Well I'm finally back from my "vacation". I've been wanting to post a bunch of things, so here's some of my thoughts on recent players and crap.
I hate for it to seem like I'm jumping on the bandwagon, but I think most of you know that I usually make my own opinion for myself and don't follow others....Kendall Marshall is growing on me. If he can play like this all the time, I would have no problem drafting him. One of the main things that I liked, is that during the NC State game I believe, when Marshall was out UNC looked like absolute crap. Nobody could create anything. I'll have more on that later with another prospect. Anyways, final prognosis is that it appears my concerns about Marshall were unwarranted and for the moment, I'm willing to admit I was wrong. Oh yeah, another thing I love about Marshall is his moxie, always steady, confident, never seems flustered...that's huge for a PG. Will be interesting to see if he actually enters the draft, most everybody thinks he will, but Roy Williams seems to have this magic ability to make good players stay in school for longer than they're expected to.
Also saw quite a bit of Harrison Barnes during my away period. I have had some issues with Barnes, due to his lack of offensive creative ability. My opinion on that has not changed. However, Utah runs a similar offense to UNC (minus how much UNC runs, we never run....idiots) so personally I don't think that Barnes will ever really need to create offense for us. If we can have him running curls off of screens, getting kick outs and just having him spot up, he'll do fine here. Barnes is just one of those players that needs to go the right situation, or he won't succeed. He would be the SF that I would be the most okay with drafting this year. However there's also a serious question of how much Barnes benefits from Marshall...if you look at least year when Marshall wasn't playing a lot, Barnes' numbers were very poor. Some of that can be attributed to him being a freshman but like I said, if we draft him people need to temper their expectations and realize he does not create his own offense very well.
You guys all know how I feel about Rivers so I'm not going to go over that again. I'm still not sure if he'll enter the draft, depends how he and Duke do during the tournament (Duke is gonna lose), but my personal feelings are that he's going to stay for another year...he needs it IMO.
Watched Brad Beal play against UK, he had a phenomenal game...very nice physique (all homo). I just wish that he would do that consistently, however I do believe that he has the tools to do such. I would definitely be ok with drafting him as well.
One of my SF sleepers is DeShaun Thomas from Ohio State. Streaky shooter, but very athletic and has good size. I don't know if he'll enter the draft, but he's somebody I would take a chance on in the late first or early second if we can trade into that position.
Quincy Miller scares the absolute **** out of me. That's all on him.
MKG will be a great player, but not for the Utah Jazz.
I really missed talking to you guys, that's all of my draft notes for now. I'm sure none of you will read this, but I'm posting because I'm a delusional scout from my couch. Deal with it.
