Its time to break our boys down once and for all...I personally am tired of all the thoughts that we suck because we don't currently have the line up of last year or a list of all stars on our roster. Our Roster with regards to draft placement: Miller.................5th pick,2000 Kaman..............6th pick, 2003 Henderson......12th pcik, 2009 Aminu..............8th pick, 2010 Davis...............13th pick, 2010 Lillard...............6th pick, 2012 Leonard...........11th pick, 2012 Harkless..........15th pick, 2012 McCollum.......10th pick, 2013 Plumlee..........22nd pick, 2013 Crabbe.............31st pick, 2013 Pressey..........Undrafted, 2013 Frazier...........Undrafted, 2013 Vonleh..............9th pick, 2014 Connaughton...41st pick, 2015 Two glaring things come to mind so far. Our future consists of no one who has been in the league more than 6 years. We have 10 guys that were drafted top 20 and 6 guys 10th or better. Now lets compare this to a few of last years playoff teams... say, GS, LAClippers, SA, Cleveland (four teams that are in contention for next year as well). SA Duncan......................1st, 1997, 1st, 82 games: 21.1/11.9/2.7, 2nd, 50: 21.7/11.4/2.4, 3rd, 74: 23.2/12.4/2.4 Ginobili..................57th, 1999 Parker....................28th, 2001 Diaw.......................21st, 2003 Bonner..................45th, 2003 Belinelli..................18th,2007 Splitter..................28th, 2007 Anderson...............30th, 2014 Daye.......................15th, 2009 Ayres.......................31st,2009 D.Green................46th, 2009 Mills......................55th, 2009 Williams.......Undrafted, 2010 Leonard..................15th, 2011 Joseph...................29th, 2011 Baynes..........Undrafted, 2013 J.Green..... ...Undrafted, 2015 GS Barbosa................28th, 2003 Livingston...............4th, 2004 Iguodala..................9th, 2004 Bogut.......................1st, 2005 Lee.........................30th, 2005 Rush......................13th, 2008 Speights.................16th, 2008 Curry..................... 7th, 2009 Thompson...............11th, 2011 Barnes.....................7th, 2012 Ezeli......................30th, 2012 Green.....................35th, 2012 Kuzmic..................52nd, 2012 Holiday.........Undrafted, 2013 Mcadoo.........Undrafted, 2015 LAC Crawford.........8th,2000 Turkoglu.......16th, 2000 Barnes..........48th, 2002 Jones............20th, 2003 Paul................4th, 2005 Redick...........11th, 2006 Hawes..........10th, 2007 Davis............36th, 2007 Jordan.........36th, 2008 Griffin.............1st, 2009 Hudson.........59th, 2009 Udoh...............6th, 2010 Hamilton.......26th, 2011 Rivers............10th, 2012 Wilcox............28th,2014 Cleveland Marion..............................9th, 1999 Miller...............................5th, 2000 Haywood........................20th, 2001 James...............................1st, 2003 Perkins............................27th, 2003 Jones.............................49th, 2003 Smith...............................18th, 2004 Varejao...........................30th, 2004 Amundson............Undrafted, 2007 Love.................................5th, 2008 Price...............................52nd, 2009 Mozgov..................Undrafted, 2010 Kirk.......................Undrafted, 2010 Irving..................................1st, 2011 Thompson..........................4th, 2011 Shumpert..........................17th, 2011 Waiters..............................4th, 2012 Dellavedova...........Undrafted, 2013 Harris..............................33rd,2014 Cherry....................Undrafted, 2014 Hmmm. Seems so far, other than the years of experience, we are right about par with the draft position average. Cleveland has the most top 5 drafts, but also the most undrafted players on their roster. Now to say we don't have experience.. sure. true. But how do you get experience? You play. I see many of the players on our roster are right at the point of turning the corner if they are to do so. New rosters, everyone competing, this lineup is primed for this type of team and environment. I wouldn't be surprised if 1-15 makes huge strides in training camp and preseason alone. By the way, when I was putting this together (I didn't have the time to get that deep), I noticed another glaring item. Most of the players on the other teams, didn't do much their first year or two in the league. stats were mostly in single digit ppg, minutes played and number of games a season were also very inconsistent. Much like our roster. The only thing we are missing is a couple of star names, but when analyzing some of these numbers, this sure seems to be the year for several of our guys to be able to break out. At any rate I think I have cleared two things up..... 1st, this team CLEARLY doesn't suck and wont be a bottom four lotto pick, but is CLEARLY an unknown. 2nd, There is no real reason to try to tank this season to try to get a lotto pick when our lineup is very similiar to the top tier teams when it comes to draft positions of respective rosters. What is one more top ten draft pick going to do for this lineup? Another unknown? Meh... 42 48 55 amount of wins over the next 3 years.
wow, that was a quite a bit of huffin and puffin, common sense says we will not be very good next year, I think if there is a surprise we could be "decently" better than many expect, I just hope one or two of the new guys really shows something and guys like CJ and Meyers build on what they showed in the playoffs, I will be happy with that within the parameters that it is going to be a long season
You hope that one or two of the many young players we have show something? As in improve? They'll all improve, how much is the question. There's no reason why CJ and Meyers wouldn't build on their playoff performances. They're 24 and skilled as hell. And with many other guys being thrust into bigger roles, I expect a lot of them to improve enough to make us a 35 to 40 win team.
There will times this team will look like team that people will praise but there will days where everyone will want to trade everyone away. I believe if players play up there upside we could make playoff teams live miserable at the end of season.
We have a lot of talent. A guy like Plumlee for example is on the US team and although he isn't an all star he could give as some very solid minutes at least. I think we have many such players coming in, talented players who are relatively cheap and who are used to playing less than a starting role and would be fine with 20 minutes or so. This gives us a very deep roster with many options, many different possible rotations and diversity in talent. We're one or two players from really contending but already have an interesting, to me even exciting, team
I think we have talent, but it's very young and very unproven. I think Vonleh has a reasonable chance to be a star player but some of these guys are going to miss, too, and several guys on the roster are journeymen. I don't expect to see a lot of consistent performances on offense, and I will be surprised if we are very good defensively. That's what you often see with young teams. I don't see this as being any different. I think it will be fun to watch at times and think about how good some of the players might be, but, honestly, I think getting a top-10 pick and getting a lot of minutes for these young kids would be the best thing that could happen to this organization right now.
Isn't that pretty much what I said? We have a line up that wont suck if most of the players meet or exceed expectations when being brought in. NO I never said we will make the playoffs this year, but suck to me means 20-30 wins with no future in site. Even if we get only 30 wins, far below my prediction, we still have a HUGE upside. That isn't sucking. Id MUCH rather be in the position we are in over teams like NJ, Sacramento, etc. Your on!
And aren't you missing a couple of Spurs? You know, the 6'11" ones with the super long arms? The ones drafted 1 and 2?
Huh? I took Last years rosters because odds are this years will have changed by opening day. I compared them to our current roster. Diez, Montero and Alexander I didn't add because they will not have any type of impact next year in my opinion.
Hmm I think something happened in my reorganization of the years. Duncan was in there, but I must have deleted him. I will reassess and update this evening maybe with some more stats to back up the fact that this team doesn't suck, but has more potential now than many playoff teams a year before they made it to the playoffs. Edit: Yeah, boy. I see a few screw-ups. I will fix tonight and I will add the PPG/AST/REB stats for all players their first three years. I think this is where people will be like... oh.. okay this team IS comparable to the top tier teams, just a couple years behind.
Until Stotts can make a system that is more valuable than superstars, it doesn't matter what players we have. Pops will always have a leg up over any talent we field.
I think whether we suck or not depends on how each individual defines "suck". If it's purely based on W/L as compared to previous Blazers seasons, then yeah, we're gonna suck - especially if you're comparing this year's W/L to last year's W/L. If it's based on league-wide W/L then we'll suck less than the first scenario, but still moderately suck. If your definition has some basis in future growth then the team doesn't suck at all - it is actually in a better position than we were in last season, and much better off than had we brought back all of our Free Agents on new contracts. Unless the team is right on the cusp of a Championship I prefer to look at it with an eye towards the future, so I definitely fall into the 3rd category definition. I don't care so much about W/L record, but want to see individual development and the foundation of a strong system. If we fail at those two things my opinion will slide towards the "suck" end of the scale.
