Q-was-here wrote:Carlos Danger wrote:I just went through our drafts since 2008 and it's really not as awful as I think some feel.
2008 - Kevin Love (5x All Star)
2009 - Rubio - not an All Star, but he's been a starter in NBA for 10+ years
2010 - Swing and a miss on Wes
2011 - Swing and a miss on Derrick Williams
2012 - No 1st round pick (anyone recall what happened to that one?)
2013 - Gorgui Dieng - solid depth piece for 10 years
2014 - Wiggins (1x All Star) and Lavine (2x All Star)
2015 - Towns (3x All Star) and Tyus Jones - solid depth piece
2016 - Swing and a miss on Dunn
2017 - Swing and a miss on Patton
2018 - Swing and a miss on Okogie
2019 - Swing and a miss on Culver
2020 - Edwards and McDaniels - both starting for us now.
2021 - No pick (I believe this was the pick we sent with Wiggins to GS for DLO)
2022 - Wendell Moore - TBD
So...15 years of drafts:
4 All Stars (Love, Wiggins, LaVine, Towns)
3 Starters (Rubio, Edwards, McDaniels)
2 Depth pieces (Dieng and Tyus)
1 TBD (Moore)
Let's call it 10 pieces out of 15 years. Not great. But is it awful? 2016 to 2019 was terrible. I believe those were all under Thibodeaux. One more reason to hate that guy.
Edit: I only looked at round 1. Nowell was a great find in second round.
Carlos, I look at that list and.......it's really bad. The reason I say that is because of the draft position we were in most of those years. And look at all of the swings and misses! Yes, every franchise misses on draft picks occasionally, but we do it a SHIT TON!
And to your final point, we've had terrible luck unearthing rotation players from later in the draft or via undrafted free agents. It wasn't until Gersson Rosas's first year that we FINALLY found some decent value in the Nowell, Naz, and JMac trifecta.
A team's draft history will reflect the quality of the team's front office during the historical period.
The Wolves made 18 1st-round picks during time 2008-2020 time frame. Five of those picks were made by David Kahn and three of them were Thibodeau picks. So nearly half of of the 18 picks before Connelly were make by either David Kahn, a sports writer who had no business heading up an NBA front office, or Tom Thibodeau, a head coach with absolutely no experience in an NBA front office. Kahn drafted one starter, Rubio, with his five picks and completely whiffed on three of them (Williams, Johnson and Flynn). Meanwhile, Thibodeau whiffed on all three of his picks.
Things were much better under Flip Saunders, even though he was rightly never considered one of the better NBA basketball execs. Flip made six picks. Three of his six picks (KAT, LaVine, Wiggins) have been all-stars. Two of the other three (Tyus Jones and Gorgui Dieng) have been solid rotation players for many years. His only total whiff was Bazz. In baseball parlance, half of Flip's picks were extra base hits (one of them a home run) and two of them were solid singles. Yet, Flip was never considered one of the best NBA basketball execs and many of us thought at the time that he made a huge mistake taking Bazz instead of Giannis and selling the 27th pick instead of using hit to draft Gobert. McHale hit a home run with his one 1st-round pick, Kevin Love, during this period.
Rosas made four first-round picks while here. He hit on two of those four with Edwards and McDaniels. The Edwards pick was a home run and the McDaniels pick at least a double and maybe better when we look back two years from now. He hit another extra base hit with Nowell in the 2nd round. He whiffed on only one first-round pick with Culver and I think it's too soon to judge the Bolmaro pick.
Added together, McHale, Flip and Rosas made 11 first-round picks and whiffed on at most three of them (Bazz, Culver and maybe Bolmaro) in the period from 2008 to 2020. In other words, they hit on 8 of their 11 first-round picks and 6 of those were extra base hits. That's a really good track record. So when you exclude the two former Wolves execs who never should have been (and never again will be) head basketball execs, the last 12 years of Wolves draft history suggests that first-round picks have a lot of value. And note that Connelly is supposed to be an elite basketball executive who was worthy of an equity stake in the franchise.
