NBA, NBA Draft / Jun 2, 2011 / 10:00 am

Evaluating The NBA Draft Success Of This Year’s Lottery Teams

By

CLEVELAND CAVALIERS
2011 LOTTERY PICKS: 1 and 4
PICKS LAST 5 YEARS: Daniel Gibson, Ejke Ugboaja, Shannon Brown, J.J. Hickson, Danny Green, Darnell Jackson, Sasha Kaun, Emir Preldzic, and Christian Eyenga
GRADE: B-

Amongst this group of players, the Cavs have found only two players that have worked out for them in Daniel Gibson and J.J. Hickson. Gibson was a perfect complementary player alongside LeBron James, but showed last year he can be a solid contributor for the Cavs even without LeBron creating open shots for him. Hickson has shown flashes of immense talent, but has been wildly inconsistent and has yet to find a true position in Cleveland. The other picks have had minimal or no impact in Cleveland, and Christian Eyenga has not exactly blown anyone away in his first two seasons. (A friend of mine from Cleveland said, “He’s the worst,” about Eyenga). The primary reason the Cavs’ grade is a B- and not lower is because they have had primarily late first rounders and second rounders to deal with the last five years.

Pages : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Related Posts with Thumbnails

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in NBA, NBA Draft |

  • http://www.dimemag.com Aron Phillips

    Great stuff, Marks!

  • http://www.dimemag.com Aron Phillips

    P.S. I’m not naming names, but some GMs should lose their jobs.

  • top_gun

    Great read. Only problem was that you could’ve put at least two teams per page since there was only about 6-9 lines about the team, which took a couple of seconds to read.

  • Rainman

    The phoenix Suns have the 13th pick…not the Houston Rockets, they’re 14th……………………

    I wanted a damn grade for the Suns!

  • Rainman

    ^ disregard that comment, i see they’re at 12, since the Jazz have 2 picks in the top 13, as do the Cavs.

  • JA

    Would have liked to see the players draft selection # in parenthesis after their name to get a better feel for how good/bad the pick was, but nice read.

  • heckler

    @ Aron–

    Its tough to fire GMs based draft selections.
    trying to rate teenagers as pro talent is difficult. scouting is on the toughest parts of a job. every draft has 2-3 no brainers, but the rest of the draft class is pure crap shoot.

    you fire GMs based on contracts that they give and trades that they make. But you gotta cut them some slack on talent evaluating.

  • H-man

    Excellent piece. It is amazing how many of the guys who get drafted are never heard from again. Richard Hendrix, anyone? Or how about any ONE of the multiple Eastern Europeans? Unbelievable.

  • http://deleted dagwaller

    Drafting Foye over Roy at this point is turning out to be a wash…

    The Wizards deserve FULL credit for choosing Wall. Starting in 2007, there has been a phenomenon during the season in which bad teams are said to be “taking the front seat in the Player X sweepstakes”.

    2007: Greg Oden
    2008: Michael Beasley
    2009: Blake Griffin
    2010: John Wall

    Oden hasn’t panned out yet, while Durant is first team All-NBA. Beasley (and don’t forget, he was the one that all NCAA season long, people were saying “oh he’s already doing what Durant did last year!”) hasn’t panned out, while Rose is MVP. Griffin is great, but lost an entire year to injury while Tyreke Evans, Steph Curry, and Brandon Jennings proved that this wasn’t the 1 star class everyone thought it was.

    Easy to say that Wall was the no-brainer pick, but that’s simply not true – none of these picks are no-brainers, as even recent history has shown.

-->