He was fairly high on both Alpi and Garuba - I think both of them were top 3 on his board for offense vs defense but he had both of them a little lower on his board overall because he worried that Alpi couldn't play defense and Garuba wouldn't be useful enough on offense. I know because I first discovered Alpi through his reporting and also thought it was a worthy flyer to take risk on Alpi later in the draft after taking what we thought was a top tier player in Jalen Green.
Pretty sure all his guides get released around a week or less before the draft. Actually a lot of them seemed to have been posted only within 48hours or so of the draft, so this is much better than that at least. I would love to have it sooner, but given all the factors involved, I'm pretty sure it will always be released around this time frame.
I have been too busy with work this year to listen to draft podcasts, but at least in terms of his history with Rockets picks, he was high on TyTy and Cam, fairly with consensus in terms of Amen/Tari/Jabari (iirc he did like Paolo/Chet more than Jabari). I think he was higher on Mobley than Jalen but overall liked all the top guys in that draft. And didn't care much for Josh Christopher. Overall he does seem to evaluate players similar to how the Rockets view them, for better or worse.
I’m sorry, I don’t know where this list came from, but it’s plainly wrong. I got so annoyed by this that I pulled his draft guides from 2020 (what 2019 in the list above actually refers to) onwards and made the below list myself: Tier Vic 2023 Wembanyama Tier 1 2020 NONE 2021 Cade Cunningham 2022 NONE 2023 Scoot 2024 NONE Tier 2 2020 LaMelo, Wiseman, Anthony Edwards 2021 Jalen Suggs, Evan Mobley, Jalen Green 2022 Holmgren, Jabari, Banchero, Jaden Ivey 2023 Cam Whitmore, Brandon Miller, Amen Thompson 2024 NONE Tier 3 2020 Okongwu, Okoro, Avdija, Haliburton, Obi Toppin, Patrick Williams, Killian Hayes, Devin Vassell 2021 Kuminga, Scottie Barnes 2022 Mathurin, Sochan, Dyson Daniels, Keegan Murray, Shaedon Sharpe 2023 Jarace Walker, Taylor Hendricks, Anthony Black, Ausar Thompson 2024 Sarr, Sheppard, Castle, Clingan, Risacher Wemby was in his own tier. Tier 1 guys are very rare. Looking back, his most obvious mistake was probably misjudging Ant. Source: his draft guides are easy to find, think you just need a subscription.
For sure, I don't disagree. Just throwing out why it might not be getting a ton of attention/replies. Honestly, not sure how much people really pay attention to this kind of stuff anyway, which is sad. There's a lot of good stuff in the guide. Even if you listen to all the stuff Vecenie puts out outside of the guides, he added a bunch more stuff in the guide.
Not that I advocate for this since Sam's work is *amazing* (as are some other folks at the Athletic). But you actually *don't* need a subscription to read most of this stuff. Let's just say they poorly "protect" their content with some simple JavaScript. (and yes there are sites that just show you all the stuff anyway, plus stuff from ESPN insider I think, which does a better/smarter job of protecting their content) And yes, his guides are super easy to find regardless.
That’s pretty dam good analysis. Especially when most of the tier one showed flashes coming into the league. I see no reason to doubt it, so far it seems he has developed a pretty good system.
I feel pretty good about my read so far on this - I had Sarr, Castle, Reed, Clingan on my board. I'm glad Vecenie called out that he is generally higher on Reed than others - Ive seen him as low as 15 on some boards so that's quite a wide variance and ultimately it rests with your view on how much his size and limited lateral mobility influence his upside. I don't think Reed is a bad player but I like the upside of Castle over Reed if you are picking him that high. I continue to have concerns that maybe Reed's ceiling is limited because of his size. If he is a Donte Divencenzo type player - that's a useful player - just maybe not the type of haul you look for with the 3rd pick when you are paying that player close to $10mil/yr while they are figuring it out....but I understand Castle has more glaring fit problems to our roster because of the shooting being his major gap but I think people are generally too low on him.
I mean, Sam's got HOURS of podcast content weekly talking about all of these things for free on youtube and honestly that's the best medium for these discussions because he increasingly does game tape break downs you miss in the written content or audio.
I found this on reddit. I don't want to pay for the sub so I couldn't check myself but if it's wrong I apologize. Ngl, your list looks way better. I was surprised he had so many people so high in the one I posted.
NBD, just didn’t want the wrong info out there… It seemed to me that the list you had was someone’s retrospective analysis of which tier the players should have been in.
I think I asked this before, but can you (or anyone) share which boards had Reed that low? I'm genuinely curious as I do like reading contrarian viewpoints (kinda like DeadOnDraft or whoever that one guy was in previous years). I can only find stuff like this: https://nbadraftnetwork.com/consensus-big-board Barlow had him 8th as the worst one there, and the median value of those boards (Vecenie, Ringer, ESPN, Yahoo, Hoop Intellect, No Ceilings, etc) was 4th. Doesn't seem like a big variance to me? Your overall point is valid, just curious about what you're seeing online.
I for one greatly appreciate it. Been reading it in bits and pieces the last couple days, and am finally ready to order all the beer and sushi at my local draft watching spot. Please basketball gods let us make the right moves.
No - you are right, I had seen that in one of the videos I had watched somewhat recently but I went back to double check that and realize it was from late February so it doesn't capture current thinking but it's interesting to see how the perception of Reed has changed so much since then - especially for a guy who put up 3 pts getting bounced in the first round 3 weeks later. By the way - thanks for sharing that link. I had stumbled on that a while back and then couldn't find it again - thanks for digging that up. It's a great way to track the hype.
Ah that makes a lot of sense. FWIW I found this reference for seeing how much certain guys tracked during the year (and I assume it is accurate): There might be a better resource that this one, especially since this one didn't bother to track guys like Clingan.
