abark wrote:How are you comparing Beasley to Oden and Bowie. Bowie has actually admitted that he lied to Portland about the fact that he was already damaged goods. And we all know Oden's story.
Before anything, the point I'm trying to make is, no one says that a player botches their own career when they bust as a draft pick. The FO gets the blame because the FO pays professionals good money to conduct a ton of research, make educated decisions, and these are decisions that could make or break a franchise for years.
And on the flip side, who gets all the credit when a team makes solid draft choices? The FOs, and rightfully so.
But if we were to debate that: even if we ignore that teams are supposed to conduct physicals and check medical records, there's still two other examples I left there.
abark wrote:Westbrook was a late bloomer that averaged 13, 4, 4 in his sophomore season. He wasn't some can't miss prospect.
Well, I cited Westbrook because we're trying to trade for him now.
But regardless, you can close your eyes, point your finger at a player in a first round mock draft of 2008, and you would likely land a solid player. It was that good of a draft year. We screwed up on Beasley and we were lucky that we got it right with Wade and that Wade is friends with LeBron and Bosh.
abark wrote:Most of your criticisms of Beasley are valid, but Kansas State has an SOS of 7.79, while UCLA's was 7.71. Beasley and Westbrook ended up playing against similar levels of competition that year, even though Beasley went to a smaller school.
Kansas State still played in the Big 12 conference which finished as the strongest conference and had the highest combined win percentage. They even had Kansas, the eventual champions, who KS beat.
Beasley was an absolute beast in college against any competition. He played on a team He had his flaws (you even left out bball iq and maturity)
That's my bad for making it seem like he played against scrubs.
But I just remembered: playing in KS allowed him to pad his stats
Most top prospects go to colleges with prestige basketball programs where they're have a chance of seriously competing and, thus, their stats are likely to go down as they play in a team system with other good players.
For example, Westbrook went to UCLA and reached the Final Four on okay stats.
I won't speculate as to why Beasley didn't go to a prestigious college basketball program, but I'm guessing there was a reason for it, because a guy with his talent and production (at that time) should've been one of the most top-recruited prospects in the nation.
So either the top basketball programs in the country got it wrong on Beasley, or they didn't want him for a reason, or Beasley had ulterior motives for not going to a good program.
abark wrote:but it's revisionist history to act like he wasn't the clear cut number 2 pick.
Honestly, I don't care what the consensus was. The consensus can get it wrong and they obviously did with Beasley.
If I were wrong about Beasley, I'd eat my own words, and I would've loved to have been wrong about him because the Heat would've gotten a great player out of it.
I don't know why he wouldn't. Assuming you think he needs the ball in his hands, so did LeBron. Great players in a great system find a way.abark wrote:It's easy with hindsight to say we should have picked Russ in hindsight, but would he even have been a good fit with Wade anyway?
