http://www.dukebasketballreport.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16425

Not a real long thread. Coach K is a Douglas fan ….I heard that best on the ball defender in college somewhere else …-might- have been to the Tallahassee press But he did I know say Toney was his favorite player. Then quickly amended outside of his own team.

the way that recent Knicks history has gone, I’ll believe this doesn’t happen when it doesn’t, and not before.

http://www.wagesofwins.com/PAWS40Draft09.html

A bit of a pit in my stomach, I must say.

First time caller… long time listener.

Is Kidd enough to bring LBJ to NY? personally i would prefer sessions after watching him disect our Defense many a time. However , if Kidd is the route towards the King … thats where my heart is.

I think his falling to 37 says a lot about GMs inability to understand odds, and the true value of draft picks. Basically, once you get by #10 in a weak draft, it’s worth picking a guy who dominated in college and has a decent chance of being a really good pro – even if there’s a 50+ percent chance that his knees blow out inside 5 years. YOur average #10 pick projects to be a below-average starter – it’s silly to play it conservative, at that point. Especially once you hit teams in the late teens or 20s, playoff teams that could be good in a year or two.

I think it’s telling that “stat favorites” Lawson and Blair ended up with teams with great management.

re: Fazekas, a caveat – no one ever said that because he had the highest number attached to his college stats, he was the “best” prospect in the draft – just that he should have gone much higher than 35.

I agree with Mike on this one — I won’t be a bit surprised to see Fazekas surface as a good NBA player. Getting cut as a 2nd-round rook doesn’t prove he can’t play – Nuggets were loaded at his position and I put Dallas & the Clips in the category of teams with crappy personnel departments.

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/11905857

I mostly agree with you. The fact is, though, that sometimes the players we wanted are the ones we regret our teams letting slip and sometimes they aren’t.
There are obviously countless examples, of course, but here are a few that come to mind. If I were a Hawks fan I’d have been pretty upset about passing on Paul. Some Knicks fans were upset about taking Frye over Bynum. I wasn’t thrilled with them taking Sweetney over Pietrus.

Not really. It’s impossible to lose, if NBA minutes is the only way to prove that the GMs were right or wrong.

The fact is, Fazekas was on several team’s rosters, and all of them (after playing him and presumably comparing him to the other big-men on their team) rated him low on their depth charts. He was waived by the Nuggets; he was waived by the Clippers, a demented franchise, but one with luxury of time to let promising young players develop; he was even waived by Dallas in favor of signing a retired Kieth Van Horn (a claim to fame he’s probably still bragging about).

Very few players dominate the D-League and then dominate the NBA. Maybe Fazekas will be the exception and prove all those teams wrong, but its not like he never had a fair shot. Even the stat-savvy GM(s) didn’t show much interest.

But I’m really not trying to argue that stat guys were wrong about him. My original point was that on draft day we tend to curse GMs for passing over guys we think are “good picks” based on their stats. But, if one was to go back over the years, these players aren’t the ones we regret letting slip by. In 2007 both Ramon Sessions and Marc Gasol were drafted after Fazekas. I think more people regret letting them slip by.