jayjaysee wrote:
I'm really confused as to what your point is in here. You think the Sixers are going to be bad? I'm pretty sure that's the least controversial opinion anyone could have about the NBA.
There's a huge gap between a "better team" and "good team"...
And as for the Zinger part...
You do know the report came out in January (or earlier) about Miller/Porzingis refusing the give Hinkie a meeting right? Not after Sam was fired/stepped down in April.. The Verical (or woj) brought it up a few days ago, but that Miller/Hinkie conversation has been on the web all year. I'm not sure if you know that and are just saying Hinkie released it because Porzingis was having a good rookie season? That to me doesn't make sense, Hinkie was feeling ownership/Jerry at that point, but not enough to come out and say "players didn't want to meet with the Sixers" that's not good PR for a guy still acting as GM.
As for the way you value draft picks.. I guess I thoroughly disagree. I don't like to discredit teams for not finding the steals in drafts. If I'm drafting at 3 and I get a player better than anyone taken in the top 10, I'm happy. If some other team's scout finds this freak in Europe that my team didn't believe in at all, I don't look at them as bad drafters. It's just an unfair standard. For every Giannis, there are 6-7 Brazilian Durant's. Which is why they go where they go in the drafts. Sometimes they work out but most times they don't. Credit for Milwaukee/Utah/SA etc but no loss for the other teams who didn't take the risk.
The report about ownership “pressuring” (but not insisting) that Hinkie draft Okafor started coming out in Jan, but that was:
a) After Porzingis was going berserk and Okafor was looking like a bad pick, and
b) At a point when Hinkie almost certainly knew he was on the way out, which alot of people felt was all but a foregone conclusion the moment Jerry Colangelo was hired.
That same article Bondom linked to above explicitly mentions that this ‘could have just been hype, cos Hinkie always puts out smokescreens about a tonne of prospects’ (paraphrasing, but that’s what it says). It’s also from a source with no real credibility, like Berman, not an insider like Woj or Lowe. It’s also completely anonymous. I guess it’s easy to fool die hard fans that you are a genius in this way. Just put out a rumour that you love every prospect in the draft, that way in hindsight the truthers will have something to latch onto if they squint and ignore everything else. In reality it’s easy to see the incentive Hinkie’s people have to try and retrospectively put this out there anonymously.
Nobody is discrediting teams for not getting steals in the draft. Every team is going to miss sometimes. But you need some kind of standard. The standard for a solid drafting GM should be roughly this: “he had the 10th pick, and the player he got was more or less the 10th best guy in the draft”. A good drafting GM should exceed this standard on a regular basis (e.g. Spurs, OKC, etc). The problem isn’t that Hinkie missed Zinger or G-Bo per se, it’s that the guys he took at alot of the picks he had weren’t worth the value of the pick. MCW wasn’t the 11th best player in his draft, Embiid hasn’t been the 3rd best player in his draft, Saric hasn’t been the 12th, Noel might not be the 6th and Okafor sure doesn’t look like the 3rd best in his draft. That may turn around, because Saric hasn’t played and Noel might be 6th best or better (still unclear but looking doubtful so far with Gobert, G-Bo, Adams, McCollum, Shroeder, etc), but so far it looks thoroughly below average. Embiid’s injury issues were certainly known at the time too.
HotelVitale wrote:This is still just judging on development and results, both of which are mostly well beyond the GM's control. I tend to think that's closer to calling a child a genius for guessing heads/tails right 5 times in a row than it is a real evaluation of a GM's drafting 'skills.'
It seems more reasonable to start with the idea that GMs can't really tell what's going to happen with players, and I really don't think there's anything to the myth of 'intuition' or an 'eye' for which player will ahcieve potential (endless guys who had great work ethics just didn't have the capacity to develop certain things, and many red-flag attitude guys developed very well). Some teams like the Spurs had some advantages in interntional scouting 20 years ago, but that's no longer the case.
The fact that virtually no GM has better than about a 60% draft success rate, and the fact that almost no big reaches in the draft historically work out, are simple intellectual way of thinking about this. Here's a more anecdotal one: if on draft night the Jazz were offered Shabazz Muhammad or maybe Sergey Karasev for Gobert, they almost certainly would've taken that deal. The FO would be the exact same guys with the exact same 'eye' for prospects and would look like shlubs, just because they'd do what everyone else would've. I'm not saying that there's no skill whatsoever in drafting, just saying that there's a basic consensus on the draft (give or take maybe 5 picks up or down) and teams just pick from like 5 or 6 names, and no one's a genius or idiot for choosing the best or worst of those 5 or 6 names.
TLDR: people making picks are basically limited to evaluating upside and how likely a player is to reach it, and the real success or failure of a pick is much more on the player himself than on the GM. We have more than enough history that favors that view over that of 'a good GM drafts well, stupid GMs draft poorly.'
This is an utterly bizarre analogy. Teams like the Spurs and OKC aren’t consistently outdrafting other teams because of “luck”, there’s a reason some teams scout and develop well, and others scout and develop poorly. It doesn’t mean those smart teams are only using their intuition, to the contrary we have alot of evidence they’re using alot more than that (the Spurs were leader in analytics, OKC has PI’s doing background checks on prospects, etc). But to assume all GM’s are clueless is a wacky assumption. We have much evidence to the contrary. You say no GM has a better than 60% rate of success. I’d dispute that. I think the Spurs (and to a lesser extent OKC) are two of the (many) examples of teams who have a hit rate well above 60% (using the metric for success I outlined above). In fact it’s genuinely difficult to go through the Spurs draft history and find misses on their picks. Your attempt to refute this through a hypothetical anecdote is both unscientific and wrong. You also have no way of knowing that’s true. For all you know the Jazz (and other smart teams) had Gobert much higher on their draft board.
HotelVitale wrote:^Simpler way of making this pt: Phil Jackson would have taken Jahlil Okafor if he had the chance. John Hammond would have taken Nerlens Noel over Giannis if he had the chance. Etc. Sure, Hinkie didn't draft super well from today's perspective but there's so much evidence of the randomness of the draft, and of basic agreement about who the better and worse prospects are, that drafting success seems like a silly thing to evaluate a GM on.
Judging a GM's pure skills based only on his team's success should've died with Joe Dumars' FO career.
The fact Phil Jackson would have taken Okafor seems more like evidence he is a bad GM (consistent with everything else I’ve seen from him except getting Porzingis), not evidence every GM is a bad GM. OKC for instance was widely reported in the media to be trying to get Porzingis to enter the draft on the promise in 2014. Orlando was widely and credibly reported to be dying to draft Zinger at #5 (in advance of him blowing up). Teams don’t all view prospects the same way. Some are good at drafting and some are not, and the results they produce are the major way we can determine this.
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