Ell Curry wrote:Re: Drummond
He's way more likely to be Deandre Jordan than Blake Griffin. I saw him play about a month ago at MSG. He moves well and has good size and co-ordination, but he didn't seem to know how to get open or seal off his man to catch the ball in the post. On D, he made some decent weak side rotations, but the other team (WVU) ended up with 29 offensive rebounds. He's just not aggressive enough, on either end. I think his stats show this. It doesn't mean he can't fix that problem (see Monroe, Greg), but it's a massive concern.
Re: Lamb
Obviously, I got to see him live too. His arms go past his knees and he moves fluidly and has nice form on his jump shot. I think he'll get his shot off fairly easily in the pros and considering he hit 60% on his 2pt FG's this year and showed he can play as a glue guy on a winning team last year while improving from a freshman to a sophomore, I'd have him ahead of Barnes. Not sure he has the handle to be a truly great player, but I think he could be a really nice 2nd or 3rd best player on a team. A very efficient offensive game, length on D and a good teammate.
Re: Barnes
Never seen him live. He does have the athleticism and shooting to be a really good scorer in the NBA, but his lack of improvement from year 1 to year 2 and his low 2pt FG percentage make me think he just takes too many tough shots to score efficiently. Seems like he might turn out to be the kind of player Danny Granger is this year, which is to say a pretty good one, but nowhere near efficient enough to be the top scorer on a good team and not great at anything else. I was going to throw out Caron Butler as a logical comparison, but Butler put up 20 a game on 49/40/78 as a sophomore. As a pro, in his prime (best 3 years), those numbers dropped to 20 a game on 46/32/87. Barnes put up 17 a game on 44/36/72. Say he's able to improve his FT% to 80 and manages to keep his 3pt% steady even with the longer distance but is a bit less accurate on overall field goal shooting due to facing longer, faster defenders than college 3's, and not having a great PG like Marshall to get him the ball, than we're looking at around 17-18 a game on 42/36/80, without being an impact rebounder, defender or passer. . That's basically what Kleiza give the Raps now at the 3, except he only gets 21 minutes a game. Hard to get excited about that.
On the other hand, he could get drafted 8th, see it as a slap in the face, start playing aggressively and stop taking tough shots, improve his post footwork and develop into a slightly worse Paul Pierce, who dropped to 10th in his draft. Personally, I can't get over the inefficient shooting in his 2nd year. Doing that as a freshman is one thing, but the only improvement in his game seems to have been taking 1.5 less 3's a game, and he should really have been a dominant, efficient scorer this year. Each of Caron Butler, Paul Pierce and Danny Granger (the latter two being the only high scoring SF's in the league who played 2 year of college ball) scored much more efficiently their 2nd season.
Nice summary. Are there any other players you can break down in this way - I would like to read a fresh opinion from an ol' head. I'm sure others would also feel the same.