Strategy of drafting "twitch" athletes over good basketball players

You don't want anything to do with Miller. He's a PR disaster waiting to happen.

 

If you are making basketball decisions based on PR that's how you end up terrible at basketball.

 

Amen more skilled than a Penny Hardaway?

 

Why? To me he's clearly a lot better than Jabari.

 

This makes me think back to Stromile Swift. Amazing athlete but severely lacking in BBIQ. His time with the Rockets was a disaster.

 

In fairness, you never got to see Penny Hardaway play against unskilled 16 year old children in a glorified rec league. Most of the talk about Amen's "skills" are coming from that.

 

Okay, "nothing" is a bit overstated. But the fact is, a lot of unskilled athletic guys are out of the league after a few years. And most unathletic skilled guys have solid NBA careers.

The point is, athleticism gives you high ceiling. Skills give you high floor. Floor is more solid than ceiling because everybody is on the floor but not everybody reaches the ceiling.

I agree that if you are picking top 5, you want a high ceiling guy. But the cliché that "you can teach skills but not physical attributes" sounds right because is flawed without qualifying the nuances. Same with the "defense wins championship" cliché. Just a bunch of oversimplifications.

 

Not surprising even on draft day the Jalen green haters wants to btch about Jalen. This is literally turning into a Mobley fan pining thread again. Move on.

Personally I think that most top 5 picks should have a high mixture of skill,talent, athleticism. Why else would they be ranked/drafted that high.

 

Every draft day fans talk about past draft mistakes....and a miss on a #2 pick is something that will be talked about for decades, so you might as well get used to hearing it.

 

All of those players had incredible hand-eye coordination and dexterity.

I don't know if you define that as a physical advantage or not.

Obviously every great players is going to have some great skill or advantage - where does the physical advantage end and the mental advantage begin is hard to say sometimes.

 

Jason Kidd doesn't belong in this group. He was a physically dominant PG.

 

Amen doesn't lack basketball IQ.

I haven't seen one credible person claim that Amen doesn't process the game quickly, and he is known as being bright.

Stromile Swift was an exceptional athlete, but JVG has said that he did not even understand where to stand on the court after being physically shown over and over again.

 

When physical advantage comes up things like height, length, strength, athleticism, come to mind.

 

no idea how thats true when he's not exactly the biggest/strongest

 

He was 6'4 205 coming out of college with elite quickness and good strength. A lot of people remember the old slower Kidd but he was a beast in his younger days. He played the game really smart and wasn't overly reliant on athleticism but he had it.

 

I'm not saying you are wrong, and I agree that is what most people mean.

I am saying to me I look at it very simply - those that are great have something that they do better than almost everyone else in the world and they minimize their weaknesses.

Players like Jokic, Bird, Kidd, Stockton and many others didn't jump out of the gym or even have all world size advantages - they had unlikely or easy to overlook advantages like court vision, dexterity, processing the game fast and strong work ethics.

Great players come in all shapes and sizes

 

oh i remember how he played. i just never saw him as physically dominant. he was methodical in the way he played with a great bball iq at pg

 

I don't think anybody thinks physically dominants when they think of Kidd but he was. He had big physical advantages over other PGs.

 

All of this will be interesting to look back on in a couple years - because Amen Thompson has been the Rockets choice at #4 for well over a week - and will be the name called when the Rockets pick 4th tonight. He is 2-3 on the Rockets big board as well and someone they really think highly of - so we should all get used to it.

I believe that Amen Thompson is going to be an extreme outcome one way or the other so I am sure it will be discussed ad nauseum regardless of the outcome.

 

Blazers might go Amen or no?