Chocolate City Jordanaire wrote:AFM wrote:Athleticism scores at the combine mean absolutely nothing to me. I don't need to wait for a vertical jump test to see whether or not a player is a superb athlete. It should be clear from watching them actually play basketball (which is what they are drafted to do, NOT partake in "agility drills" or whatever Zeller excelled at).
Nick Young had an amazing vertical, I think over 40 inches. Would you know that from watching him play? Did he attack the rim and try to fly over players for a rebound? Never. Athleticism on the court, which should be evident, is all that matters.
Essentially, I agree, AFM.
People like Millsap and Faried were extreme performers in NCAA games. They did so over time even against good NCAA opponents.
What bothered me before both of their drafts is people who insisted they were too short. I think vertical jumps and lane agility tests don't mean diddly for some players. Faried turned out to do very well on those tests, but his height didn't measure up. So, EG went for Jan Vesely, who is an athletic freak of nature. He runs and is an explosive leaper at seven feet. His athleticism does not make JV a good player.
I honestly don't think Faried was that high on their radar if they took Singleton. I don't think it had anything to do with anything other than stupidity.
While I think it can be cherry picking in spots, and while I wouldn't compare us by any stretch to professionals, theres something embarrassing about how certain folks get the job of running organizations for years upon years despite blatantly obvious stupidity.
Among the rebuild contingent, the general consensus of at least half of the board the past five years ould have landed:
Round 1:
'09: Rubio or Curry: Advantage Board
'10: Wall, and Seraphin, Anderson or Pondexter: Draw/EG Advantage
'11: Leonard and Faried: Advantage Board
'12: Beal/Barnes/Drummond: Advantage Draw
Round 2:
'09: Blair: Advantage Board
'10: Gani, Lawal, and Alabi seemed the targets, I was positive Alabi woul flop after watching him for quite a while as an FSU fan. : Advantage: Draw
'11: Honeycutt, Thompkins, Leur or Diebler: Advantage Board
'12: Crowder, Barton, Miller, Lamb or Denmon: Advantage Board/Too Early to tell
'13:
Looking at the draft history, the board would win 2009, 2011 first round, 2009, 2011, and possibly 2012 second round, E.G. would win the 2010 first round (I think Seraphin has turned out better than the general targets of the board w/the latter picks), and everything else would be a draw. The huge difference would be that in the alternative universe our starting lineup going into this draft would be:
PG: John Wall
SG: Stephan Curry
SF: Kawai Leonard
PF: Ken Faried
C: Drummond
Bench:
PG: ?
SG: (Diebler)
SF: Crowder
PF: Blair
C: Seraphin
That's a pretty impressive track record to me. There were certainly posters who would have blown picks here or there, or had blown all of our socks off with some, but I think there was a strong enough consensus that if the war room was composed of us, this is probably what the roster would look like minus trades, and small free agent signings (much of the board didn't care for the Webster signing, a few did, like me, then again I loved Q Miller and he didn't do squat last year). The only ones that might have gone differently were moves like Drummond (maybe Barnes), and perhaps a trade up in '11 for Kantner, or my preference, Valunciunas.
This isn't really cherry picking either because at the end of the day, the vast majority of the players the board wanted in the '09 and '11 first rounds were fundamentally superior to what the team did, while E.G. didn't beat the board consensus on any pick ever save for the 2nd first rounder in '10, when if I remember correctly guys like Anderson, and Pondexter and a few others were the preference, and they definitely fell flat on their face.
That's whats frustrating for me. For all the GMGM hate, and there's plenty reason, ever since they refurbished the scouting department in '02, the Caps have consistently made the right pick w/the most valuable picks, only blowing it badly twice (when they were hosed by the NHL with the composite strike draft in '05, a season where our pick would have otherwise been top 3-5, ended up being 15th or so, and in '08 I think it was when we took the son of a former player, Gustufsson, and he outright quit the game before ever putting on the sweater), and the Redskins have consistently made the right move since firing dumb and dumber from the draft room four drafts ago (something I and some bay area guys called back in '99 since we'd seen Vinny destroy the foundation Walsh layed along with the niner dumb and dumber of Carmen Policy and Dwight Clark (who thought so little of Vinny that they didn't take him w/them when they moved to Cleveland to set fire to that expansion franchise before it had even started in '99).
It's just, in the end, really frustrating to be a fan of a team with laughably bad management, and D.C. has suffered that with far too many teams in the past few decades (Boulez from my moment of noticing them in '86 to the present, Redskins from '88-'09, and the Nats from '05-'09), and with the Redskins, and Nats having righted the ship, the insistence of Leonsis upon holding on to incompetent front office leadership beggars the imagination.
