Buddy and I were talking about this, specifically LeBron. No doubt he’s a top-30 player. But given his age, we were debating whether or not he’d be a first-round pick in a league-wide redraft. Which then led to a wider conversation about how you would approach team building if all NBA players were made available.
The reason “win now” can work is because 1/2 the teams are out of contention before the season starts.
If all 30 teams draft from scratch right now, the 30 teams would be much more balanced – making “win now” very difficult.
It would be smarter to build for the future.
However, if everyone thought that, the meta would be to draft for win now I suppose. But I expect most owners would be trying for big names now, so I’d still go future.
Yeah it’s an interesting question because the optimal strategy depends on what the other GMs perceive the optimal strategy to be. Which then begs the question: would it be better to pick later (say 10th) so that you can see which way the first 9 picks, vs picking first and having less information to go off of?