Chaos Revenant wrote:The thing is, WHY does he suck?
He has NBA skills. Great p&r D. Energy player coming in. Plus athleticism. Good feel for the game and basketball IQ. And his shot was not good, but nowhere near broken.
I think it's less a bad pick and more a development failure - Ves should be a 15-20 mpg hustle player who plays excellent weakside and P&R defense and makes good passes and does the "little things." Instead he's totally useless.
Nivek was going to dig into this on the blog and I think he got sidetracked with other stuff/real life. It's fun for people to pile on Vesely and simply label him a bust that could never play, but that's not an accurate account of what has actually happened. Vesely did improve over the course of last season. Over the final 19 games of the season he averaged about 26 mpg, 8 pts, almost 7 boards, around a steal, a block and turnover. He shot 56% from the field and 62% from the line. He started the final 15 games of the year and we were 8-7 in those games. We were a very effective team defensively a -- granted, against weak overall competition -- and I recall believing Vesely to be very intuitive and disruptive defensively.
I remind everyone of this not to defend the pick or say Vesely is a good player. But his case is a curious one, because (a) he ended the season on an upward trajectory (b) had a full offseason and training camp with no lockout and (c) has been shockingly bad.
Whatever happened last offseason clearly didn't work. Vesely seemingly added no skills and his loss of confidence is something I've only seen from baseball players (Steve Sax, Mackey Sasser, Ankiel, etc) and golfers. The Wizards have to figure out a way to get Vesely back on the right track. Even if his future is elsewhere, everyone benefits from him rebuilding a bit of value. I would imagine they are going to micro-manage his summer work and push for much of it to be here. Vesely of last spring looked like he was on his way to becoming a useful NBA player, even if he'd never live up to where he was drafted. Right now he's just lost. I feel for the kid. It can't be fun.