payitforward wrote:The Consiglieri wrote:barelyawake wrote:I certainly was. I certainly have been saying for years that we need a young big, and have been roundly attacked for backing: Marc Gasol (wanted to buy a pick to get him); Drummond; Gobert (the draft page here was calling him the biggest bust of the draft, I wanted to buy picks to get him); and yes Noel. Noel is exactly the type of player we need to pair with Durant.
Porter will be better than he is playing. But, we need a foundational piece much more. Porter, Beal, Serphin and Gortat are all good pieces that we can package in some way to get a great piece. And we need another great piece.
I have no idea where Jangles got that from. At the time of the '12 draft, the fan base was utterly apoplectic that Noel wasn't the pick. Apoplectic. I'll grant that there were some Cody Zeller backers, some fans of Oladipo, and a few others, but the main debate was between Noel, with the injury, or Porter for about 80% of the board, and I, and many, many, many others were irate about the decision that was made. It was utterly moronic in my view regardless of how it played out. You just don't take players with that low of a ceiling with that high of a pick EVER, unless there's noone else with a high ceiling, and there were several players that were known to have a higher ceiling, Noel, the most highly thought of amongst them.
It was an idiotic decision then, and looked even worse last season, although Porter's play when given quality minutes this past offseason, suggests he just needs minutes to become a solid league average player (maybe better), which at least is a sign that he wouldn't be a bust, if we'd just simply put him on the floor.
Still absolutely barely awake, i have ZERO IDEA where jangles gets this perspective that it's revisionist thinking to say that Noel should have been the pick (or Len, or Carter Williams, or Adams, or Giannis etc) is complete and utter nonsense. Just scroll through the thread right around 740-815 pm on draft day from 2013. It's all right there. The Porter supporters, the outraged, holy ---- we can get NOEL! crew screaming with delight, then minutes later screaming with rage, than debating whether it should matter that several other teams proved to be morons as well (never understood why five perennial cellar dwellers passing on Noel, thus proves that passing on him was the right decision. Utterly fallacious reasoning,), it shouldn't.
It's all there in the thread, granted it takes a little digging, but at least by looking that up, you won't be either lying and misrepresenting, or simply ignorant of the truth.
You're totally right. And I would have been happier too had we taken Noel. So, yeah, jangles is off.
But, there's a more important point here, and I think you are missing it. Tell me if you agree (or at least if you see what I mean):
Noel was projected to go #1 in the draft. Then his injury was revealed, and the fact of it was given some weight by GMs, so he fell a little. But the people here who wanted him anyway, who wanted to pay no attention to the injury, didn't give that injury any weight -- and, really, why should they? Fans have no skin in the game (me included: I'd have preferred to roll the dice). If he doesn't recover, what price does a fan pay? Nothing. So of course fans give the injury no weight.
But... if you run the picks w/o giving that injury any weight, then, sorry, Noel isn't available to us. Nor can you say "see, he recovered; obviously it was stupid to give the injury any weight." That's hindsight. What if he hadn't recovered?
Now, if back then you said "we should pick Alex Len; he'd be a better pick than Otto Porter," fine. No hindsight, and tho he was nicked up a bit really no injury issue either. Lets see who turns out to be the better player, Otto or Alex.
Note: that's what Hands wanted to do. He wanted Len, and if Len turns out to be a better NBA player than Porter, that'll be a feather in his cap.
But if you said "I want Noel; who cares about the injury," the fact that he's recovered doesn't make you right -- neither you nor I had any idea whatever how bad that injury was or what his recovery chances were.
You're wrong at least in my opinion anyway. Fan's lose a blue chip top prospect. Our skin in the game is the hope, and time we waste on a franchise based on our support of said team. We have a limited amount of time on earth, all of us on this forum have chosen to utilize an unusually large percentage of that time playing make believe (if you believe the no skin the in game argument) of sports, that actually have no real tangible impact on our day to day lives other than how much time, and emotion we invest into it. Since we're here, we invest a lot of time and emotion into it (if we were a normal fan, we wouldn't even notice the draft, and would simply buy tickets, and/or watch on tv, and get up or down based on the results.
Instead we obsess.
Instead many of us have watched our team consistently make the wrong decision draft in and draft out for at least 25 years, and amongst this base more likely 30-45 years (for me its since the '86-'87 season when I was basically 12). The team has had only four top 3 overall picks since 1986, but it has also had countless lottery picks (1989, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).
What would likely piss this fan base off more?
Going conservative and/or wtf?!?!: ie 1989 (Tom Hammonds), 1992 (Googs), 1993 (Cal Cheaney), 2002 Jared Jeffried, 2003: Arvis Hayes 2009 (stupidest trade in modern DC History until the Filip Forsberg Trade), 2011 Jan Vesely, 2013: Porter
Taking a risk, or as Oscar Wilde said, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars...": 1994: Juwon Howard, 1995 Rasheed Wallace, 1999 Rip Hamilton, 2001 Kwame Brown, 2010 John Wall, 2012 Bradley Beal
This fan base has basically suffered a never ending litany of horrifically bad decision making on draft day and in trades. It has suffered limitless amounts of botched deals, and idiot decisions of all manner.
Why on earth would taking the risk, and aiming for the stars with a player with huge upside, or the best player on the board with upside, piss it off, or be an unwise decision?
If Nerlens Noel goes Greg Oden how is that any different than Hammonds, Cheaney, Jeffries, Hayes, Vesely, Otto right now, or Kwame Brown? We've suffered horrible debacles over and over again.
We'll suffer plenty more. What it's harder to take, and harder to suffer is, to put it simply, "not even trying to be great."
I can and always will forgive the Kwame Brown bust because in that draft, the three contenders for the #1 overall pick were Brown, Chandler, and Curry and all had the possibility of stardom in scouts eyes. You could have gone after a role player who could contribute in Battier, who'd be a great glue guy/6th man, you could have invested in a higher floor moderately high ceiling guy like JRich, or you could aim for a super star, like the '95 Garnett selection instead of the safe Joe Smith pick, like Kobe Bryant in '96 instead of the big white stiff Todd Fuller (I remember a lot of those drafts based on what the Wizards and Warriors did because Im a bay area kid), you could have aimed for Kwame or JRich/Battier etc. I forgive Kwame because it was trying to do what the Warriors didn't do in '95 and '96, and that was aim for a star that just might be in hand.
This is a league in which its basically impossible to win without that guy, so aiming for the stars is de rigueur.
What I cant forgive is going for guys like Jared Jeffries, and Arvis Hayes, and Otto Porter, and Googs etc, guys that have no chance of ever being special, and are only if everything goes right, nice complimentary players (and in 2 of the 3 finished examples, not even that, were in wait and see mode with Porter), particularly when our team lacked players who were special (in the case of Porter, we did have special, but it was all backcourt based).
I feel like Shylock here, "If we pick a predictable bust, do we fans not bleed? If we miss the playoffs yet again, do we not weep? and if you poison our hopes and dreams will we not vent at RealGM?"
We're all invested here. If we pick a bust, we all lose, as we have over and over and over again with the vast majority of draft picks since 1988, but i think a pretty strong portion of the fan base could take losing, and failure if it was felt that the franchise was actually orchestrating decision making with an intelligent plan in place that prioritized building a long term winner, and relied on the best means of evaluation possible. But that hasn't been what we've had to work with, and as a result we've seen Curry and Rubio lost for nothing in 2009, we've seen Jan Vesely drafted over guys like Kawhi, Faried, Tobias Harris etc that many on the board loved (or trading up for Valunciunas), Beal over Drummond (although Beal was a good pick), now Porter over Noel, or even Adams, or Giannis, or Len etc.
I flat out disagree about Noel being available to us because I disagree on your risk assessment of the guy. An ACL in 2013 is not what an ACL was in 1995 or 1980, and if a team is willing to bottom out, and start it's total rebuild with trading for Noel, well, you can tell how they assessed the risk there. Seems to me the risk management question was all about a GM covering his own rear after totally botching 2 of the previous four top 6 picks (and several other first rounders), and wanting to go conservative and save his own job, rather than make a selection that had a chance to potentially put the team over the top and was in the better long term interests of the club regardless, even if it failed.
What's interesting is that a fear among many of us at the time, that we might have easily made a much better pick if we'd never moved up to #3 and had instead been slotted in at 7 (or was it 8?), as we were pre-lottery (maybe we take McCollum, Adams, or Shabazz, my fav guys there, or maybe we get an Olynyk like CCJ wanted, who knows).
I just don't think I see this at all like you do, that's all.
Good point btw, on Len, it will be interesting to watch him as there were a lot of rumors that he was the guy we liked best after Porter (and he is actually legit or appears to be anyway), wonder if that was true.
