Dumbass says marquee players were never available as if the Hornets didn't grab Muggsy Bogues and Dell Curry in the expansion draft.
Kelly Tripucka, Reggie Theus, Scott Skiles, Oliver Miller, B.J. Armstrong, Greg Anthony, Byron Scott, and Gerald Wilkens were all grabbed during expansion drafts too.
And we're talking about how their stats were accumulated, you don't just accumulate stats against "marquee players". There were three straight two-team expansions in that era ('88, '89, and '95). Every single time that happened, you got:
* Every team plays 4-8 games racking up #'s against shytty expansion teams
* Every opponent loses a role player who may have been a capable defender
* Every opponent gets knocked back two spots in the draft and was able to build less talent
There were ways to avoid losing a player in the expansion draft (like by making a deal with the expansion team), but they always diluted your talent in other ways, like trading away a 1st-round pick for the promise not to take one of your players. In the 1988 expansion draft alone, teams traded away 6 draft picks to the expansion teams in order to protect players.
That happened three times in 7 years. So you've had a constant addition of easy W's on your schedule, every team has lost 3 extra role players in 7 years and sometimes draft picks too, and every team got knocked back about 6 spots in the draft. How can you possibly say that the average talent level can increase under those conditions when you've seriously diluted the talent 3 consecutive times?
breh
