Schadenfreude wrote:Matty wrote:
Replace Bargnani with Aldridge at the C and you probably could have had a good future there.
I'm not suggesting Bargnani was a bust, but more often than not you expect the No.1 pick to pan out into a perennial All-star at the very least. Unfortunately we're the Toronto Raptors, nothing has gone smoothly in our brief history.
Naturally. But the argument then as now was that we were very young, and consequently the likes of Bargnani would become very good as a matter of course (this argument continued until he was 27, for what it's worth). Having young players is a good thing, undoubtedly. But not all young players will progress significantly...DeRozan at 27 may be very similar to DeRozan at 24, as might Patterson, etc. Amir and Lowry, with eight and seven years' experience respectively, are what they are. There's little reason to project that the group as a whole is on some steep upward progression that'll take the team from the middle of the pack to contender status.
My point though is that if we drafted the right guy, the one that was touted most as the No.1 pick in the 06 draft, we would not be talking about the rest of the players and their progress. The real core that we were going to build around was always going to be Bosh and the No.1 pick player. Aldridge's career speaks for itself, I don't need to lay it out for you. He was a star in the making ever since his sophomore year. You don't think he could have panned out in Toronto as the same solid player he is today? I mean he's been through some tough times in Portland with the injuries of Oden/Roy and what not, but he was always a consistent player throughout it.
The past is the past and I've accepted what happened but having Aldridge on our roster would have changed alot. His impact would have been felt unlike the one we ended up picking.
As for this current group. JV and Ross are the only players that can improve dramatically and at this point I wanna see what a playoff run will do to their game.
