Keeping our pick? This might be a Lottery year

Something like that could happen again if we get the 4th pick, Jaden Ivey is still available, but our GM chooses someone else who turns out to be a dud while Ivey blows up on his NBA team.

 

Yeah we had the 3rd pick. Yikes!

 

It was. There was a draft party in Tualatin. Bill Schonely was there.

 

Schonz has some great stories. Reminds me of this time:

http://www.sportstwo.com/threads/a-huge-thanks-to-the-blazers-kris-schonz-rice.290988/

 

To my way of thinking, there are seven guys that kind of figure into that 1-7 pick area for the Blazers

Smith, Bachero and Holmgren as strong positional fits who also have the potential to be major difference-makers.

Ivey and Sharpe have superstar potential. You don't pass those up unless you either have a position fit that's on a par or you get a very sweet trade offer.

Murray and Mathurin are somewhat position fits with the potential to be rotational contributors fairly quickly.

 

about those Blazer draft picks:

2005: 3rd pick
2006: 2nd, 6th picks
2007: 1st pick
2008: 11th pick

in a 4 year span, the Blazers had 5 lottery picks; four top-6 picks; three top-3 picks

yet, 5 years after the 1st pick in the string, and 2 years after the last; in 2010-11 only two of the 5 players were still Blazers, and one of those was Roy and his deteriorated knees. 6 years after the 2005 draft, only one of those picks was still playing for Portland

that is the kind of opportunity that few teams have had. And it's the kind of failure that even fewer teams have had.

some would take that as a cautionary tale against tanking. But it's really an example of bad decisions and bad luck

 

Yeah, bad luck as much as anything. The 2005 draft didn't yield much of anything to anyone beyond Chris Paul, Deron Williams and Danny Granger. Webster still managed to hang around the league for 10 years, and the Blazers got Jarrett Jack late, and he was passable.

We got two all-stars the next year, so it's hard to complain. If Roy's knees don't give out and he is smart enough to realize he and Andre Miller can be great complements to each other, who knows what happens. Of course, LA eventually sulked his way to San Antonio.

The next year hurts, literally, because Oden couldn't stay healthy and Durant turned out even better than advertised and the style of the NBA changed to make him an even bigger factor. That wasn't a bad pick, though, except in hindsight; I still think if you took a poll of NBA GMs on penalty of death every one of them would have taken Oden if they had the first pick.

2008 is rough because when the draft prospects first started to come out, there looked to be a chance Russell Westbrook might be around for the 11th pick, and we needed a point guard. We took Jerryd Bayless, who, at the time, was considered in the ballpark with Westbrook but just never was a really fluid athlete and couldn't overcome those limitations while running an offense. Meanwhile, while we were able to snag Batum later on, we could have had Hibbert or Ibaka had we not picked Oden the year prior.