These are all good and true words. As fans we've been waiting for next since 2007, but the team itself hasn't; it's brand new and still evolving. I can wait. I've waited much longer for much more important things; waiting for Lillard and company to win it all is doable.
We are not going to compete with Warriors (or Cavaliers) in the short term. The sooner we (and a lot of other teams) realize this, the better. The time we should be looking at is 3-5 years from now, and build for that period. CJ and Lillard will be basically vets then but when you look at how Spurs stars have aged, they can still be good then. Nurkic will be well into his prime. It's important to get young talent we can develop further, getting average players like Trevor Booker (one of many suggestions) now will help us get 3-5 more wins during regular season and that's it. It should not be the goal.
Dame and Cj will be 29 and 28 in three years, which is perfect and basically right in their prime. Nurkic will be 26, which is entering his prime; Vonleh will be 25, and Hark will be 27... assuming they gel and improve together (Spurs philosophy again), we'd be really well setup in 3-5 years.
I think that dame cj nurk are the conerstones, and turner hark crabbe are worth building with everyone else can get whatever'd in order to bring in a couple guys who slot in between those two categories. its not impossible to think that could be a contender.
What about a Harkless (asset) and Turner (bad contract) package?? Do you think we'd be able to move that for free? Could we expect anything back?
We can draft a Crabbe in Ferguson, and have Napier as our 3rd ball handler without much drop-off. That saves us over $30M. I don't think they're worth building around.
Sustained run?? I don't care about that. One championship after a 40-year drought would make me deliriously happy.
The Pippen team was built to try to get that one championship but didn't pull it off. By sustained run I mean get to at least WCF's on a yearly basis with at least one championship thrown in.