Olshey's comments remind me of the difference between talent and skill. Skills are learned and need long practice, talent a person is born with or not. Simons needs to work on skills but talent is there.
c'mon man....there has been a tsunami of "nice" written about Ant this off-season jabbering about "how-great-he's-going-to-be". That 'article' you're defending is one of dozens. It's over-the-top and typical of off-season-we're all-bored hype and pointing that out isn't nearly as 'bad' as the over-sensitive and defensive responses like yours right there. Oh, and by the way...it was just a joke for chrissakes; lighten up francis for the 'record': I think Simons is going to be a pretty good player. I have no clue what his ceiling is. But while I think he's going to end up a good player, I think the odds are high he will struggle at times next season, perhaps a lot. I wouldn't be surprised with a Layman type of season where he looks great part of the time and looks like a scrub part of the time. The NBA scouts players that have an impact and teams come up with adjustments, often very effective ones. Simons doesn't even have a year of NCAA play as a foundation, and so far the roster construction makes it look like he's going to be tossed into the deep end of the pool another thing: I believe a whole bunch of this hype deluge is from Olshey, both on the record and off the record. Maybe he's going to be proven right about Simons. But I hope if Simons does struggle this season to live up to the hype, it doesn't affect him in a negative way
Holy hell, some of the superlatives in that article are too much, even for me. This reads like an SI article about Sebastian Telfair from 2003. (Rick Pitino cameo included, for those of you that remember the connections there)
Unless Olshey was planning on trading Simons, what reason would he have to be behind all this hype? If it's to show how good of a GM he is, wouldn't hyping someone up this much potentially lead to disappointment? Lately Olshey seems more like the set low expectations type of guy than to over hype someone.Wouldn't it be better to hide Simons and have him surprise everyone next year?
I know it was a “joke” at least in part, and so was my Debbie Downer response. Just seems to me that there has been that kind of comment this summer to all of the reports about Ant. I get that Olshey sold it pretty hard in that interview, but I don’t see that he has anything to gain by making as effusive of a claim about Simon’s talent if he doesn’t actually believe it. What does he gain if Simons plays like crap except looking like either stupid or a huckster? Based on comments I have seen from Dame, CJ and other coaches, the consensus seems to be that we got a real steal on Ant. Does that mean he won’t struggle at times? Of course not, but wouldn’t it be great if we’ve struck gold for once?
I agree it would be great if Portland struck gold, for once, outside the lottery. In the last 10-15 years, I don't think they have. You have to go all the way back to Zach Randolph at #19 in 2001. They drafted Cliff Robinson at #36 in 1989; They used a 24th pick on Arvydas Sabonis and a 24th pick on Terry Porter...that was definitely striking gold. They struck bronze with Batum I guess as for why Olshey may be hyping Simons, I don't know. It's entirely possible he believes everything he's saying, and he may be right. But it wasn't just that one blurp in the press conference. Olshey has been quoted a couple of times in articles praising Simons, and he made a point of praising Simons when he sat in for a quarter on the broadcast of a summer league game I watched. So it would seems a safe assumption he's saying the same things off the record, IMO now, as I mentioned in the off-season there's a hard media search for something, anything, to write about. And the media is an echo chamber so maybe a lot of this is germinating from earlier hype
You want to hear someone hype Anfernee Simons, you should listen to some of Dame's comments about him, and even some of ET's. I think the entire organization really believes Simons is going to be a star someday. Could they all be wrong? Of course, but they seem to all be on the Simons bandwagon right now.
Ant, Whiteside, 538's 38 win prediction, and more. These are all reasons why I'm excited about the upcoming season.
