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Following Potential 2025 Draftees

Did not see the game, but Demin with 9/4/2 on 4-12 shooting against the lowly Utes. I'm not sure if I'd consider that to be struggling or playing well given his horrific play against non-terrible teams.
 
Ferguson_Mellochill said:
The value of top picks is far too great to allow the outcome to be left entirely to chance. Enough picks can remain random, such that the league can maintain its position that "Picks are random." However, the number of fortuitous outcomes for the league are too numerous and consistent for the odds to say this is random. A few examples:
  • The LA Lakers are the NBA's most important franchise for TV ratings, literally holding down the west coast time slots. The Lakers moved up in the lottery 4 times consecutively, receiving picks #2, #2, #2, #4. Mathematically, this is not impossible, but it is improbable.
  • Amidst this string of good luck for the Lakers, Lebron moves from Miami to LA in free agency, but the team around him isn't good enough to compete in the playoffs. Lebron misses something like 1/4 of the season with some nagging injury (a sore groin, lol). Anthony Davis concurrently tries to force a trade to the Lakers, literally quitting on his New Orleans Pelicans team and leaving them in shambles. Both the Lakers and the Pelicans franchises are in a state of disarray. Then low-and-behold, the Lakers move up from #10 in the lottery standings into the top 4, so they can add the #4 pick to their young players, Ingram and Ball, in a trade package to the Pelicans to acquire Anthony Davis. As 'fate' would have it, the lottery gods also give the Pels the #1 pick in the draft to start their rebuild with Zion Williamson. The league gets a win-win. The Lakers are now a contender, TV networks have something to talk about, and the Pels have high-level lottery talent to stabilize their franchise and rebuild. Whew! Crisis averted.
  • Houston Rockets ownership took huge financial losses during the Covid pandemic. (They're largely invested in commercial real estate.) The Rockets, who just lost James Harden when he basically checked out on them Anthony Davis-style, get four consecutive top-4 picks (Jalen Green, Jabari Smith, Amen Thompson and Reed Sheppard). Now Houston tanked their season for each of these picks. The odds were decent for them to get a high pick in each draft individually, but to move up 4x in a row is still a fairly low probability--like .50 * .50 * .50 * .50 = 6.75%. It's like flipping a coin 4 times and getting heads each time.
  • Michael Jordan sells the Charlotte Hornets. The new ownership gets the #2 pick in the draft (Brandon Miller), which effectively helps to sweeten the deal. The deal officially closes 7 weeks later.
  • The Milwaukee Bucks are sold to new ownership, who likewise then get the #2 pick in the draft (Jabari Parker), which effectively helps to sweeten the deal.
  • Cleveland fans were literally rioting and burning Lebron jerseys when he left in free agency to go to Miami. The following summer, the Cavs get the #1 pick to draft Kyrie Irving and start their rebuild. One #1 pick isn't enough for the franchise to recover from losing Lebron, so then Cleveland proceeds to soon win two more #1 picks back-to-back (Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins). Fans get over losing Lebron somewhat, though he decides to go back to Cleveland to team up with Kyrie if the Cavs will trade one of those #1 picks back to Minnesota for Kevin Love. Such a feel-good story.
If I'm a conspiracy theorist this year, I don't see a particularly egregious situation that requires intervention, but I'd keep an eye on Brooklyn. The way things rapidly fell apart with James Harden, then Kyrie Irving, then Kevin Durant all leaving might be enough of a black eye for the league to want them to move up this year. The Sixers' situation is another to watch. I don't know what the protections are on the pick owed to OKC, but I'd be surprised if the league is going to allow the Thunder to get another lottery pick to add to what appears to be the best team in the league. Why? Because then the small-market OKC Thunder will be in the Finals for the foreseeable future. See what the TV ratings look like when the Thunder and Cavs meet in the Finals this year. If I'm the league, I'm a bit tempted to put Cooper in a big east-coast market like Brooklyn or Philadelphia.

At some point, it wouldn't surprise me if the league simply asks Cooper Flagg's camp if there are teams in the lottery he'd be willing to play for. After all, a big-name, high-impact white American player is going to draw attention and help carry the league's image with Lebron aging out. Gilbert Arenas, in one of his podcasts, made it sound as though the league basically set up Wembanyama with the Spurs so that he'd be put in a good situation to develop and be successful.

That said, if I'm the league I'd be okay with franchises like Charlotte, Washington, Toronto and Utah getting guys like Ace Bailey and Kasparas Jakucionis.
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Ferg, thanks for the thoughtful, well-considered response. I will really mull it over. I simply don't claim to know one way or another, but you provided much to think about, which is all one can really ask.
 
David Hume said:
Ferg, thanks for the thoughtful, well-considered response. I will really mull it over. I simply don't claim to know one way or another, but you provided much to think about, which is all one can really ask.
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I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'll just say that if I were in charge of dolling out these high-value assets, I would consider the health of the league and the health of the individual franchises that I'm charged with taking care of. Unfortunately, professional sports is now primarily a media product. Digital platforms have undermined real-time broadcast media in general, and live sports has become one of, if not the, most powerful media products. So audience aggregation is an important consideration.

To keep the game going and to keep everyone rich, the league has to make money on broadcast and streaming rights. They need superstars in big markets to bring in the casual viewers. It's just that the smaller markets have much savvier GMs, like Sam Presti. Denver broke the system by drafting a perennial MVP in the 2nd round. Milwaukee broke the system by drafting a back-to-back MVP in the mid-1st round. OKC broke the system by acquiring SGA and watching him blossom into an MVP. The Jazz broke the system by drafting Stockton and Malone outside the top 10.
 
Ferguson_Mellochill said:
I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'll just say that if I were in charge of dolling out these high-value assets, I would consider the health of the league and the health of the individual franchises that I'm charged with taking care of. Unfortunately, professional sports is now primarily a media product. Digital platforms have undermined real-time broadcast media in general, and live sports has become one of, if not the, most powerful media products. So audience aggregation is an important consideration.

To keep the game going and to keep everyone rich, the league has to make money on broadcast and streaming rights. They need superstars in big markets to bring in the casual viewers. It's just that the smaller markets have much savvier GMs, like Sam Presti. Denver broke the system by drafting a perennial MVP in the 2nd round. Milwaukee broke the system by drafting a back-to-back MVP in the mid-1st round. OKC broke the system by acquiring SGA and watching him blossom into an MVP. The Jazz broke the system by drafting Stockton and Malone outside the top 10.
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It's kind of like reading Machiavelli, whose writings I respect, or realism in IR theory, which can sound so cynical, but then again, according to realists, we have no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests.
 
Conspiracy theorists always make this stuff sound somewhat plausible by carefully picking and choosing their "evidence". However, the league is full of things that make zero sense if you believe (for instance) that the draft is rigged. You just don't tend to hear about those as much.

The NBA is sports entertainment, and the new generation of casual fans doesn't care about teams, game results or championships as much. They follow their favorite players (no matter where they play), watch highlight packages and talk about non-basketball NBA drama online.

The NBA doesn't give a crap where its stars play as long as they consistently show up on social media and their highlights make the rounds. The league/sport is way too chaotic anyway, you can't control it by funneling players here and there. Too many variables.
 
The “the draft is rigged when I can put a story around it” might be worse than saying it’s just rigged. It’s not… too many people with no interest in helping each other would end up in the know. If any media and or other teams got a whiff of it it would be catastrophic to the nba. So the commissioner wants it to make the sport more popular? Silver has his pick of multiple other CEO jobs if he wants it. He has no motivation to risk everything for himself and the league to get Wemby to SA or Kyrie to Cleveland etc. maybe in the ancient early Stern days… now no damn way.
 
Saint Cy of JFC said:
How can you be carried by a team when you are the leader in basically every single stat?
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Flagg needs a ton of spacing because his offensive game is all about getting to the basket. For a college team, Duke is ridiculously good at hunting easy 3pt shots in a very deliberate manner. They function almost like an NBA team, calmly moving the ball and forcing bad NCAA defenders to scramble to the perimeter, away from their comfort zone (the collapsed paint).

The Duke system enables Flagg's entire game. They get him single coverage post-ups, wide open cutting lanes (often with nobody on him) and corner 3's. Ideal situation for a kid with a shaky outside shot and very limited ability to create efficiently off the dribble against a set defense.
 
David Hume said:
It's kind of like reading Machiavelli, whose writings I respect, or realism in IR theory, which can sound so cynical, but then again, according to realists, we have no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests.
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Did Machiavelli write about the sports entertainment industry? I can't quite recall.
 
Tremendous Upside said:
Conspiracy theorists always make this stuff sound somewhat plausible by carefully picking and choosing their "evidence". However, the league is full of things that make zero sense if you believe (for instance) that the draft is rigged. You just don't tend to hear about those as much.

The NBA is sports entertainment, and the new generation of casual fans doesn't care about teams, game results or championships as much. They follow their favorite players (no matter where they play), watch highlight packages and talk about non-basketball NBA drama online.

The NBA doesn't give a crap where its stars play as long as they consistently show up on social media and their highlights make the rounds. The league/sport is way too chaotic anyway, you can't control it by funneling players here and there. Too many variables.
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I see you've never worked in media or advertising.
 
Handlogten's Heros said:
The “the draft is rigged when I can put a story around it” might be worse than saying it’s just rigged. It’s not… too many people with no interest in helping each other would end up in the know. If any media and or other teams got a whiff of it it would be catastrophic to the nba. So the commissioner wants it to make the sport more popular? Silver has his pick of multiple other CEO jobs if he wants it. He has no motivation to risk everything for himself and the league to get Wemby to SA or Kyrie to Cleveland etc. maybe in the ancient early Stern days… now no damn way.
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Kyrie's dad said Kyrie was going to Cleveland before the NBA draft lottery.
The NBA doesn't need to rig every lottery pick, only a few important ones here and there.
 
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Try this: See if the Philadelphia 76'ers get a top-4 pick this year in order to: a) retain their pick to rebuild after a disastrous, injury-plagued season, and b) to keep another lottery pick the **** away from the OKC Thunder. That'll be my inquisitive conspiracy hypothesis for the time being.

The other one would be to put Cooper Flagg in a market like Brooklyn or somewhere he really wants to go, but I don't really have conviction on this. If Cooper gets sent to Canada, I'll be shocked and will personally apologize to everyone on this fan site.

Lastly, what's the status of the Allen family selling the Blazers? It seems like that whole discussion died down last spring.
 
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SoberasHotRod said:
Wolf with 4 points in 40 minutes, went 0-7 and had just 2 assists. He did have 13 rebounds and only 1 turnover though.

I like Wolf, but he has too many of these type of games, especially for an upper classman, for me to be able to rank him too high.
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He's a conundrum for me. Definitely in my lottery, but probably more in the 12-14 range.
 
OKC has Philadelphia's pick, Miami's pick and the Clippers' pick (swap). They're looking at adding up to three top-20 picks.

Geez.
 
I don’t have a problem believing in cynicism, for I served as an enlisted man in the US Army’s 1st Psychological Operations Battalion (Airborne) conducting armed propaganda, target analysis, and related activities in 1980s Latin America. You see a lot. But as one of our colleagues mentioned, people have big mouths, this stuff should show up.
 
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