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I'm not sure I'd say Top 2, but I'd say he could be as good as Top 5.
If you believe in made up numbers like "PER" then perhaps they just did. He had the best PER of any prospect in the draft, including that weird looking dude from OU.
Blair was definitely the best rebounder in the draft, if not in many drafts. He made the great imposing #2 pick his woman when they went head to head in the last NCAA season.
While his knees were a major factor in his slide down the draft board, Blair is an excellent test of the use of SABRmetrics in basketball as a player evaluation tool. Despite the acceptance and use of quan ative analysis in the NBA, perhaps old habits die hard.
I'm not sure I'd say Top 2, but I'd say he could be as good as Top 5.
So, "PERhaps"....
hollinger is laughin...i love stats
that , lets see what he can do in camp and nba first.
Of course. But that holds true for all draftees. The Spurs appear to have ganked one of the top 2 players in the draft.
All three picks appear to be great picks. Things could go bad, as they have been known to do, but this could turn out to be one of the Spurs' best 3 drafts.
Great pick where the Spurs got him, but one of the top 2 players in the draft? Uhh no.
I'd say with the combination of skill, strength, and readiness to play, he's probably close to a top 15 player in the draft right now.
Among the NCAA players in the draft, who produced more than him last season? He destroyed the #2 in the draft head to head.
I dobn't pay any attention to PER. Didn't Bonner have a better PER than Duncan last year?
Right, which is why you look at things like a player's rebounding rate and actual play, including head to head matchups. Blair had the best rebounding rate of any prospect in the last ten drafts.
While the rest of the league was sitting with their thumbs up their asses, the Spurs took one of the draft's best players.
I like Hollinger - he is who he is, and doesn't pretend to be anyone else.
He's a stat guy, he tells you the stats he uses, how he uses them, and then ranks the players. Nothing wrong with that in my book. Obviously stats don't tell the whole story - but it's certainly part of it.
Watching Blair toss Thabeet around like a ragdoll is a good part of the story as well.
I hope the guy can contribute. If he can give us 5-7 boards per game in limited minutes, we'll call it a win and be VERY happy.
????? NO
Spurs were very friends with PER last year. While any other team has two players in the TOP 13, the spurs third player in PER ranking was 11th (manu, behind tim at 5 and tony at 8).
Bonner wasn't even in the TOP 50.
While i wouldn't use PER as a sure thing to rank exactly players, you usually don't see many scrubs among the TOP10, not to talk about the TOP 1 as Blair is.
How does it translate to NBA is the question, but that's the same for every pick.
Production is still king over potential in my book.
If you can get a guy who has essentially out produced all the compe ion on the collegiate level, how can you not like the guy?
Potential doesnt win les anyway. Production does.
He should be a beast of a rebounder. Could play bigger than his size like Barkley did. For him to be top two he would need a more polished offensive game.
But he should pan out as a should of been drafted in the lottery type of player.
+1
Millsap led the nation in rebounding for three straight NCAA seasons. He somehow fell to the second round. Worked out pretty well for the Jazz.
If only he had the polished offensive game of a Hasheem Thabeet.
The problem with your argument is that the #2 pick in the draft is/was not a top 2 player in the draft either. For me personally, I don't think Thabeet was a top 10 talent in this draft. He's big and can block shots. That's about it. I thought he was a bad pick by the Grizzlies.
Aside from Blake Griffin, you could argue Stephen Curry, James Harden, Tyler Hansbrough, Jordan Hill, Lester Hudson, Eric Maynor were more productive than Blair.
And statistics aside, you can argue guys like Earl Clark, Ricky Rubio, James Johnson, Terrence Williams, DeMar Derozen, and Toney Douglas project to be better NBA players than Blair.
Like I said, Blair was a great pick where the Spurs got him. And, as a "college" player, he was definitely one of the more productive players in the draft. That college production doesn't necessarily make him a top 2 player in the draft.
Thabeet is more of a low post intimidator- shot blocker. A different type of player and no he does not have an offensive game. The spurs can use a low post shot blocker.
Right, those guys "project" to be better. But who was actually better on the court?
Good post. There will be other good players better than Blair picked after the top two.
So what kind of contract do you offer a player who almost certainly would have been in the Top 10, if not for concerns about his knees? You've got guys from last year's draft like Donte Green, Kosta Koufos, and Alexis Ajinca - all making over $1M per season, and putting up crap numbers. They got drafted in the first round because they might have potential to develop into decent players. Then you have Blair who most people think will be able to contribute his first season, who didn't get drafted in the first round, because teams are worried that he might not last. Do you offer him something closer to the bottom of the first-round scale, and make the contract contingent on health? Do you offer him somthing in the middle, like the $800K that Houston gave Joey Dorsey? Or do you give him something closer to the minimum, and ride him for a couple of seasons as cheaply as possible?
Ike Diogu was one of the most productive players in his draft class, Michael Wright, Sam Clancy, Lonny Baxter. You can go down every draft and find a guy that ripped up in college but simply doesn't translate as well at the NBA level. If you want to amend your argument and say Blair "was one of the most productive players in college" in this draft, that's more than a fair statement. To say he's a top 2 player in this draft is most likely inaccurate. It's not just about production on the court on the college level.
Not that you have slots for the 2nd round, but you give the 37th guy slot money, with no reward for being unwanted by other teams. The only time you give more is if you are competing with a foreign team.
Ike Diogu is probably a stud, for some reason all of his teams never play him.
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