closg00 wrote:1. Washington Wizards: G Isaiah Collier
The college basketball season is underway and in a draft class that is wide open, a few players are making strong statements early on. USC freshman guard Isaiah Collier is one of the most powerful guards with the ball in his hands and has made a compelling case for the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft in June with how well he's played early in the season.
https://sports.yahoo.com/2024-nba-mock-draft-2-isaiah-collier-alex-sarr-early-leaders-for-no-1-spot-184157823.htmlPerhaps this draft will not be as dreadful as-is the current conventional wisdom
I think it will be, for the most part. I think the reason it will be is pretty simple: This is the draft people have to write about, and they aren't going to spend the next year writing about how much the prospects suck. Like always, they'll begin to try and shine this ----, and pretend there are players with the potential to become really good because it's too depressing and uninteresting to write about the limitations of players, than to speculate on the high end (if unlikely) potential ceilings.
So from that perspective, I'm typically convinced that most "reevaluation" articles that try to raise people's expectations are basically a form of marketing "draft journalism" because it isn't fun to write about drafts from an exclusively negative perspective. That's why people speculated about the upside of guys in '13 and '20, and why they will again this year.
The one caveat I'll provide is this: we have a season in front of us, and freshman prospects can evolve a great deal for good and for bad jumping from high school players to college players (or pro's in Europe/Australia etc). So there is the hope that some of these guys end up being just flat out better than expected? That the challenge in '23-'24 helps them to lift their game and their ceiling. That's always possible.
But I do think that's typically related to an entire class cohort, but on an individual level it's more miss than hit, and so the chances are that for the most part, these surprises won't be relevant to us. More than likely, there are about 3-6 players that matter to us, maybe as many as 8, for our first, and a bunch of them are going to have to produce outlier seasons over expectations for that to be relevant. It can happen, but generally when the NBA says ahead of time, they aren't super high on a draft, they're right. For the class anyone, but as '13 proved, sometimes there's hidden gems in there, it could happen. I just wouldn't get your hopes up beyond just hoping we hit on whomever we draft unlike most picks in recent years.
