NBA draft 2012

Oh nostalgia. I would like to know how you were watching these games on TV every freaking night in the 80's.

 

Changing topics, is this Beal kid any good?

 

Well, it is a better topic than the Pacers' draft.

 

Nonsense. Miles Pumlee is a beast.

 

He went to Duke! He's gotta be good!

 

93Devil,

If you really want to see only the best players, you don't necessarily want them to stay in school.

You want the league to contract about six teams.

 

How do you explain James scoring his team's final 25 points in a playoff OT victory against the Pistons? Would seem to be 180 degrees from playing hot potato with the ball.

Last year? Pretty simple, really. There was still some confusion about roles. James was the better player but was the newcomer. Wade was the established player, the team's go-to player at crunch time for 7 years, but was showing some age.

This year Wade went to him and said, point-blank, "We need you to carry this team."

He probably should have said it last year. Somebody should have said it last year. But they didn't, and the end of games tended to be quite untidy as a result.

But it had NOTHING to do with what James should or should not have been told by a coach in high school or college.

 

This.

 

I covered him last year at Florida, and he's very good. Probably one of the safest picks in the draft. Started off the season slowly because he seemed to be deferring to his teammates, but he came on strongly at the end of the year. He didn't shoot anywhere near his high school percentages in college, but he was shooting around 46 percent from three in the postseason, which is what everyone expected when he signed with Florida.

More importantly, he's got pretty good size for an NBA two, and he plays bigger than that size. He was Florida's leading rebounder from the small forward spot. He's a good defender, has great hands and is more explosive than he looks.

If you ask me, he'll be an All-Star at some point in his career. He has the potential to make it there multiple times, too.

 

I agree with 93Devil on the whole early-entry thing. It has definitely hurt college basketball in the sense that you have very few returning stars to market a program or the sport around. It's getting to be like minor league baseball, where there is wholesale roster turnover every year.

I enjoyed basketball much more in the 1980s when you could watch a Patrick Ewing or Akeem Olajuwon or Michael Jordan for several years, then follow their progress from college to the pro ranks. And they were much more NBA-ready when they arrived.

As for players like Sullinger who's draft stock may have slipped, well why not come back for another year in college and try to improve that status? It's like selling stock when its value has dropped. If you believe it can bounce back, wait a little while. The draft is always going to be there next year.

 

How many juniors were drafted in the top ten this year?

 

Umm, because it doesn't actually work that way. The whole notion of "staying in school to improve your draft stock" has been proven to be a complete farce in recent years--with the kids who try it seeing their stock drop with the extra year more often than rise.

Contrary to myth, pro scouts aren't looking for older more experienced players who've been through the wars. Instead, they're enamored by the younger bouncy bodies who've never yet been injured nor had their weaknesses exposed yet. Simply being a year older detracts from a player's draft stock, because scouts interpret an older player as having less "upside" potential for improvement. And if you stay until a year older without sufficiently improving, that can have a disastrous effect on a kid's stock. And if you stay until a year older and also get injured? Well, fuck ...you just screwed yourself, kid.

Telling Sullinger to stay a third year is the dumbest advice you could give him.