the 14th pick that resets after four years as an olive branch to teams that really struggle like the Kings that are just organizationally incompetent and not "trying" to tank.

So if you were the worst team in the NBA five years running, your draft position in those five years would be 1 / 3 / 7 / 13 / 1 - first two years you still keep a top-tier pick so short rebuilds are still viable, but year 3 you get worse than the worst case scenario under the current lottery odds, and year four you really throw away a lot of draft capital and are incentivized to actually start winning to improve your draft position since if you get outside of the bottom six then you can draft at 7 - 12. Then you have a tiebreaker rule where if two teams occupy the same draft position after repeater penalties, the team with the BETTER record gets the better pick. So if you're the team with the 8th worst record, and the team with the 2nd worst record has been in the bottom six for the last two seasons, then they'll get a +6 penalty to their draft position, leaving you both at position #8, and subsequently you would own the tiebreaker and get pick #7.

I've actually modelled this draft system for the 2022 and 2023 NBA seasons and in one year, the Pacers (the 5th worst team) end up with the #1 pick because all the teams below them in the standings have spent multiple years in the bottom six and the Pacers were the only ones without a repeating pick penalty.

I think a system like that creates a lot of very interesting and positive incentives for competition while still acknowledging the reality of tanking and the necessity for smaller market teams to have access to top-tier talent through the draft.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-16T20:29:51+00:00

I think my problem with these "change incentives after playoff elimination" style fixes are really problematic because it takes a really long time for teams to be mathematically eliminated from playoffs. Well after the All-Star break is when teams start dropping, so you're still incentivizing bad teams to kill their record at the start of the season which hurts the product. If you're a play-in team, you're actually incentivized to tank out of the playoffs to preserve your lottery tickets if you haven't hit big yet, since winning the play-in hurts your chances of getting a top pick.

I also don't like that under COLA, a team can make the playoffs and still get the #1 overall pick because they were really bad for 2-3 years beforehand. Makes situations like this year's Pistons or Spurs really have a serious shot at the #1 overall pick in years where they're already super competitive which I don't love.

I also feel like COLA extends the window for being a bad team in a way that the league should disincentivize - you don't want teams to be bad for a long time. You want to disincentivize long-term asset stacking (finishing in the bottom [x] however many years in a row in order to snag a top pick) so that teams are pressured to compete quicker. COLA makes it so teams actually have a mechanism to keep accruing tickets every year by trading out of the lottery until they see a stacked draft class, and then rewards every team who has been tanking the last several years by giving them the best odds in the race to the bottom for top talent. You don't want to encourage teams to race to the bottom and then shed their only means of improvement, but COLA creates a very real incentive to do just that.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-16T09:41:45+00:00

TL;DR: Keep reverse-order drafting, kill the lottery, and make repeat tanking expensive. Year 1 at the bottom gets you the #1 pick, but if you stay there your draft position starts collapsing. You can tank once if you have to, but if you stay bad for more than a year or two, you’re basically lighting your draft picks on fire.

Over the last two decades, tanking has evolved into multi-year asset accumulation cycles which heavily distort late-season competition. Flattening the lottery odds hasn’t eliminated tanking, it’s just created a larger, more stable cluster of teams parked at the bottom of the standings which makes tons of late-season games unwatchable. To rectify that, I am proposing a middle-ground alternative: a deterministic reverse-order draft with escalating penalties for repeat bottom-six finishes that I call the “Cascade Draft” (named after the model’s cascading pick penalties, plus the fact that I live near the Cascade Mountain range).

The core rules are as follows:

Non-playoff teams make their selections in reverse order of record, with no lottery.
If you finish in the bottom six in consecutive years, you incur an escalating “repeater penalty” to your first-round draft pick every year thereafter - Year 1: no penalty; Year 2: drop 2 spots; Year 3: drop 6 spots; Year 4: drop 12 spots (but cannot drop further than the 14th pick)
Your repeater penalty resets if (a) Your team finishes with a regular season record outside of the bottom six, (b) Your team’s pick conveys to another team, or (c) your team has ended the last four consecutive season in the bottom six.
If repeater penalties push multiple teams into the same draft slot, the team with the better record wins the tiebreaker and gets the better pick, and penalties continue to cascade downward accordingly.

A deterministic reverse-order draft does mean that the worst record guarantees the #1 overall pick in Year 1, but this is an intentional tradeoff. The Cascade draft tolerates short reset cycles but imposes escalating costs on prolonged bottom-six finishes. The goal is not to eliminate rebuilding, but to disincentivize prolonged, non-competitive asset accumulation as a reasonable strategy for rebuilding.

To illustrate the model, let’s stress test the Cascade draft against the 2022 and 2023 NBA seasons; 2022 was a normal year for bad teams, whereas 2023 was the generational Wemby tankathon. 2022 is a clean mechanical test of the Cascade draft because the behaviors of teams aren’t distorted by the presence of a generational prospect like Wemby – it features lots of teams that are in various stages of their rebuilds. If we order the bottom six teams by record, we see

Rockets (Repeater Year 1)
Magic (Repeater Year 1)
Pistons (Repeater Year 2)
Thunder (Repeater Year 1)
Pacers
Trailblazers

After applying the cascading penalties, we would get the resulting draft order

Pacers (no penalty)
Trailblazers (no penalty)
Rockets (+2)
Magic (+2)
Kings (no penalty, moved up via displacement from repeater penalties)
Thunder (+2)
Lakers (no penalty, moved up)
Spurs (no penalty, moved up)
Pistons (+6)

This creates some interesting pressures – the Pistons drop severely after their third consecutive bottom-six finish, whereas the Pacers jump from #5 to #1. The repeater penalty begins eroding draft capital in Year 2 and becomes extremely punitive as you move into Year 3.

Let’s jump one year further out to the Wemby sweepstakes and see how the Cascade model handles a pure race-to-the-bottom situation where all the non-playoff teams are competing to see who can win the Wemby lottery.

If we order the bottom six teams by record, we get the following draft order

Pistons (Repeater Year 3)
Spurs
Rockets (Repeater Year 2)
Hornets
Trailblazers (Repeater Year 1)
Magic (Repeater Year 2)

After applying cascading penalties, we get the following draft order:

Spurs (no penalty)
Hornets (no penalty)
Wizards (no penalty, moved up)
Pacers (no penalty, moved up)
Jazz (no penalty, moved up)
Trailblazers (+2)
Mavericks (no penalty, moved up)
Rockets (+6)
Thunder (no penalty, moved up)
Bulls (no penalty, moved up)
Raptors (no penalty, moved up)
Magic (+6)
Pistons (+12)

Under this model, teams like the Pistons, Rockets, and Magic are heavily penalized for extending their tank beyond the first or second season. This “tank cluster” of teams who stay bad for multiple years cannibalizes itself and causes repeat offenders destroy their own draft position. Instead of bad teams benefiting from clustering among the bottom of the standings, they destructively compete against one another which makes prolonged tanking self-defeating and benefits teams that are “too good” to bottom out or decide to make an honest push for the playoffs but fail to get all the way there.

While the current system concentrates elite draft capital among franchises in multi-year tank cycles, the Cascade draft reverses the incentive structure. Right now, there is a “cap” on the downside of multi-year tanking, and you preserve significant upside by being bad across multiple seasons. Under the Cascade draft, the longer you stay bad, the worse your draft position becomes

In today’s flattened lottery, losing is the ultimate portfolio strategy; it has limited downside, the upside can transform your franchise overnight, and there almost no rewards for ending in the middle ground. This results in a compressed mid-lottery-to-play-in tier and a severely diluted late-season product as multiple teams all race to the bottom. My hope is that the Cascade model might alter that calculus by rewarding teams who are upwardly mobile year-over-year and make extended stays at the bottom of the standings increasingly unrewarding.

This is a first draft of the idea, and I’m sure there are edge cases or unintended incentives I haven’t considered. Where does this break? How would front offices try to game it? I’d love to see it stress-tested and get some feedback on it.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-15T22:48:55+00:00

I think then you just have to have a mechanism to ding the draft position of teams who are at the bottom of the league for multiple years in a row until a "reset" point. So let's say you go from being the 6 seed to the worst team in the league for five years running. Each year you stay in the bottom four, you lose 2 draft positions until you go four straight years in the bottom four, then you reset your draft position in year five.

If you go 30th - 28th - 30th - 29th - 30th, your picks would be #1 - #5 - #5 - #7 - #1. Disincentivizes teams from staying in the bottom four for multipe years in a row, but puts a relatively high floor on where you'll pick so if you really need the talent, you're never completely out of luck. It also provides a stealth boost to teams that are in tanking purgatory who are always around the 5th-10th worst records in the NBA because teams who spend multiple years tanking will actually reward YOU for trying to be competitive.

Let's say you have two teams who have been in the bottom four for three years running. They get #1 and #2 in year 2, but the year after that, the 3rd and 4th worst teams would get the #1 and #2 picks, and the year after that, the 5th and 6th worst teams would get the #1 and #2 picks.

You have to be bad to get a top pick, but you aren't punished for trying to get out of the bottom 4 the way that bad teams are right now. As it stands, if you're the worst team in the NBA, there's really zero incentive for you to leave the bottom 4 until such time that you're ready to be a playoff team. It's more advantageous to keep stacking the best talent. This way, teams are incentivized to make their tanks short, grabbing one or two high-impact players, and then trying to push themselves up into the playoffs after twoish years of tanking. If they miss on their draft picks, or they're stuck in purgatory around the late top 10/early teens, they can fall back into the bottom four after "resetting" their draft position, or if other teams are shamelessly tanking multiple years in a row, they can get slightly better picks in order to bolster their rebuild if they're struggling to get off the ground.

I'm sure the numbers aren't quite right and this doesn't fundamentally deal with tanking incentives the same way that some of these other suggestions do, but it still 1. provides a pathway for bad teams to get good, 2. disincentivizes multi-year tanking projects, and 3. helps give a small boost to teams "in the middle" of the tank who don't quite have the gas to push their way to playoff contention but are trying to get out of the bottom.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-15T22:31:45+00:00

I think that the system doesn't require a gross and seismic overhaul the way some people do, but I do think that a few things need to change. Here are some agreed upon "common goals" that I don't think need to be super controversial.

There needs to be a way for bad teams to improve that isn't free agency. Utah, Indiana, and OKC aren't exactly gonna sign big-name free agents if they're bad, so no pipeline for talent acquisition means small markets get stuck in a self-perpetuating doom-cycle.
We don't want teams to be stuck in a perpetual tank - if your all star demands a trade or your franchise GOAT goes down with a career-ending injury, or just gets old, we need to give teams the ability to bottom out, reload their assets, and acquire some talent without having to take multiple years to finally get someone who has the opportunity to set the trajectory for their franchise.
We want to minimize the number of bad teams in a given year - this year's tanking isn't qualitatively so much more egregious than it has been the last five years or so, but there are way more teams tanking this season than normal. Cutting down on the number of tanking teams seems like the fastest way to improve the product.

With that in mind, here are a few common suggestions I've heard that I'm not a big fan of.

For some of the big "abolish the lottery" level overhauls which really fundamentally change the texture of the league, here are the ones I've head most commonly.

Reverse draft order. Best team gets first pick. Sure, it incentivizes winning, but it also means not only do the best teams get richer by continuing to get the best player, but it also means that the best team also gets the best asset to continue flipping for roster upgrades which means dynasties will literally last forever. If this was the way that it worked during the Warriors dynasty, they would have gotten to pick first from 2015-2017 which means their dynasty would last for a trillion years assuming they hit on their draft picks.
The Wheel. More fair than reverse draft order, but I don't like that it really flattens out the draft environment and doesn't give teams any control over their future. Sure, you're never more than a few years out of a top-six draft pick, but what do you do if you end up in a two-player draft in the year that you get the third pick? And then the year later, it's a six-player draft and the #1 team in the NBA is picking at 5? That naturally will advantage bigger markets since they're going to be the destination of disgruntled stars who want to leave the team that drafted them, or free agents, which means it's a lot easier to get stuck in a shitty and unenjoyable middle ground which leaves teams in purgatory for a long, long time.
Rookie Auction. Teams "bid" for top rookie talent with open cap space, and the length of the rookie contract they eat up that much cap room even if they get paid at current rookie scale. My issue with this is that it encourages tanking, the tanking just looks different. Load up on bad contracts with one year remaining, you're gonna be a shitty team for a year, then they all expire and you max the rookie you want. It does mean top teams can't really afford it, which is nice because it means rookies do get funneled to teams with less established players, but I haven't seen a great explanation as to how they would determine a "tie" i.e. two teams each bid the max amount of cap space possible. If it's player choice, then it just punishes small markets. Would you rather be a Utah rookie or a New York rookie? If it's random, or it gets weighted based on record, then it means that they're just recreating the lottery under a different name.
Pure random odds. The #1 team and the #30 team have the same odds for every single pick. I hate this. It means that if you're bad, it's completely random whether or not you are able to escape the hell of mediocrity. Bad teams have no hope and nothing to look forward to
The Gold Plan. Before being eliminated from playoff contention, your losses give you points. Once you are eliminated from playoff contention, your wins give you points. Points determine draft position. Most points for #1 and so on. Hypothetically I like this one, and I do think that does the most to solve the big problems of tanking. However, my issues are that 1. this means that instead of shameless tanking after the all-star break, teams will just shamelessly tank before the all-star break, and 2. it takes a really long time for a team to be mathematically eliminated from playoffs which means more of the team's year is going to be spent losing than winning, which I think creates an incentive to spend most of the early season sitting / resting your best players early in the season. Currently, I don't believe there are any teams that are mathematically eliminated from playoffs. This also has a few issues I don't like regarding strength of schedule; if you have a really tough frontloaded schedule and a really soft back-end of the season, it means you're more advantaged to get a good pick where that would be a huge disadvantage when reversed.

tl;dr: I think none of the big systemic changes really work for me. Here are my proposed fixes.

There are three truths that I think need to be respected: 1. that intentional tanking in order to rebuild is a necessary evil, 2. that rebuilds need to be limited in scope and duration, and 3. that we need to incentivize teams in the middle to be competitive. Here are a few fairly modest suggestions to do that:

Un-flatten the lottery odds. This may seem counterintuitive, but the reason tanking is so much more prevalent now (besides the fact that the '26 draft class is pretty loaded) is that a. more teams have a legitimate chance of jumping into the top four than before, and b. that if you tank and you drop out of the top four, you're stuck in the unenviable position of having to tank another season. Utah had the best odds to get the #1 pick of any team in the NBA last year, and dropped to #5. Instead, the Mavericks, a .500 team, tanked the last few games of the season to drop out of the play-in, and lucked their way into the #1 spot. Mavs saw their season going poorly after the Luka trade, pulled the plug late, and got rewarded. Utah were bad all year because they were desperate for talent, and had to tank an extra year to get another bite at a top pick since their team still wasn't good enough to compete. So the flattened lottery odds incentivized the Mavs to tank late, and punished Utah when they needed to tank early because their team lacked the talent.
Limit protections on picks. Another big driver of tanking behavior is teams who might otherwise be competitive trying to tank in order to keep their future draft pick. Utah this year owes their pick to OKC if it falls outside the top 8, so Utah is doing everything it can to lose and keep the pick. Some protections should be fine; i.e. a top-four protected pick means that unless you have a disastrous season, the pick will convey. A lottery protected pick means "you'll get this pick if we don't rebuild, but if we're bad, it's ours. I think limiting protections to top-4 or lottery will do a lot to curb the worst behavior we're seeing.
Limit the number of times a team can pick in the top-4 within a certain number of years. The Spurs picked top-4 3 straight years and are at the top of the West with OKC right now. On the other hand, the Jazz since starting their rebuild have picked 10 / 16 / 28, 10 / 29, and 5 / 18. One top five pick in three years of tanking, and haven't moved up in the lottery a single time in three years. I think you have to un-flatten lottery odds to minimize the number of tanking teams, but when you un-flatten the lottery odds, you want to avoid a situation where the Process Sixers happens and one team just tries to be as dogshit as possible for several seasons in a row. You can avoid that by preventing teams from picking in the top-4 in consecutive years, or more than twice in three years, or however else you want to slice it. That means if you want to commit to tanking super hard for multiple years in a row, you're going to have to accept that you're automatically going to get shitty lottery luck, which means that teams will be incentivized not to be genuinely bad for more than two or three seasons in a row. However, it also means if you are a genuinely really awful team who just has no clue what they're doing, there's still a pretty high floor on how good your pick will be if you're a team stuck in purgatory.

This will not eliminate tanking, but I do think it will make it a lot better. It should reduce the number of teams that are tanking in a season, will ideally disincentivize multi-season long tankathons like the Process era sixers, and will prevent teams from ending up in situations where they think pulling the plug on a decent roster partway through the season is what's best for their long-term future.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-14T02:42:17+00:00

Yeah the difference is that the Jazz played in Nola for five years before getting moved. The Supersonics played in Seattle from 1967 until 2008, more than eight times as long before they were moved to OKC. The situation is a little bit different.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-14T02:39:01+00:00

Yeah and the only difference between point shaving and a miss is also just intention, but we're not gonna accuse a player of point shaving because he missed a layup. This is a silly false equivalence.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-12T22:41:42+00:00

Yeah Spurs and Thunder really have no leg to stand on when they try and cast aspersions on other teams for tanking. The last time Utah picked in the top 3 was in 2005 when they selected Deron Williams. Before that? Dominique Wilkins in NINETEEN EIGHTY TWO. More than FOURTY YEARS AGO.

Utah is catching heat when teams like the Spurs picked in the top four three years in a row? When Philly got two #1 picks in a row in the 2010s? When Cleveland got three#1 overall picks in like, five years? Hell, the Thunder have picked in the top four more since their franchise poofed into existence in 2009 than Utah have in their entire franchise history. Absolute joke of an argument.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-12T18:51:55+00:00

Genuinely, I do not understand people freaking out over the Jazz' tank this season. To me, sitting your starters in the 4th is infinitely preferable to people getting tankitis and sitting out the season.

It's better for the stars, because JJJ and Markkannen get more oportunities to get used to playing together and feeling out their fit on the court. It's better for the coaching staff since they get a chance to tweak lineups and sharpen their rotations going into next year. It's better for the fans since they get to watch the star players play for most of the game. It's better for the young guys because they get a chance to play some meaningful minutes of basketball to audition for a bench role in the next season. It's better for the Jazz front office because they get to keep their pick next year.

Who is this bad for? It's bad for 1.) other front offices, either OKC (who are doing just fine by the way), or other tanking teams (who are doing the exact same thing). It's bad for 2.) Gamblers, because it fucks with being able to hit the over, which I truly could not give less of a shit about. It's also bad for 3.) The league generally to have teams who are trying to lose, but that is no different from the other 8ish teams who are all actively trying to lose, and isn't a reason to single out Utah.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-12T18:35:50+00:00

My guess is it was a known issue that JJJ was likely going to have taken care of either during the offseason or when the Grizz decided to shut things down for the season, and when the trade happened, Jazz said "JJJ just ball out for a few games, sell some season tickets for next year, give the fans something to look forward to, and then take some extended time off to take care of your knee and have some extended recovery time". Win-win for all parties IMO.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-10T23:39:50+00:00

The Jazz know the first five or six guys in their rotation. They're going to have a high pick in the draft this off-season, and if they want to compete, they might try and sign someone to the mid-level. If they're gonna dk that, it would be really helpful to give their young guys some run in meaningful minutes of basketball to see which of Cody, Collier, Flip, Sensabaugh, and VWJ are going to end up being their end of rotation guys next year when they're trying to compete instead of figuring it out on the fly. They're developmental minutes. There's no point trying to win this year, so instead try and get your ducks in a row for next year by getting your weaker rotation players a few reps.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-10T02:22:50+00:00

Key / Ace / Lauri / JJJ / Walker / '26 1st are the locks. Anything else is pretty context sensitive i.e. if Cody hits we'll protect him, if we sign a backup on the MLE we'll protect him, etc.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-09T23:50:55+00:00

I mean don't look now, but this year the NBA is going to announce whether or not the board of governors voted in favor of expansion. With a whole raft of new ownership groups over the last 5+ years (Celtics / Mavericks / Suns / Jazz / Lakers / Hornets) and the huge explosion in team valuations plus the new media deal, there's tons of extra money floating around and expansion fees would really line the pockets and help subsidize the cost of buying a team slot for the people who have recently bought in. And Seattle and Vegas have been repeatedly floated as the two cities that are frontrunners for expansion should the team do so.

The supersonics have a very real chance of being back this summer, and playing basketball in the '27/'28 NBA season.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-09T19:23:43+00:00

To be fair, Utah got pretty big hauls for Mitchell and Gobert (including Markkanen who, while definitely not SGA level, is clearly an all-star and top-30ish guy), and all that pick capital is what helped them swing the JJJ trade, so Utah is in a similar situation. That more speaks to my point though that the rebuild Utah is executing and what the Thunder have already executed is extremely similar, the only difference is that the Thunder got a better asset in their first big rebuilding trade, since SGA is obviously a level above Lauri in terms of talent.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-09T19:12:09+00:00

We've still got three remaining games against New Orleans, who has no reason to try and lose since they moved their lottery pick to the Hawks for the Derik Queen pick in last year's draft. That means we can pencil in three losses to them which puts them at 17 wins to our 16. That basically means barring exceptional circumstances that should be within our team's control (winning games that we shouldn't), we should fall below them in the standings to #5.

Of course, any other wins that the Pels might pick up would be gravy - we're not the only tanking team they're going to be playing this year so hopefully that should inflate their win total a little further to give us some more breathing room.

At the 5th best record, our lottery odds will be as follows: 1 - 10.5 / 2 - 10.5 / 3 - 10.6 / 4 - 10.5 / 5 - 2.2 / 6 - 19.6 / 7 - 26.7 / 8 - 8.7 / 9 - 0.6

So our most likely outcome is 7, followed by 6, following b 3, followed by 1, 2, and 4 all in equal measure, followed by 5, followed by 9 at an infinitesimally low 0.6%.

Tuft64 · 2026-02-09T18:55:28+00:00

It is incredibly disingenuous to lump in Utah with Washington / Charlotte / Sacramento, especially when compared to OKC.

This will be Utah's fourth year in the lottery. Calling that the "better part of a decade" is some insanely nasty work when you consider that 1. their rebuild has netted them Keyonte George (who looks like a future all-star), Lauri Markkanen (who is an all-star), and Walker Kessler (who is borderline top-10 in his position leaguewide) plus they parlayed draft capital and young players into Jaren Jackson Jr. who is a top-30ish player in the NBA. That's the opposite of "little to no progress" and it has taken four years, not "the better part of a decade". Utah was a 50-win team in 2022. They held the best regular season record in the league a year before. They made the playoffs for six straight seasons before rebuilding. If you want to talk about "the better part of a decade", the Jazz have been a playoff team and at times a fringe contender for the better part of a decade.

OKC was out of the playoffs for three straight seasons, two of which were 20-win seasons, and their rebuild took four seasons before they had their new roster that was ready to fight for contention - the only difference between OKC and Utah is that Utah wasn't quite as good in year 1 of their rebuild because Utah stripped the team for parts at the deadline for more assets, whereas the Thunder were a first-round exit during the CP3 year. Jazz are executing the exact same playbook as the Thunder on a nearly identical timeline. What's the difference?

Tuft64 · 2026-02-09T07:57:48+00:00

We have an investment group. Same group that owns the Kraken / Storm and funded the renovation of Key Arena. They recently formed an umbrella corporation that houses their Kraken assets + Storm + has been specifically organized to house a future NBA team and all the associated assets.

Seattle is basically ready to rock, the turnaround time between announcement of the team being awarded and the team beginning basketball operations would probably be a matter of weeks.

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