Yes he would have
2023 NBA Draft Megathread
- Thread starter Ferguson_Mellochill
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Lively looks 1billion times better than he did in summer league and even the start of preseason. I'm going to go ahead and call it the Alex Jensen effect. He looks like he might be one of the very few rookies to be starting on a team with playoff aspirations.
From what I'm seeing here are the 2023 rookies who look like they will be starters this year: Wemby, Scoot, Ausar, Bilal, and Lively.
fishonjazz
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Black started last night and played better too. Though he came off the bench in the other games.
Bawse Dawg
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The Wemby highlights depress me. The Mitchell and Gobert trades were too good. Full blown tank was the way.
f
Wouldnt have guaranteed Wemby.
None of the Magic main rotation players played. It's looking like Black will likely start the season playing in the Gleage.
Bet they just keep him on the bench. I dont think he isnt ready, they just have a lot of guards, but I bet they try to get him in here and there.
Bawse Dawg
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No, but having a real chance would have been nice. And consider the consolation prizes.
Having Lauri Markannen is pretty nice too.
fishonjazz
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What if we could have had Lauri AND a chance at wemby? We still had lauri during the last 20 games of last season iirc and we kinda sucked. I just checked the last 20 games (just chose the number 20 at random as its a nice round number and decent sample size) and we went 7-13. Lauri was on the jazz roster that entire time. Not sure where a record that dismal puts us if extrapolated out to 82 games but I bet we would be much closer to wemby with lots more lottery balls.
If nothing else mike conley should have been dealt before the season started. An old highly paid dude does nothing for a tanking team who recently traded literally every other piece from that team. Weird to trade bogey, royce, rudy, gobert, etc but stop at conley.
He got us a top 4 protected Lakers pick in 2027. That could easily end up being better than straight tanking this past year.