you think he will improve on his game by sitting and watching vs playing and being coached out of those habits in live game scenarios?
The overall evidence has shown the kid can be a spot up bucket to go along with his Defense and outstanding character. Has always been my favorite for the Atlanta pick with that cast of forwards available. Really think the Spurs hit it out the park with this one.
I thought Carter made some really nice passes tonight, one really nice cross court one, found a couple cutters, that nice wrap around at the rim for the dunk. Was impressed with his shooting, the drive and pull up jumper in the lane where he bounced Kon off him like he was a child.
Defensively though he was real bad and disengaged tonight especially off ball. But I’ll take it if that’s what it took to get his offense going finally.
Maybe the Austin team is better (I don’t know), but the G league is not known for teams playing solid, fundamentals basketball. I don’t think he’d learn how to be a role player in the G league
Why would you toast to a comment saying exactly the opposite of what you said?
Personally, I'm more worried about his lack of awareness when he's guarding off ball. He needs to work on that if he wants to be a positive on defense. All that try hard stuff he does for show when he's on ball means nothing if he doesn't become smarter and starts to pay attention to what's going on around him, when he's off ball.
He's a teenager.
His passing game is what I see people talk about being unappreciated the most. Think that bodes pretty well for his fit with ball dominant players of he's able to keep the ball moving efficiently when he does have it.
Hopefully that's something he can improve on, but, on any sport, I tend to see that players with high levels of awareness, IQ and instincts bring that from the cradle. It's rarely something you can magically turn on.
You can work on it though by learning some basic defensive rules as to not get burn so often.
Im happy he hit open shots.Playing good defense and hitting open 3s is a must from him.
Did he get injured? Just saw the highlights and he was limping a bit at 5:18 mark in the 4th Quarter.
Under Scott King last season, the defense of the full-strength Austin squad was pretty remarkable. As for offense it depends on who's running the point. Losing Bouyea was a real blow as Nelson isn't ready for prime time. Have to see who gets signed.
Would make sense for Bryant to get closer to the Vassell-rookie treatment (17 mpg as a deep bench player) as opposed to the Lonnie-rookie treatment (lots of time in Austin, 7mpg over 17 games in the NBA as a rookie) or the Sochan-rookie treatment (26mpg, started 53 of 56 games).
I thought he was a lot better this time. Yes defensively he was asleep, getting hit by cutters all the time and always away from the action in general, but i thought those were mostly summerleague forgivable offenses. On the offensive side, I liked his drives, TO or not, he seems fast enough were you can imagine that he'd be able to develop that and be less predictable. The triples were all wide open but still good. All in all, just a generic summerleague game, which is a great improvement over the devastation of the previous games.
Yeah, I can really see Bryant developing into an elite role player, a la Danny Green.
CB will be a beast by the time he's 23 or so.
Nice to see him (finally) get some shots to fall. I agree with Scott that the Vassell treatment of 15-17mpg will be the approach. Some G-League to keep him in shape, but mostly 12th man minutes.
My guess is that Bryant spends a good amount of time in the G League for the first couple of months, but as injuries inevitably pop up + he develops he’ll start to see more time with the main squad.
I think the estimate of him playing 15-17 mpg probably isn’t happening until post-ASB but we’ll see. With the type of prospect he is it would be a big win if he’s actually ready to be a rotation player by the end of his rookie year.
Atleast his 3 point stroke comes natural unlike Sochan's. His Basketball IQ is lacking but as long as the kid works hard the Spurs will do everything to turn him into a real NBA player.
I didn’t bring any Barnes stats, you’re referring to another poster I guess
Then you tried to have your cake and eat it too by bringing up Barnes stats to help your case when in the proposed scenario Barnes would be on the bench in favor of Sochan. And then you say that SGA who shot 38% from 3 last year is the same type of shooter as Fox who shot 31%? SGA is closer to leading the ENTIRE league in 3point FG% than Fox is to SGA. So yeah you’re going to get roasted by saying Fox, Castle, Wemby, and Vassell are all just as good shooters as Dort, Williams, Chet, and SGA.
To make it simple for you I will rank them.
1. Dort
2. SGA
3. Chet
4. Vassell
5. Williams (who is .3% behind the Spurs best shooter)
6. Wemby
7. Fox
8. Castle
So one team has 3 out of the top 4 shooters in their starting line up. And the other team has 3 of the bottom 4 shooters in their line up. Not exactly even
Even if the Spurs traded the pick before the 2nd round, there were other picks traded with Raynaud still on the board which the Spurs could have easily obtained dirt cheap (future 2nd + cash, a couple of really bad seconds, etc) to draft him (or anyone else) if they wanted to. Either the Spurs didn't want Raynaud at all or, at least, not enough to give him a decent guaranteed contract. Bottom line, it wasn't going to happen, pick or no pick.
Indeed. The Spurs clearly just didn't have an interest in Raynaud.
The real criticism, IMO, is just how the Spurs approach the second round in general in the Brian Wright era. Here is his second round history:
Traded Away:
#38 (2022)
#33 (2023)
#35 (2024)
#38 (2025)
Actually picked:
- #41 (2020) - Tre Jones, signed a multi-year partially guaranteed deal (very good pick, IMO), got to a second contract with us, now on his third contract with Chicago. Solid NBA deep bench player.
- #41 (2021) - Joe Wieskamp, signed a two-way deal, then converted to a regular contract post ASB his rookie season, then signed a 2-year 4.4MM contract (1 year guaranteed), then was waived two months later creating $2.2MM dead cap hit. This one is one of those "wtf" kind of things... but maybe the Spurs just thought they'd do Joel a solid and gift him a couple million bucks for the trouble to help them meet the salary floor?
- #44 (2023) - Sidy Cissoko, signed a multi-year, partially guaranteed deal. Used in Fox trade.
- #36 (2024) - Juan Nunez, I wouldn't even call this a draft-and-stash. It's a draft-and-punt. There is no reason to believe Juan Nunez will ever get an NBA contract.
- #48 (2024) - Harrison Ingram, signed to a two-way deal.
Brian Wright seems to have purposely avoided high SRPs, but he's not singularly focused on two-ways. He's picked guys who get NBA deals. But aside from Tre, none of these guys have ever really looked like NBA players while there have been plenty of other guys he could have picked who do look like NBA players.
Why this is the approach... who knows? Whether it's right or wrong, good or bad is up to debate.
But it does look like outside of can't miss blue chip prospects (Wemby, Castle, Harper) he has a proclivity to like to draft projects (Vassell, Primo, Sochan, Bryant). I include Vassell in that list because he wasn't really a big time college performer either. None of these guys averaged over 10ppg in their college careers. Vassell averaged 12.7ppg his sop re season, but was picked ahead of guys with more impressive college production. Haliburton, Nesmith, Maxey are the hits, but even some of the guys outside of these big hits in the NBA picked behind him had more impressive college production: Lewis, Bey, Stewart, Anthony. I'm not suggesting that this means Vassell was a bad pick or we should have taken Lewis, Bey, etc... I'm just pointing out that Brian Wright loves himself a project.
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