1. Champs and D: We’ve taken a step back from the season thanks to Ed Weiland’s excellent draft coverage but now it’s time to take a quick look back at the Celtics’ run. In the end, the Celtics excellent defense coupled with the inability of the Lakers to match up with Paul Pierce gave Boston another banner. Indeed, the Celts’ were the best defensive this year (number one in points allowed per minute), but this serves as a nice jumping off point to test the old adage that “defense wins championships.”
NBA Draft 2008: Grades
The 2008 draft is a tough one to grade. I had 3 players, Rose, Beasley and Love, head and shoulders above the rest. I felt after the top 3, there were 15-20 players who could have been shaken up and drawn in any order and it wouldn’t have surprised me much. Because the pool of talent from 4-25 was so deep and evenly matched, there were many varied opinions on this draft. I’m guessing there will be more busts than normal and more round 2 and free agent surprises than normal.
NBA Draft 2008: Power Forwards
This is a very strong group. The strongest in the draft and it might rival the SFs of ’03 and ’07 as strongest group in any draft class I’ve seen. Beasley and Love are at the top. I really can’t decide who should go on top either. Love does have better numbers and improved during the season. Beasley had to carry an otherwise weak team. Both are terrific offensively and raise doubts defensively. If I were a GM, I’d be happy with either one, but if forced to choose I’d give Beasley the slightest edge. Beasley looks more able to slide to SF than Love would to center. Beasley seems to have more potential to dominate, while Love seems to have more potential to be dominated. But they’re very close and any team lucky enough to land either one should feel fortunate. There are several other PFs capable of making an impact.
NBA Draft 2008: Centers
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.