Dark Faze wrote:Nice post Consiglieri
I will say that you can't write off a guys college year of basketball though. Teams WANTED to like Drummond, but his play at UCONN was abysmal. And again, while I think that Drummond will be a nice player, I'm in no way willing to concede he'll be a great defensive force and rebounder at worst. There's a huge difference between playing 20MPG like Drummond and dominating backup bigs on the glass and inside vs being an official starter full time. Drummond can't even finish games because he is a significantly worse FT shooter than Dwight and Shaq. Again, let that go through your head for a second. SIGNIFICANTLY worse than Shaq and Dwight. Significantly. That's scary.
I guess we'll just agree to disagree then. I can't disagree w/facts, and Drummond is a putrid free throw shooter, much like McGary (and most big men these days), but substantially worse. Despite that though, he still had a solid year at UConn. I'm not about to snow you with some argument that he was great at UConn. He wasn't. But I will argue this. UConn was a total clusterflutch last year. The coach was essentially being hounded into retirement, and in poor health, the team was imploding, the vets were ghastly leaders, and the up and coming kids stunk out loud (hence Lamb dropping from a projected top 4 pick in the fall of '11 to the 12th pick in June 2012 ), and Drummond wasn't even in line to play there until the end of August, nearly six months later than the rest of the prospects knew where they were headed for '12-'13. It was a recipe for disaster, and it was a disaster for UConn.
Drummond himself was not a disaster, at best he was terribly inconsistent, but watching him, or looking at his numbers, and you saw exactly why he was the #1 recruit, and the #1 rated prospect when things were clicking. In the end, he ended up averaging 10-7.7 and nearly 3 blocks a game. As the season went along he had strong games, or solid games far more often than bad games, and he shot nearly 54% from the field. All in all after entering conference play, his performance would break down like this: 13 outstanding to very good games among his 22, 3 average to competent games, and 6 awful games. There's not a chance in hell you can define his play at UConn as miserable unless you cherry pick it. If you want to say he didn't live up to expectations, I'd agree, he got into foul trouble too often (anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3 of his games), he was the worst free throw shooter I've ever seen since I watched myself in 3rd grade, and he had some freaking horrible games. However, despite all the bad press, the truth is that the team was horrible last year, and Drummond was merely uneven. The evidence available suggests that he was the best player in the entire high school class of 2011, the evidence available at the NBA level suggests that he's either the best or second best prospect from the '12 draft based on his play, and the evidence suggests that at UConn, more often than not, he could be relied upon to put together a good to vey good game. In what I'd classify as his quality starts from conference play forward, not looking at advanced stats (where he'd still look good), he provided UConn with 13.2 and 10 boards and 2.7 blocks a game. Is that miserable? Is that horrible, is that abysmal? Maybe your definition is different than mine. He was efficient shooting the ball from the floor, he hit the boards hard, he played outstanding defense much of the time, he was a force blocking shots (only 5 starts in 22 games starting new years eve where he blocked fewer than 2 shoots, blocked 3 or more shots in half of those 22 games as well), and he basically ---- the bed in only 6 of those 22 games. It's too bad people didn't pay more attention to his high school track record, as well as his overall performance game to game in conjunction with the situation he was in at UConn. Even if you wish to add his performance in the opening of the season, 9.2-6.5-2.8 per game, doesn't look bad at all as he's getting his feet wet.
The truth is, he wasn't abysmal, and the smart bet is that teams picking #2-#8, made a catastrophically stupid mistake in not picking him. There were a few of us propping him and suggesting he was worth taking a shot on. At the end of the day, I shut up about it, because I knew with the team clearing out dumb, dumber and dumbest, and trying to build with character and chemistry, the team had spent a ton of assets in acquiring Nene, and already drafting Seraphin, and desperately needed a legit shooter to replace the only one they had in Nick Young, and offer the team more. Beal wasn't a bad pick, he was probably, either the 2nd best, or 3rd best valuable at slot when we picked, and we didn't swing and miss, we took a guy who will be a borderline all star, and maybe an all star if everything goes right.
But Drummond was a franchise pick, period, we'll see what happens going forward, time will tell what will happen as he gains more minutes. WHo knows if he'll ever improve to competent as a free throw shooter, but I don't think it's remotely reasonable to place more doubt on Drummond than Beal, or anyone else, at this point in time, Drummond is probably the best pick from this draft, and as I said in June when Detroit stole him 3-4 slots lower than was reasonable, they got a massive steal, and probably the best value in the entire draft. So far, I'm right.
