I think one of the things that’s helped me mostly check out from the draft over the past few years is the inflated value placed on the perceived physical or “unteachable” components of a player. It becomes the most alluring thing that distracts from certain smaller issues like… can someone actually play basketball. The physical tools combined with all the other fundamentals obviously gives you really high ceiling guys, but a lot of guys come and go while having all the ‘tantalizing’ physical tools but lack the most essential: being able to play basketball. I don’t know how many boners have flown over the years for guys like Saer Sene, Jan Vesely, or Bismack Biyombo. The year we landed 5th and got Exum I definitely didn’t see anything but hoped for the best on “Australian Kobe” hype and didn’t have any other choice. But I’d imagine everyone (GMs, pundits, and fans) would do much, much better in their drafting fantasies if they were running a track and field franchise rather than a basketball one. Guys like Darius Miles get drooled over and coveted until we learn 4-5 years down the road that they don’t really play basketball that well, when it seemed obvious from the get go.
This is the overreaction thread and I’m kind of agnostic on the whole thing. But Tre is a guy who can play basketball. I hope we’ve made the right choice and that the experts see something that my non-expert *** didn’t, but I hope we didn’t pass on him because we’re trying to run a track and field franchise and couldn’t see him as an actual basketball player because he wasn’t giving us physicality boners.