Cavs @ Blazers

[JonFromVA]

It's incredibly difficult to project college talent, and it doesn't help when they're competing at a lower level of competition, or only blooming after playing 3 or 4 years.

But perhaps that's the new challenge for GMs & scouts much like the Spurs took advantage of international scouting a decade ago?

Paul George went 10th in the 2010 draft, and just 3 years later Damian Lillard went 6th. Nobody pushed the envelop further in this last draft, but certainly eyes will be on CJ McCollum who went 10th and Kellly Olynyk who went 13th to see if they can out-perform their better known and more hyped peers.

[Okada]

Again, I've explained this before. The consensus was that the prospects were a mess after the top 3 guys, Kyrie, Williams and Kanter. Pretty much take whoever you like the best, but there were a lot of guys in the mix there. People forget the opinion of the time and just look at the list of players drafted and say 'no way Kawhi/other mid 1st pick could've gone 4th!' Not true, it was pretty much wide open after the top 3. Kawhi and Tristan, before the draft, were getting projected as low top 10 picks, but Kawhi wouldn't have been any more surprising than TT at 4th, at all. If anything TT was the bigger reach. And everyone agreed after the draft that Kawhi fell too. Doesn't matter what you say really, it's just a fact that Kawhi was the only person I wanted at 4th before the draft, and if you think I'm BSing then you obviously didn't pay much attention to that draft at the time.

[Okada]

I just googled 2011 NBA Mock Draft and looked through all the results on the first page.

nbadraft.net - Kawhi 9th, Tristan 7th
BleacherReport - Kawhi 8th, Tristan 16th
DraftExpress - Kawhi 14th, Tristan 8th
WalterFootball 1 - Kawhi 11th, Tristan 8th
WalterFootball 2 - Kawhi 4th, Tristan 8th
Sports Illustrated - Kawhi 9th, Tristan 15th
SportingNews - Kawhi 4th, Tristan 16th