Oh snap it happened again. 14 Houston Tony Mitchell 6-8 235 SF/PF 44 Houston Robert Covington 6-9 210 SF/PF On to the next 6'8/6'9 SF/PF's.
We should have 2 Lottery picks, one being a top 5 pick for sure. With that, we would be looking at Steven Adams or Alec Brown as centers, and Ryan harrow at PG. These players are not stars, but would defentily give us some help at their respective position. The only stars in this draft are probably Cody Zeller, and Shabazz.
Oh, let's be realistic. As long as Morey is playing Moneyball with the Rockets, we will never draft a potential superstar -- Morey would trade him for a former superstar in decline. If he couldn't get an aging superstar, he would trade down to get a better value -- two for one picks to acquire more undersized tweener forwards. As long as Morey is GM, the Rockets are destined for mediocrity. Remember, Moneyball is MediocrityBall
Rebuild Please I think if the Rockets tank the Rockets will get two middle lottery picks next year. The Rockets would be bad but not worse then NO, SAC, CHA, or CLE. Some other teams are debatable. Toronto won't make the playoffs since wing players are not that good. Possible for Rockets to get a pick 1-3...it would nice. 2013: I want the Rockets to target Cody Zeller, Shabazz Muhammad, and Steve Adams as of right now. The Rockets need a franchise big man and these two are highly skilled and can play defense. Shabazz is just a scoring machine...no qualms against that. Nerlens Noel just seem like a defensive force but nothing more. 2014: Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker...honestly don't know that much about this class besides these two. We would be in the playoffs that year or next with a bright future.
2013: We should draft a Big. I don't know if i'm so high on Shabazz Muhammed's game. We'll see how he does at UCLA. Although he is very determined. 2014: Jabari PARKER!
At #16, Zeller. At #18, Fab Melo since Zeller was off the board. We needed a center more than another tweener PF like Terrence Jones regardless of whether the Rocks felt Jones was a tad better overall player than Melo. We can't teach Jones how to be a 7-footer. That said, I was hoping we could package Lowry and the #16 pick to take either Drummond or Leonard with Toronto's #8. We wound up sending Lowry to Toronto for possibly a worse pick in a weaker draft. IOW, we gave Lowry away with little to nothing to show for him.
The top of next year's draft should be very high. Everything I've seen from Shabazz (haven't seen a high schooler dominate the McD-AA game in some time) says to me that he will be the heir apparent to the SG position in the NBA. Right now it's Kobe Wade and that's it, so that may not be such a stretch. Then you can add on top of that the big men, who may not be as good as Davis was this past year, but will still be solid. Noel should be better than Drummond, Isaiah Austin for Baylor should be a similar prospect to Drummond. And then you've got the other UCLA guy Josh Anderson who is basically the Anthony Davis for PG's coming up--he's got great court vision and he's 6'8. His face is a little messed up, but so is Davis' and that didn't stop him. So yeah the top 4 should be really good. This year I felt like Davis was a legitimate #1, then only Gilchrist had potential to be a superstar. Beal's upside is Eric Gordon, except he played half as good as Gordon did his freshman year. So the top was really not so good this past year. It was actually a bad year to tank this year, Charlotte and Washington and Sacramento. Next year we've got a leg up on everyone else if we stay like this; even Dallas who would LOVE to tank right about now will find it hard to win less than us with a healthy Dirk out there.
Steven Adams and Cody Zeller look like better prospects than Noel, but that's just my opinion (Adams and Zeller have offensive games rather than just defense as in Noel's case). The fly in the ointment is Morey. He will either trade the picks for a star level player in decline or he will draft another short, tweener PF to feed his fetish for 6-7 to 6-8 power forwards he thinks can play SF.
According to NBADraft.net, were drafting 14th again and selecting UNT's Tony Mitchell. Another 6'8"-ish Power Forward. Boo.
Looking forward to the season to see which of our young prospects step up and can show some all-star potential. Could possibly end up with 2 lottery picks with ours and Toronto's unless something amazing happens. My picks: 6'6" SG Shabazz Muhammad and 7'0" C Isaiah Austin
Can someone tell me how the Raptors pick(Lowry trade) factors into the 2013 NBA Draft for us, and why dont i see the Rockets in the Raptors slot at #8 in the 2013 mock draft, although as smr said they are using last years draft order
If they finish #8 we would get it. Sounds like they just haven't updated the traded picks. Sometimes they do that in the first few mocks and then add all the draft pick trades. Basically if the pick is a lottery pick but not top 3, we get it from Toronto. Base case scenario for next year (if you only care about next year) is: Houston #1 overall, Pick from Toronto #4 overall, Pick from Dallas at #21 overall. A bunch of second rounders form these S-n-T's and such.
Shabazz is a transcendant talent. Too early to tell with Austin and Noel at this point. It's hard to see them being better than Anthony Davis was this year, and Drummond might be the closer comparison. The dark horse is Shabazz's teammate, Kyle Anderson who plays PG at 6'8. If anything he's a physical specimen with decent court vision who should be at least all-star quality and potentially could be much more. But I can't get on any of those horses except for Shabazz. That man is further along now than Harrison Barnes, Michael Gilchrist, or Eric Gordon were in their respective careers, i.e. at high school graduation. I think he will be the #1 pick to be honest, and if he's not then it's a mistake on the drafting team's part.
There's so many different ways to rate a draft class. This one surely won't have the depth of last year. But can its best player/players be better than last year's best player/players? Case in point, I and many others were panning the Blake Griffin class for being one of the worst in recent memory, but if you were the team drafting Blake Griffin, what did you care how good the other players were? In the end we were partially right, partially wrong (Harden, Evans, Rubio, Curry fulfilled expectations; Thabeet and pretty much everyone else was a bust). Personally I think the 2010 John Wall class is the worst we've seen in the decade. Who really even met expectations out of that class? Cousins and Monroe and that's about it so far. It's early yes, but I feel comfortable calling that class worse than 2009. Just goes to show you, anything can happen.