Per your request I looked at this thread but I need some more information to go on here. First, what are the owner's ratings. Is he super impatient or something?
He has average ratings for desire to win and patience (yellow). And higher (light green) for desire superstars and spending.
Second you said that two of the ownership demands were a deep playoff run and a 4 star player and the ownership call conversation takes place prior to the new year activities beginning so at that point in time you failed on both of those goals. You didn't mention the exact player and coach budgets but when you fired the coaches didn't it say you would be responsible for a certain portion of the contract and then on top of that you had to hire an entire staff so I would have to think you were over the staff budget after all that. If the contracts matched the 19-20 start OKC would have been at over $130 million and you added Faried and Melo so that's a few million more...was your team salary budget really more than $135 million? It would have seemed like you would have been over the player salary budget as well potentially making you 0/4 on ownership demands in year one.
This sounds right. I probably shouldn't have fired Donovan right away and let that play out. That's how I messed up the staff budget I think. And yes I was over the player budget, hadn't thought about that too much. I understand being docked for not making the playoff run which is why I was willing to take on so much bad salary. Makes sense ownership would be mad about that.
The point of challenge mode is meeting the demands put in front of you today. If you don't have a 4 star player then you don't have a 4 star player. If he wants to win then you shouldn't trade Gallinari and SGA for a bunch of future firsts. That owner did not want "The Process" - he wanted to win. Your moves might make OKC better 5 years down the road but that was not his timeline. His timeline was now and you didn't meet his demands - in fact you went from 52 wins to 35 and appear to be doing things to rebuild which is not what ownership asked for. Hope that explanation makes sense.
I think the key for me here is if I had provided ownership with their 4 star player, I still messed up on 3/4.
The staff budget is very low of course it seems for every team, but I can see where firing an entire coaching staff and not meeting expectations anyway is considered a failure.
I also may have screwed up by promising an average season instead of a rebuilding one, when average was my absolute best case scenario and that got me stuck with the expectation of making the playoffs. Maybe they would have settled for a medicore team if I had promised worse.