As for timelines, it's not an either/or thing. We can try to be good now and develop our young players as we draft them. Zion is the only thing untouchable right now. It all depends on the offer/player. We don't have room for a max slot anyways, but if we did and it was some dream world Kawhi said he wanted to play with Zion in NO, you do that. You don't say "oh gosh kawhi, zion will be 19-23 for this deal of yours and then when he is 24 your contract will be done and you will be coming out of your prime at 33 so we will pass".....
furthermore if we had a max slot and could get that type of player, we wouldn't have to give up anything. The problem is we don't have a max slot and we wouldn't attract a Kawhi(or even a kyrie) anyways. But it's not like we would pass on that sort of talent right now if we did/could.
We have to accept the reality that we are not thought of as a desirable franchise to star for. Whether that's the franchise rep, the city, or a little bit of both isn't important. It just means we have to work harder, get more lucky(which we did recently bigtime!) and have less room for error than the Lakers of the world.
Think about it- since the mid 70s except for a maybe 5/6 year period(when Kobe had fallen off and before Lebron came) and a couple years in the early 90s the Lakers have ALWAYS had at least one megastar top 4 player in the nba. From prime kareem to prime Magic to orime Shaq to prime Kobe and now Lebron for a year to prime AD.....over a 45 year period they have had what...7-8 years where they haven't had a league defining player. Sometimes two. And top 4 may be not specific enough...usually top 2/3. Whether it be drafting, trade, FA, or a forced/leveraged trade(Kareem, AD) the Lakers get these sorts of players. We don't. These players aren't going to come to us in FA like shaq did. These players aren't going to come to us in forced/leveraged trades like Kareem and AD did(if anything as we've seen they'll leave us)….so given these limitations, we *have* to do it in the draft if we want a player like this and then with development. Fortunately we struck gold and got Zion, now it's a matter of two things:
-developing him into a superstar
-if that happens, putting the pieces and framework around him so that when he does emerge into a superstar we won't lose him to the Lakers of the world like we did with LA. or the Bucks did with kareem.
because right now the lakers forum is full of guys giggling over how good zion will look in purple and gold in a few to 6/7 years.