Trail Blazers begin NBA draft Do any of these players interest you for our second round pick or any other reason?
Only Dominic waters because I went to highschool and middle school with him haha. I didn't follow much of his college career but I remember him being pretty good at scoring
After doing a little research, i found out that 8 of these 12 players are either point guards or undersized Shooting guards who might be able to convert to point guards; this seems to indicate that the Blazers don't think Bayless is the longterm answer at PG (and I agree). The other four players were all power forwards, they were all labeled with terms like "soft", "doesn't like contact", rail-thin"; so I don't know what they are looking for there. Maybe they miss Channing Frye. The only player who seemed interesting to me was Dominic Waters who had good size for a PG and had a .435 3-pt shooting percentage, led his league in assists and free throw percentage, but he was not even in the database of draftexpress or nbadraft.net. So I have no idea what his defensive ability might be or even his athleticism.
I see that Chad Buchanan says they expect all 7 of the underclassmen in the workouts to go back to school, so i guess a lot of this was just kind of a getting acquainted thing.
I can't say any of those guys get me particularly excited, but then again most of these guys are fringe second rounders so they're probably just trying to get feedback on whether or not they should pull out or stay in -- although I believe the deadline was yesterday if I'm not mistaken? As for them bringing in a lot of combo guards and point guards I suppose you could infer that they aren't sold on Bayless as PGOTF, as I think it's fairly apparent he's probably "backup shooting guard of the future" on this team (if he stays), but who knows.
I'd guess that who they have coming in this early doesn't reflect an assessment of their roster but rather who wants to show up and work out. my own take is that they have no pressing needs and plenty of worthy players already under contract. Still they'll want to add talent to their group with every opportunity. I look for them to package the pick and move up or out of the draft altogether. STOMP
I think we need to target a great defender at guard above all else. But who are the top defenders in College Basketball? Anyone have ESPN insider who can summarize this ranking by Franschilla?
I've seen Dominic Waters play for Portland State several times and he's really good. I'm not sure if he'll play in the NBA, but I wouldn't count him out though.
Good, but he wasn't playing against anyone of note really. Waters is a very good all round player, with no real weaknesses. He's definitely the best pro prospect I've seen at Portland State since I started attending games about six years ago. He's a more polished point guard than Bayless or Mills, and a good athlete, but doesn't possess the hops of Bayless nor the Quickness of Mills. A little above average athlete I'd say. He'll play professionally somewhere, but may not be the NBA.
