The old shell game.

[Kim Malo]

At 08:46 AM 6/13/2006, Eggcentric at aol.com wrote:
>< I've no objection to show time, so long as it is fundamentally 
>solid.> - Kim As you point out, show time and fundamentally solid 
>are not necessarily mutually exclusive.   But is Sergio 
>fundamentally solid? All I know is what I hear and what I read.

I don't know - I **asked** if hot dog was all he was or.... Nor do I 
know by what I read unless I know the agenda and reliability and 
trust the judgement of the one I'm reading. I was simply pointing out 
that brushing him off just because some have labeled him a hot dog, 
as you seemed to be doing, isn't always the right thing to do.

>DraftNet Also making me a bit suspicious of Sergio's thousand points 
>of light ("all the moves of a Cousy or a Magic Johnson") is that he 
>continues to be ranked overall behind seven other point guards (many 
>of them combo guards) in a draft that is considered bereft of topnotch PG's.

Well yeah, and these draft boards tend to gush to death over players 
anyway. They're all about hype. See above about reliability and 
agendas of sources <g> So I'll look at what they focus on as good and 
bad as relevant points but not the degree, assuming that they're 
probably heavily underplaying the bad while highly overrating the good.

>  < Oh come on Egg. {Danny} Was caught off guard???? I don't think 
> so, although I agree he might not be ecstatic about having the 
> seventh pick. Ignoring tempting puns about off guard and former 
> shooting guards as GM, no way it was a surprise. It was clear for 
> the last couple of months that we'd likely be drafting in the lower 
> to mid end of the lottery. End of the first round was never an 
> option. > - Kim I never said "End of the first round."   I said 
> "bottom half." Do you really feel that when Danny was doing the 
> bulk of his scouting that he ever dreamed we would end up with the 
> #7 pick?   Even with a dozen games to go we were just two games 
> behind the 8th place rapidly self-destructing 76ers.

Right. And that still wouldn't have us in the bottom half of the 
draft. No, he didn't know we were getting number 7, but we certainly 
were headed for something within breathing distance of it, even if we 
made the playoffs as the last team in. And equally definitely not 
picking in the bottom half of the draft unless we traded down.

>    Think Danny concentrated on the top six or seven talents in the 
> draft or on the guys he felt he could grab late lottery or just out 
> of the lottery? <And say what you will about Danny otherwise, the 
> one thing he has shown he understands is the draft.> - Kim Yes and 
> no.   I personally like West, Perkins, and Gomes yet feel none will 
> ever become legitimate "stars."   Danny naively catapulted Banks 
> into a lottery pick,

Well first, you can only pick from what's there, and those weren't 
exactly top of the lottery picks. To use a Belichickism, he got good 
value for the picks. Whether or not any of that three will become a 
star depends not only on what they bring to the table, but also upon 
how you define star (e.g. is a key role player on a championship team 
a star?) and in part on what Danny does with the rest of the team. 
Are any of them likely to be MVP candidates? No. And I'm still not 
convinced Danny understands team building vs talent accumulation, and 
team building affects how *everyone* looks. But that's a different 
issue that has more to do with his other moves than the draft.

I think he did very well with the picks he had.

As to Banks, while you've made it fairly clear that you'll never give 
Danny a pass for anything, I've always given him a semi-pass for 
question marks about that first draft because he came in fairly late 
as GM,  it was his first, and he was relatively new to that whole end 
of things. If he hadn't done a good job picking after that I'd be 
less inclined to let that pass hold.
Kim