Official Draft Day Thread

[Q-is-here]

The other thread is getting a bit unwieldy. Plus it's not official like this one!

[FNG]

Phew, I was concerned we were going to have to go with an unofficial thread .

I'm excited for tonight, but also going into it realistically. I'm in the camp that thinks we're not going to keep #17, so I'm probably going to refrain from commenting a lot on the pick because I think it will end up going to another team. I'll probably be more involved Thursday night with #31, which I'm inclined to think we will keep.

We have a smart board here with guys who can really talk basketball deeply. But if you go back and look at some of the draft day threads, you'll find yourself chuckling a lot! We get crushes on certain players, and then get close to jumping out a window when another team "steals" him from us...and so often, those players end up as busts! I highly recommend the 2022 draft day thread which I just read because it was TC's first draft...it's about 50 pages back if you want to skip to it. We were quite excited about Wendell Moore, and were trying to decide where to put the Tim Connelly statue after he made a couple pick trades to get him. I didn't post that night, but I think I remember thinking he was a great pick also. Cam got us all fired up about EJ Liddell as a future HOFer, and there was widespread despair when TC traded a pick that could have ended up as Liddell. If you look at what a disaster Liddell has been so far, it looks like we dodged a bullet there.

It'll be fun tonight, but we know TC is a wheeler/dealer. When they announce who the Wolves chose with the 17th pick, he's gonna look a lot like Walker Kessler to me when he puts on that Timberwolves hat!

[KG4Ever]

FNG, please speak just for yourself. I hated the Wendell Moore pick and you are going overboard with the statue comment. OK, my bad in loving Kennedy Chandler but I did like Andrew Nembhard (a lot more than Wendell Moore) and that is a bit redeeming. Initially, I was not that crazy about the Kessler pick until I read that he had a three point shot and saw him play and he grew on me. Dmn TC, of course threw WK in trade rather than WM to Utah. And for the record, I was never a big EJ Lidell fan, though, I know Cam and some others were. I advocated a tradeback by TC to get two picks from Memphis and guess what, TC followed my advice on that, but I think that is the last time he listened to me.

[Crazysauce]

There are some good ones out there. Remember some on the board with their unwavering love for Nik Stauskas. Haha.

[KG4Ever]

I actually had a pretty good track record of hating Wolve's draft picks (Flynn, Wes Johnson, Foye, Shabazz, McCants, Kris Dunn), but I am glad I was wrong about Anthony Edwards. I think I was the first to mention Anthony Edwards as a potential draft pick a year before the draft but I eventually turned on him as he had a pretty inefficient shooting record in college, didn't impress defensively and made some crazy statements just before the draft and I knocked him way down my list. Oh, I was wrong about Kevin Love too (I preferred we kept OJ Mayo). Probably the only picks I absolutely loved were KG, KAT and Ricky.

[SameOldNudityDrew]

If memory serves, when we picked Ant over Wiseman, at least one guy on the board swore off the team and a couple others sounded pretty close.

We've all whiffed.

And I think we all tend to overvalue the draft too. The Washington Post had a good article on this today. Since the Wizards pick 6th, they decided to review all the draft picks from 6-10 in 15 drafts from 2006 to 2020. 75 players. The results?

Only 4 out of 75 actually became star players (Dame, Steph, PG, and DeRozan)
12 more out of 75 became high level starters (guys like Julius, Kamba Walker, Jamal Murray)
13 more became regular starters (think Harrison Barnes, Rudy Gay, Eric Gordon)
23 became little more than contributors (guys like Nerlens Noel, Randy Foye, Willie Cauley-Stein)
23 became busts, mostly riding the bench or out of the league in a few years (guys like Patrick O'Bryant, Jimmer, Mudiay, Jonny Flynn, Killian Hayes, etc).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/i ... 36d9f45650

I might quibble with a couple of their categorisations, but it's a good reminder that a lot of these guys getting drafted just don't work out.

[FNG]

FNG, please speak just for yourself. I hated the Wendell Moore pick and you are going overboard with the statue comment. OK, my bad in loving Kennedy Chandler but I did like Andrew Nembhard (a lot more than Wendell Moore) and that is a bit redeeming. Initially, I was not that crazy about the Kessler pick until I read that he had a three point shot and saw him play and he grew on me. Dmn TC, of course threw WK in trade rather than WM to Utah. And for the record, I was never a big EJ Lidell fan, though, I know Cam and some others were. I advocated a tradeback by TC to get two picks from Memphis and guess what, TC followed my advice on that, but I think that is the last time he listened to me.

My recollection was you had some of the better takes in that thread. But generally the board's takes look pretty funny a few years later. The best of course was Cam. He would lock in on a guy and post 100 times in a usually well-researched manner how we would be crazy to not take him. Invariably the guy would end up a bust. He has his preferred list posted on his X, and I'm checking medical records to see what terminal diseases they might have. His X feed should be pretty entertaining tonight...he'll be pushing for Coward, Fleming and Clayton if they're available at 17.

[60WinTim]

Thanks for kicking this off, Q! I was traveling to the Smokey Mountains today, but would have kicked off an official draft thread if it wasn’t already here.

TC surely has a small list of players that are worthy of the 17th pick. So if we do trade the pick, we’ll know all those players were gone before pick 17.

I am hopeful we get our guy at 17.

[Monster]

It wasn't that long ago the draft was basically THE hope for this board...and also the reminder of what could have been.

Everyone has had some successes and failures. Some of us can feel good about how we liked a guy even if he just had a 5-7 year NBA career as a 2nd rounder. It's fun to try and see if you can notice something the so called experts didn't. There are some guys I still don't know why went as high as they did. Meanwhile there were a couple guys that just didn't turn out that I was higher on that were lottery picks. We are fans we aren't always gonna be completely rational.

With a team like the Nets with so many picks and other teams having multiple picks and I get the sense there are plenty of players without consensus we could see a NFL draft type of movement on draft night. I'm looking forward to being entertained. I hope I can get back home in time to join you all.

[BloopOracle]

I still remember how mean you all were to me for being on the Lauri Markannen train