He just doesn't have NBA caliber talent. He doesn't possess explosive quickness/speed. His court awareness/vision is below average/mediocre. His ball-handling skills and jump shot are poor. And he seems a little soft/fragile. He'll most likely be playing overseas in 2-3 years.
Probably not ... and I felt this way when we drafted him, but at least now we're probably going to find out for sure one way or another. I'm all about removing all doubt and then moving on (something that probably should have been tried with Bayless).
Drafting Smith has got to be one of the biggest draft goofs in franchise history only because he was projected to be a 2nd rounder. And the player everyone wanted and the mock drafts predicted we would draft, Kenneth Faried, is having a SOLID rookie season so far.
Flynn is a bum. Is that a good enough reason? Haha. Bayless is putting up a 17.4 PER this year and is a month younger than Nolan Smith. If it were just a matter of retrospect, it would be bad enough. That it was so fucking painfully obvious at the time that it was a mistake makes it terrible. Ed O.
Keep in mind that the same group of geniuses who drafted Nolan Smith and Luke Babbitt are likely going to have two decent lottery picks to fuck up this June. Can't wait!
Blame your hero McMillan for both picks. He wanted Coach K's recommendation, and Babbitt was drafted because he was whining for a shooter.
It must be fun to have it both ways. They waited too long to dump Outlaw, Webster, etc. They should have waited to trade Bayless. By the way, McMillan was behind the Bayless dumping. Thus his preceding praise for Armon Johnson.
By the time Bayless was shipped out they had already missed their window with him, they should have made a commitment to see if he could learn and play through his mistakes starting in year one, but they never did that and by year three there were a few things working against him staying in Portland. 1) He wanted out and wasn't happy with his situation. 2) Nate was never going to be comfortable with Bayless as his point-guard and at the time of the trade I think Nate was being given a lot of say on roster decisions and finally, 3) the team was fully committed to making the playoffs at all costs leaving little to no time for living through the inevitably steep learning curve that would accompany trying to give Bayless enough leash to learn to play the point in the NBA. I still don't know if Bayless will ever be a point guard a team can win with but even so I still feel like the way he was handled here was just a colossal waste of time
It's all relative. Deep draft means everyone gets good players, so no edge is attained by anyone. To make progress against the field, you need a top pick in a shallow draft. Here's a fine example. 1.Blake Griffin 2.Thabeet 6.Flynn
As a critic of Pritchard and McMillan, I think the former was right to draft Oden, and the latter was right to dump Bayless. Bayless is getting stats on a bad team temporarily while Calderon is out. They can't move up if Bayless plays a major role.
Last I checked, Bayless gets his assists only by dishing off to teammates standing in preplanned locations while he drives head-down. No court vision, but gets assists that way. I just checked. Calderon back tonight, 35 minutes, Bayless 13 minutes. His 15 minutes of fame are up. Make that, down.
He's 23 years old. He's got plenty of chances to improve and show that his success this year isn't a fluke. Ed O.
