fatlever wrote:30 teams last year would have drafted davis at #1, including your beloved spurs and thunder.
Well I agree with that, because I think Davis will be the #1 player from the 2012 draft. However that said, let's not act like we know what these teams would have done. I rarely see anyone correctly predicting the Spurs moves, so let's not just assume they'd have taken such and such a player with no evidence.
mkg would have never lasted to #5. he would have been gone at 3 or 4.
No proof of that. And even if he was gone, so what? You just draft Barnes or Drummond and enjoy the extra asset you got for trading down.
this notion that players are bad picks if they are not eventually equal to the spot they were drafted is absurd. real life doesnt work like that. there are always 1000s of variables involved. a player that might be a good fit with one team is might not be a good fit with another. this isnt fantasy basketball. you have to account for other factors, such as current roster, fit with teammates and coach, style of play, the draftees willingness to come to your town and stay beyond a rookie deal, potential off court problems etc... you talk like drafting is done in a vacuum and rating players is black and white.
Your alternative method of "hey, it made sense to me at the time" is 100 times worse. Sure there is context- like injuries and such, but since we don't actually know what was going on inside the war room for these teams, and we have no idea what info they had, grading them on actual results should be the primary method of assessing them. Virtually every bad pick ever can be judged a good one using your criteria.
there is a huge difference between drafting a player at #2, who eventually is considered by most to be the 5th best player in the draft and drafting a bust.
Sure. Nobody said Cho is a terrible GM, he's not as bad as Higgins or Jim Paxson at drafting for instance. But at least 50% of his lotto picks for you have been the wrong picks (probably more like 75%). That certainly doesn't make him good, in fact I'd call him distinctly average. If average is what you want, great. I'm a bit fussier.
for example, abdur-rahim was drafted #3 back in 1996 (a loaded draft). in hindsight there were several players after him that turned out to be better - kobe, nash, ray allen and some others who had similar impacts jermaine oneal, peja etc... in a redraft done today, rahim doesnt go 3rd, but it wasnt a bad pick. he was a good player for a long time. most teams would be thrilled to get an abdur-rahim out of top 5 pick each year.
Shareef was a terrible pick. Trust me, you won't find any Grizzlies fans who liked that pick. Their GM should be raked over the coals for that decision.
the bobcats were rumored to be in talks with a lot of teams for that #2 pick, but we dont know for sure what was really offered. and even if the harden rumors were true, there is no telling if harden would have agreed to an extension with the bobcats, which would really have been a fail. perhaps cho reached out to harden's agent to gauge his interest and it wasnt mutual, so the bobcats moved on. again, too many variable and unknowns...
Well there's a lot of talk that it was offered, and Cho hasn't denied it. I believe it, especially when even before the draft there were rumours about how much Presti wanted Beal, and that he'd offered Harden. It was reported everywhere. And the beauty of trading for Harden is that he doesn't need to want to stay- he's on a qualifying offer, and nobody who is offered the max takes the qualifying offer and waits out the year. Nobody. You were all but guaranteed to retain him.
beal has a skill set that screams #2 scoring option on a good team, #3 scoring option on a great team, #1 option on a bad team. future all-star? maybe only because the current young talent at shooting guard around the league is lacking. that being said "draft on talent, not need" seems that by your logic the wizards screwed up by not selecting drummond or lillard instead.
The Wizards got a guy who could easily be the 3rd best player in the draft. They missed Drummond, but I'm not ready to say Beal won't be better than Lillard. Beal looks great.
wait, so you said kemba was a bad pick because he wasnt the 9th best player. when i asked you to tell us who was better you listed exactly 8 players ahead of kemba. so, even you agree that kemba was the 9th best player in that draft. and did you just rank reggie jackson ahead of kemba? why? because presti drafted him? how about you wait until reggie proves it playing real minutes for an entire season where he is being gameplanned by defenses before you make that leap.
No, I think there are 9+ guys I'd take ahead of Kemba. However in fairness to Kemba, the story is not told yet for some of the guys he is in the same tier with, so I'm listing them in a clump. Like I said, I think Kemba will likely prove a mistake, but I haven't pronounced final judgement on him in the same way as MKG and Biyombo. R.Jax looks much better than Kemba, he's probably going to have to be traded in a year or two, to avoid another Harden situation (getting an offer the Thunder can't pay). This time, teams won't be too dumb to offer proper value for R.Jax though. Not after the Harden disaster, where a tonne of teams (like yours) turned down wholly reasonable packages for no sensible reason.