Should Oden and Durant even be first round picks?
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by user Stumptown
I love to make sports predictions and mouth off about what I think is going to happen for a player or team or anything else in the world of sports. I find that being right in that situation allows you lots of bragging rights and no one really holds you to it when you’re wrong. So far my favorite “got it right” was when I called a local sports talk station before the NBA draft last year in response to a local beat writer who said the Blazers should offer every player on their roster to get the first pick so they could take Adam Morrison. I called in and said Morrison had a ceiling of Mike Miller and probably wasn’t that good and that the best player in the draft was Brandon Roy and that if the Blazers moved up they should take Aldridge. They ripped me for that on the air, but I’ve been bragging about that ever since.
But for every time like that when I called it right, there are 50 times when I was wrong. Truthfully, I follow sports fairly religiously now and that has greatly boosted my ability to call things right. Still, I’m haunted by one particular goof. The biggest Ryan Leaf call of my sports fan career is the cause for this article. It is none other than Mr. Tim Duncan. I thought he was going to be a bust. It sounds absurd now, but I honestly did. I watched him play in the ACC and he seemed soft. I just thought, this guy has the tools, but no heart and plus he can’t jump. I openly told people that he would be at the end of someone’s bench and never get off by the end of his first year. Hmmmm…guess I was a little off on that one.
To compound my mistake I argued about it repeatedly with my friend John who got me involved in his fantasy basketball league. John took Duncan with the last pick of the first round his rookie year. I made fun of him for weeks until I finally had to eat so much crow I started sprouting feathers. Duncan is, of course, a great player and looking back I should have seen then what the rest of the world did. But even more surprising to me was that Duncan was immediately an impact fantasy player.
I know we are months and months away from the start of the next NBA season and fantasy basketball drafts, but I’m still curious. Which of this year’s rookies will be worth drafting and how high will the first rookie go? Assuming you don’t play in a keeper league, do you take Oden or Durant in the first round? Second? Assume they go to Portland and Seattle as predicted. Then assume Seattle lets Rashard go. Both of those guys are getting lots of PT. I think both guys are impact fantasy players their first years, but I think Durant will put up the better numbers of the two. Still, I don’t see taking either of them before the 3 rd round in an open draft with no keepers. Am I crazy? Should they even go that high? On the flip side, if they don’t go in the first round this year it could very well be the last year of their careers they aren’t lock first round picks.
For what it’s worth, depending on where they go, here are the guys I think could make a fantasy impact as rookies: Oden, Durant, Thornton, Brewer, Green, Yi and Horford. It is really too early to make such predictions, but watching Duncan tear things up reminded me of that fantasy season when John crushed me on the back of his Duncan prophesy and I started thinking about fantasy hoops and how to avoid that happening again.
I guess I could start by not being a freakin idiot.
