I like this year’s crop of centers. There isn’t the star power we had last year with Oden, but there are enough good prospects that watching this bunch develop over the next few years should be interesting. This year one of the questions will be whether to go for potential or immediate help. Roy Hibbert is available and offers any team a useful defensive presence on the inside immediately. I don’t think there’s a team in the NBA that couldn’t use that. But there are also some young players out there with legitimate promise who are a couple years away from making an impact.
NBA Draft 2008: Combo Forwards
This is the other half of the small forwards, or more accurately a 3rd group of forwards. The problem I had ranking these players with the other was I felt they were different types of players. A good example is last year with Al Thornton and Corey Brewer. Both were listed as SFs, but were very different players who offered different skills to prospective teams. Comparing such players to each other seemed a little pointless. So I decided to break off players who fit somewhere between SFs and PFs and call them combo forwards. Such a player will fall into one of three categories.
- A college PF who is a good player, but seems too small to make the jump to PF as a pro.
- A college PF whose skills suggest he’s more of a SF. For example his strengths are shooting and passing, as opposed to rebounding.
- College freshmen and sophomore forwards who I’m having trouble figuring out what their eventual pro position will be.
NBA Draft 2008: Small Forwards
I’m doing something a little different this year with the SFs. I’m splitting them into two categories. There will be the SFs, who are the more traditional small forward types who might be more like guards. Then there will be the combo forwards. These are the bigger players who might play either forward position depending on the matchup. The reason for this is these are different types of player and rating them against each other just didn’t seem like the best way of evaluating. I thought about this last year when I was comparing Corey Brewer to Al Thornton. They were two completely different players. Brewer could play some backcourt and Thornton could play some PF. It was silly to use the same rating system to compare these two players. They’re different players who fill different roles on teams. They should be evaluated differently. That’s what this split is an attempt to do.
NBA Draft 2008: Shooting Guards
Last year’s crop of SGs was one of the weakest I’ve seen. This year it looks like one of the deeper groups. Most of the depth is of the lower round variety though. There’s very little star power in this group. OJ Mayo and Eric Gordon would seem to be potential stars, but both players have a ways to go before they’re at that level. Below them are a group of juniors and seniors who have developed into pretty decent prospects. They’re not on the level of a Mayo, but they’re certainly good enough that if I were a team drafting in the top 10, I wouldn’t feel bad about passing on Mayo or Gordon for a talented big man with the idea of drafting a SG in round 2.
NBA Draft 2008: Combo Guards
Last season I took things simple with the combo guards. I looked for players who could score both often and efficiently, showed an ability to play some PG in a pinch and put up an RSB40 in at least the 6.0-6.5 range. This year I’ve got a little better grip on the position, or at least I feel as if I do. When I originally separated past prospects, I had put them in the 5 traditional positions. This year I’ve isolated some combo guards and I’ve been able to come up with some better data on what successful combo guards looked like in college. There have been only 2 who have been wildly successful pros, Allen Iverson and Gilbert Arenas. Both entered the NBA after their sophomore seasons:
| Player |
FG Pct. |
2-point Pct. |
P40 |
A40 |
A/TO |
RSB40 |
| Allen Iverson |
.480 |
.546 |
30.5 |
5.7 |
1.2 |
9.3 |
| Gilbert Arenas |
.479 |
.519 |
22.3 |
3.2 |
0.8 |
7.8 |
Iverson was a terrific all-around player, but Arenas was a little more difficult to get a feel for. Everything looked OK, but the 0.8 A/TO would have scared me off some. He’s become a good enough passer in the pros, but he’ll never be mistaken for Jason Kidd or Steve Nash. The fact that as a sophomore he was able to score often and efficiently with a high RSB, should have gotten him drafted before early in round 2 though.
NBA Draft 2008: Point Guards
This is a potentially a pretty good group of PGs. Rose is going to be very good. Whether he’s a star, just a solid PG or even some sort of star combo guard is still up for debate, but he should be pretty good. Beyond Rose, things get a little more iffy, but there are enough good prospects that I suspect 2 or 3 other good ones will emerge. The most interesting thing going on this year with the PGs is the number of small college sleepers. Very few small college players ever make it, but I’m guessing at least one of the players from the small college group this year will make an impact. I say that because there are just too many good ones for one of them to not hit.