Here's all of Sheppard's defensive matchups for the season, sorted by the most time defended. It's really not bad. https://www.nba.com/stats/player/1642263/head-to-head?dir=D&sort=SECONDS
Clingan is whatever. I haven't been really impressed. Buzelis, Castle and Ware have been the best so far imo and I would've been loved taking either of the first 2 at 3.
That's where I'm at too. Reed doesn't look like some of the epic busts like Bennett, Thabeet, to an extent Fultz, etc. Those guys looked out of place. Reed doesn't. He's got a great feel for the game and shows some really encouraging signs of playmaking potential. The shooting has been bad and if it doesn't improve he's not going to ultimately last in the league. But I'm certainly not writing that off yet. I'd trade Reed for Castle in a second right now. But that's where it's interesting because Castle has also gone through some bad shooting slumps but he's had the opportunity to play through those because of the rest of the Spurs roster and where they are at in their timeline. If Castle was here he wouldn't have had the same opportunity yet. Conversely, if Reed was with the Spurs he'd get a lot more minutes to try to work through his shooting struggles.
Reed has not adjusted to the size and speed of the NBA game. He reminds me of a gun shy quarterback who's been sacked too many times - everything is rushed even if he's not under pressure. I see him pulling up short on plays where Fred or Holiday would drive all the way to the basket, like he's expecting a block. I wish he could play more garbage minutes to get comfortable, but we don't have a lot of those games.
As a comparison: Matt Maloney shot .439 from 3 his senior year at Penn. Then as an NBA rookie, he shot .403. Being a rookie doesn't have to mean your shot completely disappears.
255 pages for Reed Sheppard!? 5,090 posts for a player who has scored a total of 133 points for his career?
do we have the same energy dissecting reed's rookie season as we did with "worst player in the league" jalen green's?
Jalen showed a lot more in his first season than Reed has so far. You could say that's due to opportunities, in part. I'm still hopeful, but I was more confident in Jalen in his year one for sure.
Maloney was also undrafted and we didn't spend a #3 pick to get him. I don't understand your point, unless you're saying Reed isn't yet mature enough to handle the pressure of the NBA, after everyone said a coach's son wouldn't have that issue.
The maturity is certainly a factor. That is my point. That's not intended to fully explain the poor play away though.
I agree that's the biggest part of it. Should've either stayed in school another year or started the year with the Vipers for 2-3 dozen games to get some seasoning. It's apparent to 90% of us that he's just not ready.
I agree with you - this was such a weak draft and Reed wasn't like the normal #3 pick. There is a fairly good case to be made that he have been picked outside of the top 12 pick in any other recent draft. Thats the problem with applying draft position generalities to something that is very much dependent on the depth of the player pool that specific year. I think even of the scouts who were high on him, similarly thought he would have to take time to adjust to NBA length/athleticism. Guys like Vecenie thought he would eventually be a valuable contributor but he even noted that the grades on Reed varied wildly among the scouting community - even the guy he shares a podcast with had him much lower. The fact Houston has turned into a solid playoff contender I think has just exacerbated the problem because Reed is definitely costing us games having to learn on the fly and those games matter this year in a way that we didn't expect them to matter so much when we were drafting last year - not that it would have changed who we drafted necessarily but that's just to say his plus minus so far suggest his minutes would be better distributed to Holiday when we are losing close games. ...but there were definitely a lot of people on the board here who thought we were drafting Steph Curry and spent a lot of time aggressively shouting down any suggestion that there was another pick here and I don't have a lot of sympathy for their disappointment because it comes from their own ignorance of unrealistic expectations for Reed.
I think one thing we're seeing is that there wasn't a lot of obvious separation in talent level in this draft class from the top of the lottery all the way back into the first half of the second round. There were a fairly normal number of legit NBA prospects, so the depth in this class was fine, but what made it such a sh*tty draft class is that the top prospects didn't really separate themselves as much as usual. I think some analysts called this out going into the draft actually. So we're kind of seeing the expected outcome in that type of situation--the best current players from the class are scattered all over, not clustered near the top like they normally would be. The other thing to mention is that the young players who appeared to have some upside to at least become fringey star players, like Sarr, Risacher, Sheppard, were just not as dominant and ready-to-go as their equivalents would normally be in another class. This gives the older, high-floor, low-ceiling guys that hang out in the late first/early second round more of a chance to excel on the rookie leaderboards than in an ordinary draft.
