payitforward wrote:Oh please.... Tell me this: if you are the Memphis GM right now, today, & I am Tommy Sheppard, & I call & ask you to trade me Brandon Clarke straight up for Rui Hachimura, should you go for it? Should you take the trade?
If you say, "yes," you are fibbing; your fingers are crossed! If you say, "no," then every point you try to make in this post goes straight down the drain.
This is an interesting one... I actually think both teams say no, but it has more to do with player fit. In coverage of Clarke's season so far, I actually haven't seen much mention of how ideal a fit he is with the rest of their young core - with an offensive trio like Morant/Brooks/Jackson, one of the most valuable additions you can make is a low-usage, high-efficiency defensive stud. Clarke's value is obviously less team-dependent than some think, say, Draymond Green to be, but it's definitely cool to see him find the perfect role in which to contribute immediately. On the other hand (and this is well-tread territory for us), a team like us is still trying to figure out where our night-in, night-out bucket-getting is going to come from. No doubt Clarke's played his value up above the average 21st (23rd? Something like that) pick, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the league would still place a premium on Rui's perceived tier-one offensive upside (even if it's still far from guaranteed that he realizes it). So while I don't think the Grizzlies "should" swap Clarke for Rui, I maintain that we've seen too little of either for the average GM to have fully 180-ed on their relative values.
payitforward wrote:Still, let me take those points 1 by 1 as best I can:
1. No one would make a final judgment on either Rui or Garland based on their first 4 months. You are absolutely correct! Then again, no one suggested doing so -- did they?
I know you like to disclaim that you could be wrong about anything without ever actually considering the possibility, but I don't think calling Garland absolutely horrific, atrocious, whatever (and yes, that first month and a half or so was extremely ugly) and claiming that him becoming a good player would be essentially unprecedented is a particularly nuanced position.
payitforward wrote:2. I'd say that "...evaluating how ...current abilities... project to develop into concrete and consistent future contributions" is what FOs try to do in figuring out whom to draft in the first place. As we know, they are absolutely great at that, which is why so many #1, 2 & 3 picks wind up sucking -- let alone guys taken from 4 through the end of the lottery.[/b] Or, to put it another way, I don't think it's possible to do that for either Rui or Garland.
I think it's possible, and that FOs are better at it than we give them credit for, but there are still gonna be a lot of misses. Obviously, FOs are pretty wedded to their initial evaluations (or rather, those initial evaluations are made with the length of a rookie-scale contract in mind), which is one reason that you never see a lot of first-year players swapped. For us, this kind of stuff is mostly guesswork - predicating a lot on a player's "intangible" value that we have no way of knowing. In fact, I suspect that we're probably aligned on the value, or lack thereof, of discussing something like a Garland-for-Rui trade
.payitforward wrote:3. Garland's improvement? November was horrible beyond belief. December was no better. January so far does show a small improvement over the previous two months. Still horrible... maybe no longer beyond belief? Then again, improvement doesn't mean anything without reference to a meaningful baseline, does it?
How about we use this one: Has Darius Garland been as good in January as... oh, let's say Justin Robinson was on his whole season before being waived? The answer is simple: no, he hasn't.
Robinson, per game, on the season:
Garland, by month:
C'mon man.
- that his January numbers had become quite respectable). As far as a meaningful baseline, it doesn't matter what you're comparing him to - he's trended away from his October/November averages, towards league averages. If, for some bizarre reason, we want to extrapolate Justin Robinson's 49 total minutes as if he would perform the same playing 40 minutes per game, Garland is trending positively relative to that as well. Is he anything like a positive contributor so far? Almost certainly not (although it's hard to imagine anyone looking good on the current Cavs team). But he's not in stasis either - he was drafted with a view on long-term improvement, and so far he's showing an ability to learn and improve.