First of all, rebuilding a franchise is in no way any responsibility of a coach. Frank should not be worried about contracts at all. It is his job to work with the team he gets from Dumars, and work towards the best possible result with the best playing combination of players. If Macklin doesn´t beat out Maxiell, Wallace, Jerebko and Monroe in practice, he should not be awarded minutes by Frank.

Now, Dumars, that´s a whole other story. He might like to see more minutes for Macklin, to see his trade value go up. But he should have thought of that before. If he would have wanted Frank to play Macklin more, he should have assembled a team where Macklin would have been good enough to crack the rotation. That would have meant putting a worse team together than we have now. That is basically what Portland did: trade away your proven veterans. Yes, they did it to acquire young players and picks, but it also automatically gives those young players a chance to prove themselves in real games. All of there competition at their spots has been traded away.

Secondly, I don’t get how we somehow have to evaluate a player by playing them in games. Do you guys really think Frank and Dumars somehow can’t evaluate Macklin, simply because he only playedf 79 NBA minutes? What about the NBA competition in practice? Monroe and Maxiell are currently both NBA starting big men, and on a bad NBA team I might add. If Macklin can’t beat them out consistently in PRACTICE, why would he be able to beat out other PF’s en C’s in actual GAMES? Frank sees him everyday, I think he will be able to evaluate Macklin just fine.
I read people saying: look at Pop. He let’s his young players finish this or that game, completely on their own! He is a great player developer, hence, we should play our young players too. But do we know what Pops players showed him in practice? Why does he trust those guys? They must have earned it somehow, and from what I know about Pop, it’s not necessarily easy to gain his trust. They must have earned it in PRACTICE, after which they have affirmed that trust in the game and Pop decides they deserve to finish it. The fact that Pop plays his young players a lot, has a lot more to do with great drafting and signing by Buford. HE (along with his front office) deserves credit for giving Pop great young players, who live up to their potential to beat out proven starters.

And lastly, who says players need to play in NBA games to develop? Sure, IF they get there, they will ultimately develop while playing in NBA games. But first they have to develop to the point where they deserve minutes in an actual game to begin with.
People say: Look at Afflalo. We hardly played him, trade him away and once he gets minutes, he develops into a decent rotation player. Not true. It completely disregards his development in Detroit. It’s precisely because of his development in Detroit that he was able to earn Karl’s trust in practice, meriting his eventual rotation spot. Same for Johnson in Toronto. (By the way, it’s on Dumars that he trades them away right when they have developed into potential rotation players. That’s where the problem was, not with them supposedly not developing, because they weren’t playing much)

So basically, we’re in this mess because Dumars didn’t want to really rebuild after he had all the capspace from Iversons contract getting off the books. He attempted to continue the run (or pick it back up if you will) by adding new veterans, BG and CV. He envisioned them starting for another good Piston team. It didn’t work out, obviously. I think this year he did ok. Not great, but ok. Look at it this way: 3 out of 5 starters are young, potential building blocks for the future. Now, the second unit, I think, is too veteran heavy. I would have liked to not have Wilkins, so Frank would be forced to play Daye (now that that Wilkins IS there, Frank has to play him if he outplays Daye in practice). And of course, I would have liked to see another young player with potential in stead of either BG or CV (or both :P), but hey, I can understand it was hard to move them for Dumars.
That way we would have had 5 or 6 out of 9 rotation players be young potential building blocks for the future.

So I back Frank 100% on this one: it is Dumars that should have given him a different team to be able to rebuild. Dumars has proven to be a great GM when it comes to making a mediocre team better, through gutsy trades and signings (Billups, Hamilton, Rasheed). He might do a great job with ateam like the Hawks. It’s up to him now to show that he can also rebuild, or build from scratch. I hope can do it (he did good draft wise, so far).

It comforts me knowing that Gores apparently has faith in Dumars. Gores seems a shrewd business man, who isn’t afraid to shake things up and would have no problem eliminating elements that stall development of his enterprises. Yet he stuck wit Dumars. He must believe Dumars can do it.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. It’s 2 AM in the Netherlands now, time for bed.

Let’s say we play Macklin some minutes towards the season’s end and he plays superbly.  As a restricted Free Agent, we may have just upped his value by giving him a chance to shine in limited minutes. 

I agree that Macklin should play some, but precisely what you just said was a big part of John Kuester losing credibility with players. He changed and shook up lineups often because the team wasn’t winning, and that helped erode players’ trust in him and it also, I think, made them believe the coach was blaming certain individuals who were being benched for the losing results.

Like I said, I want Macklin to get some meaningful minutes, but I also think putting guys in roles and keeping them in those roles if they perform reasonably well (and Maxiell/Monroe/Jerebko/Wallace all have) has been a big part of him earning some trust that was lost during the Kuester era.

It doesn’t make Frank lose any credibility with the players by telling them we’re struggling are going to try something new.

I get not taking minutes from Jerebko because he has a future here, and Wallace deserves to play his last few weeks of his career, but Maxiell isn’t owed anything as far as I’m concerned. And he might opt out and leave us in FA with nothing. So are we going to play him over the young guy who we may need to resign as his replacement, and risk losing both?

Macklin’s numbers in the D-League may be just against D-League competition, but does anyone think Maxiell would or could avg 16 pts and 17 rebs down there? I don’t. I think Max would just try to get by doing as little as possible until he’s called back up. THAT is why Macklin deserves to play over Maxiell.

With backup SF always up for grabs too, if Frank wanted he could play JJ at SF, and just give Macklin his minutes at backup PF.

There are ways Macklin can get in the rotation. Frank seems to have a hidden agenda on this one for some reason.