I'm not arguing that the world hasn't changed. Of course it has. It's entirely appropriate to say that the context the Celtics operate in today is quite different than the one the Lakers operated in then. I'm simply pointing out that removing Kobe's rings probably overly narrows an already too narrow data set. This isn't a reason to include them, just saying that I don't know that the answers here are going to be found by examining past champions, especially if we're going to pick and choose which champions count and which do not because of contextual changes.
Defining tanking is going to be tough, as it means all things to all people. Someone posed the question recently in this thread, but I think the rubber hits the road in terms of what the GM and coach do with the veteran players and rookies. A sure way to lose would be for either or both to mandate either playing underperforming/unmotivated vets or overexposing under developed kids. If they continue to play each and every game to win, and determine playing time largely on merit, then I think they're not "tanking". There are thousands of shades of grey and all kinds of in between around the merits of developing players in there, but overall it amounts to whether they're going to continue to try to put the best team on the floor to win games on a nightly basis. Most of this falls on Ainge, and whether he wants to do some "Major League" style subterfuge mid season to try to somehow artificially generate a lottery pick or a better lottery pick. In my mind, this would be counter productive. I can do nothing but admit that given the choice between a 16 pick and a 10 pick, i'd rather we got the asset that is the 10th pick. But I don't think I'd make that a goal in any way. This is very hard to argue against without creating strawmen, because lots of people would say that we need a top 5 pick, or a top 10 pick, etc, but there's probably very little consensus on what we should be striving for, if anything. I guess I'm coming around to the idea that this is probably way more of a crapshoot than I'd ever want to admit, and the team should just try to win every game they play and let things take care of themselves. Maybe it would be optimal to play to lose an extra dozen games to increase the odds of landing the next great Celtics superstar, but doing so has a host of very difficult to quantify downsides that I personally wouldn't want the team to pursue that strategy. More than anything, if I'm arguing in this thread, i'm arguing against the notion that there is "one way" to build in the NBA. There are flaws to all approaches, and you're going to have to mix skill and a little bit of luck. This isn't a reason to not try or to make it harder on yourself, but there seems to be a prevailing notion (again, a strawman) that the Celtics best path to success is to suck as completely as humanly possible this season. I think there's room for disagreement there. The obvious solution, of course, on a site like this, is to look to data to try to answer this question, but pretty much all of the data is flawed because of all of the special circumstances that surrounds almost all of these superstar moves.
At the end of the day, I'm really, really uninterested in being Cleveland. I think it will be interesting to see if they can lock up Irving this summer. The NBA is evolving toward a bit less movement of FAs, imo, so maybe the draft has to become the model, even if you can't definitively prove that it has been to this point.