BUT TOO DAMN EARLY

It’s rare that ANYONE is predicted to be the best of all time, but Jordan was Nat’l player of the year and was widely regarded as a top talent. No one questioned him at #3 at the time. It surprised no one who saw him in college that Jordan was a perennial all star.

I don’t think judging Warriors draft strategy by anything an NFL team did is all that useful.

The NFL draft is a very different animal from the NBA draft. Every year, football teams rely on rookies to come in and play key roles. At minimum, they’re used on special teams, but most teams start a few rookies. Lineup turnover is high and the sheer number of players you need is higher than in basketball. Most basketball teams do not start rookies and many teams don’t have any play that much. Football teams get value out of later picks. The difference between 1st and 2nd rounders is not always clear (and there are actually some good studies indicating that for what you wind up paying them, late first round picks are significantly better deals than early picks). Picking for need makes sense in football as the playing life of most guys is short and you cannot stockpile backup talent at the expense of immediate play. And as teams pick for need, you know the various teams’ needs, you can better predict whether a guy will fall to a spot if you trade down to take a guy you want.

None of this holds equally true for basketball. Every year or so, an NBA team collects a couple of 1st rounders, sometimes even three. It is very, very rare that more than one of these guys work out. It is not uncommon to see a team take more than one busts with multiple picks. Part of this is that the odds of a player being able to do much for a basketball team drops quickly as the first round moves on. If that second 1st is in the 10-20 range, odds are that you’re not picking a guy who will help much, ever. Unless you are really keen on a guy that you are pretty sure other teams will overlook, trading down is more than likely just going to drop your odds of getting someone who can play the game at all. And I don’t think that the ‘weak year/strong year’ difference really has a much of an impact on this as many would like to postulate.

This doesn’t look like a year that someone is going to take our garbage in exchange for swapping picks. No one wants bad contracts. The #7 pick isn’t valuable enough to warrant acquiring players we’d give away for nothing were there takers.

But he would be paid as a #7 draft pick…. so I would have to think he’d be considered a bust, if all he became was a role player, or quality bench guy, right? He supposedly has decent size, and great defense. That is something to look forward to. The Warriors seem to find these guys who can score, but yet, they end up becoming those “role player/quality bench guys”… so they don’t really need another one of those types of players.

I’m pretty confident that there will be a couple guys who will be quality starters at #7. They probably won’t be that “franchise player”, or superstar, but I think they can find someone who has enough potential to work his way to the brink of star status, kinda like a J-Rich, or something. They definitely don’t need another Dunleavy Jr.

If Nelson is talking this guy up, I can almost guarantee that the W’s aren’t looking at this guy too seriously. It’s probably a ploy to get another team to pounce on him, or something.

I’m seeing Mock Drafts now that Rubio is going 4th? Do you guys like Rubio, and could you see the Warriors moving up to take him?

Totally agree, T-money. I’d much rather do this and pick up a known PG commodity.