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Following Potential 2025 Draftees

Ferguson_Mellochill said:
I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'll just say that if I were in charge of dolling out these high-value assets, I would consider the health of the league and the health of the individual franchises that I'm charged with taking care of. Unfortunately, professional sports is now primarily a media product. Digital platforms have undermined real-time broadcast media in general, and live sports has become one of, if not the, most powerful media products. So audience aggregation is an important consideration.

To keep the game going and to keep everyone rich, the league has to make money on broadcast and streaming rights. They need superstars in big markets to bring in the casual viewers. It's just that the smaller markets have much savvier GMs, like Sam Presti. Denver broke the system by drafting a perennial MVP in the 2nd round. Milwaukee broke the system by drafting a back-to-back MVP in the mid-1st round. OKC broke the system by acquiring SGA and watching him blossom into an MVP. The Jazz broke the system by drafting Stockton and Malone outside the top 10.
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It's kind of like reading Machiavelli, whose writings I respect, or realism in IR theory, which can sound so cynical, but then again, according to realists, we have no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests.
 
Conspiracy theorists always make this stuff sound somewhat plausible by carefully picking and choosing their "evidence". However, the league is full of things that make zero sense if you believe (for instance) that the draft is rigged. You just don't tend to hear about those as much.

The NBA is sports entertainment, and the new generation of casual fans doesn't care about teams, game results or championships as much. They follow their favorite players (no matter where they play), watch highlight packages and talk about non-basketball NBA drama online.

The NBA doesn't give a crap where its stars play as long as they consistently show up on social media and their highlights make the rounds. The league/sport is way too chaotic anyway, you can't control it by funneling players here and there. Too many variables.
 
The “the draft is rigged when I can put a story around it” might be worse than saying it’s just rigged. It’s not… too many people with no interest in helping each other would end up in the know. If any media and or other teams got a whiff of it it would be catastrophic to the nba. So the commissioner wants it to make the sport more popular? Silver has his pick of multiple other CEO jobs if he wants it. He has no motivation to risk everything for himself and the league to get Wemby to SA or Kyrie to Cleveland etc. maybe in the ancient early Stern days… now no damn way.
 
Saint Cy of JFC said:
How can you be carried by a team when you are the leader in basically every single stat?
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Flagg needs a ton of spacing because his offensive game is all about getting to the basket. For a college team, Duke is ridiculously good at hunting easy 3pt shots in a very deliberate manner. They function almost like an NBA team, calmly moving the ball and forcing bad NCAA defenders to scramble to the perimeter, away from their comfort zone (the collapsed paint).

The Duke system enables Flagg's entire game. They get him single coverage post-ups, wide open cutting lanes (often with nobody on him) and corner 3's. Ideal situation for a kid with a shaky outside shot and very limited ability to create efficiently off the dribble against a set defense.
 
David Hume said:
It's kind of like reading Machiavelli, whose writings I respect, or realism in IR theory, which can sound so cynical, but then again, according to realists, we have no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests.
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Did Machiavelli write about the sports entertainment industry? I can't quite recall.
 
Tremendous Upside said:
Conspiracy theorists always make this stuff sound somewhat plausible by carefully picking and choosing their "evidence". However, the league is full of things that make zero sense if you believe (for instance) that the draft is rigged. You just don't tend to hear about those as much.

The NBA is sports entertainment, and the new generation of casual fans doesn't care about teams, game results or championships as much. They follow their favorite players (no matter where they play), watch highlight packages and talk about non-basketball NBA drama online.

The NBA doesn't give a crap where its stars play as long as they consistently show up on social media and their highlights make the rounds. The league/sport is way too chaotic anyway, you can't control it by funneling players here and there. Too many variables.
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I see you've never worked in media or advertising.
 
Wolf with 4 points in 40 minutes, went 0-7 and had just 2 assists. He did have 13 rebounds and only 1 turnover though.

I like Wolf, but he has too many of these type of games, especially for an upper classman, for me to be able to rank him too high.
 
Handlogten's Heros said:
The “the draft is rigged when I can put a story around it” might be worse than saying it’s just rigged. It’s not… too many people with no interest in helping each other would end up in the know. If any media and or other teams got a whiff of it it would be catastrophic to the nba. So the commissioner wants it to make the sport more popular? Silver has his pick of multiple other CEO jobs if he wants it. He has no motivation to risk everything for himself and the league to get Wemby to SA or Kyrie to Cleveland etc. maybe in the ancient early Stern days… now no damn way.
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Kyrie's dad said Kyrie was going to Cleveland before the NBA draft lottery.
The NBA doesn't need to rig every lottery pick, only a few important ones here and there.
 
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Try this: See if the Philadelphia 76'ers get a top-4 pick this year in order to: a) retain their pick to rebuild after a disastrous, injury-plagued season, and b) to keep another lottery pick the **** away from the OKC Thunder. That'll be my inquisitive conspiracy hypothesis for the time being.

The other one would be to put Cooper Flagg in a market like Brooklyn or somewhere he really wants to go, but I don't really have conviction on this. If Cooper gets sent to Canada, I'll be shocked and will personally apologize to everyone on this fan site.

Lastly, what's the status of the Allen family selling the Blazers? It seems like that whole discussion died down last spring.
 
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