Jesus, did we really draft Freeland 7 years ago? That is a Stoudamire-esque level of time commitment to failure.
That's the key. There's a chance one of them will turn out well, but most will amount to nothing. If you can flip a few of them for established players or legit prospects, you do so without a second thought. The fact that we accomplished both in the course of a week is brilliant maneuvering on Olshey's part.
We gave away the only decent second round pick on that list. Hope Withey doesn't turn out to be the second.
That list is all Pritchard except the first and the last two. On half of them, he spent a million dollars to get it. But Olshey makes better picks, so it's irrelevant to the future.
The only thing that really scares me is that Neil seems to be a very good evaluator of talent, so giving away any of the guys on his big board seems risky
In general, this shows that second rounders are much more often trade assets than they are contributing players. Trade assets clearly have their own value, however. If we did get back two second rounders in the Lopez deal, as was reported this morning, I no longer care that we gave up this year's No. 39 pick in the draft. But I'm still pissed we sold a second rounder two years in a row. Unless that No. 40 pick was an under the table pay back to OKC for us getting Maynor last year, or some other unknown deal, selling picks for no asset in return is just unnaceptable.
If you go through the drafts over the last 10 years, there were definitely some really good names on there, but they are few and far between. Usually there's maybe one or two really serviceable players taken in the second round, but almost never a star quality player. It's guys like Asik, or Varejao, or Trevor Ariza, or Carl Landry..... there is the occasional Marc Gasol though. The only thing that really stands out to me is that starting quality big men can be found in the second round, so I guess that's one reason to be worried
