A Blazers mock mock draft!

Woe unto Trail Blazer fans today and really this whole week, the week of The Draft.  The Blazers don’t have a pick, front office isn’t expected to trade for any, and everyone seems pretty peachy with the roster as it is, though a couple spots still need to be filled out, and perhaps something done to upgrade a little in some certain areas.

Pretty boring, then.  All these other teams with their picks and their trades and their possible trades and their trading up and their trading down and their setting-themselves-up to-get-Kevin Loves.  All the talk about moves and potential moves would provide me hours of speculative napkin-drawing at the bar with friends, as I demonstrate exactly how Jarrett Jack is the crucial link in a 5 team roster swapping extravaganza.  Cleveland has reportedly received at least seven trade offers, it’s rumored, for their number one pick.  Can you imagine how much conversation over beers that has generated?? How exciting would it be to be a Cavs fan right now!   Even if you have to live in Cleveland to do it!!  (That’s a cheap shot for their getting that damned pick and screwing it up so much.  I actually like Cleveland, but it was necessary.  I imagine Cleveland fans are already desensitized to this sort of stuff, though, so no harm, no foul.)

Plus, it is one of the best drafts we’ve seen.  We’re all salivating after the meh draft of last year.  We’re ready for some game changing stuff.  And this draft doesn’t disappoint.  The top five especially are interesting, but there’s even talent down in the second round that looks useful to a lot of teams.

So there you are, O Trail Blazers compatriot, not getting to participate in any of this.  You’re watching NBA TV air reruns of the 1998 draft all day interspersed with that damned 1984 draft special they made while your friends in the rest of the country gab and gab away.

Fear not.  Because thinking of what would happen if the Blazers were to draft someone is just about as fun as thinking about their actual moves.  That’s right, I’m suggesting you start creating a mock mock draft for the Blazers this year.

Obviously with no picks, it doesn’t quite work to speculate too specifically on what trades might have been made and whatnot since those pingpong balls could have fallen to so many different spots (yeah, right, says the statistically-nearly-impossible Cavs ping pong ball), but we can indeed take a gander at some of the prospects and think about how they’d have altered this Blazers team, as good as it is.  I’ll go through them in the order I have them showing up in the draft this year:

Jabari Parker: Parker didn’t have the best NCAA tournament, but his year was impressive, and from all accounts he’s a standup dude, a good “culture guy,” which makes him a nice fit with this current group of Blazers.

What most impressed me this year seeing Parker is how he moves.  There’s a lot of ways to get around a basketball court.  Some players are smooth, gliding through the air.  Others are small and crawl.  Some are large and grind their way through.  Parker hops.  He is a hoppy player.  This doesn’t mean that he jumps high, or that he explodes up into the air.  It means that he is always ready to make his way into the air, is always ready to move laterally, it always ready to get a rebound.  He doesn’t move his feet without being ready to plant one and take off in another direction: each step is also a pivot. Interestingly, some of his draft workouts seem to focus on this and how it allows him to get to the hoop, and focus instead on the way it allows him to make stepbacks and whatnot James Harden style—something I never quite saw him get the opportunity to display this year.  So maybe there’s even more that you can do with him as you develop him than we saw even with every other college game being Duke or Kansas this year.  A lot of that mysterious quantity we call by the name of Upside.  

Portland is an interesting position as a team because of the presence of Aldridge in the offense: it makes any going to the bench always a bit like going-small, unless another sort of shooting giant should ever appear.  The roster stresses length over size so as to preserve quickness and so doesn’t find Parker’s type of body the most appealing.  The Blazers finesse their way to the hoop, they don’t hop their way there.  The people who do need to muscle their way inside though—like Lillard—might appreciate some sort of help on this front: the threat of some dangerous cutter with a mean stepback that could also add unpredictability and stretch the floor.  What Parker would add is that: someone who would mess up the inside without Lillard being taken out of the offense through driving and passing with his head down.  In short, Parker could serve as a Danny Green type character who could actually get to the hoop (the Danny Green of the last season’s Finals did this, but he never did it before! it was a wonderful sight to see) with a bit more muscle, which would allow Lillard to be a bit more Tony-Parker-style bothersome.

Andrew Wiggins: Wiggins is tall and lanky and is a great athlete and seems to really have a nice sense of the floor and is boring as hell for mock mock Portland fans.  Not that we in Portland wouldn't be the first to appreciate him: it's just that we have someone not unlike him in Nic Batum and Will Barton.

We are simply stacked at the lanky 3-guard/small-forward spot, and even if the Blazers were a part of this draft, they would not much incentive to have anything to do with Wiggins.  He’s a building block for some team in the East that needs a sizable guard who can shoot, and who can help with finessing their way to the rim.

He could, indeed, be somewhat of an upgrade over a backup two-guard, if he were to play that small, and would add a bit more length to the bench than the Blazers already have.  But he’s actually only at 2 here because the Sixers are going to pick him—not because I’m excited to talk about him.  Let’s move on.

Joel Embiid: Obviously, if he is healthy, he is a franchise-changing addition to any roster.  The man can do anything, judging from the clips of him posted around.  I don’t mean to exaggerate this.  Draft clips are odd and always immensely flattering to the talent they showcase.  They put a premium on the exhibition of pure physicality, which can’t really be appreciated and evaluated anyway except when you see it in person.  They feature little to no competitive trials, so that you have to watch how they played in college and then extrapolate from there if you want to see what they can do against a defense.  Just to make him that much more tantalizing for us, even Embiid’s college footage wasn’t as available to our eyes as it was with other prospects, due to his injuries during the season.

But he is remarkable.  Every post move of his is the Platonic ideal of a post-move.  It’s what Dwight Howard has in his head every time he gets the ball down there, and then makes a mockery of as he bumbles his sorry way to the hoop.  In fact, Embiid is in many ways the athlete that Howard should have been.  He is graceful, he is nimble, he never looks confused about his place on the court, yet he is strong and hulking and simply, brutally huge.  Each movement is approached with a quiet unassuming curiosity which masks a kind of subtler, more intimate relationship to space than any basketball player actually has—but which comes naturally to soccer players (which he was).  This is more impressive than any “footwork,” and is probably more what people mean when they compliment him on the latter.  And he can shoot—a bizarre, bizarre thing to see in someone so big and so good in the post because, unlike LaMarcus Aldridge, who shoots with the facility and the unconsciousness and accuracy of a guard, Embiid looks like a big man when he does it.  It’s very strange.  Like a big man, he takes a little more time to get in rhythm; but unlike a big man, this is because he is a poor shooter and his hands don’t work with the ball thingy in them unless he’s shoveling it into the backboard or dumping it into the hoop: it is simply because he is so damned big and the ball simply has to move more to make its way to the top of his shot.  When it does this, the jump, the release, everything takes the shape it does when a smaller guard does it—only the earth quakes when he comes back down and hits the hardwood because the man is seven damned feet tall and 240 pounds.

Dante Exum: The big ??? of the draft.  If he is what he is rumored to be—some strange Australian Kobe Bryant—the Blazers would be interesting if they landed him.  The Blazers aren’t quite the team of 2’s, but if they had someone who did more of that in the second string of the rotation to come in and play 10 minutes in the first half and the first half of the fourth, I don’t think they’d be doing too shabby.  Matthews does this currently, lighting things up when the bench guys stagnate a bit: next year, Will Barton will be doing a lot more of it instead of running point, I imagine.  But another Barton-like player wouldn’t hurt, I think.  Go for it mock mock Blazers!  Draft Exum!

Aaron Gordon: The Boris-Diawsiest of this draft (only ripped), and therefore the most exciting. I love players that have strange bodies that do all sorts of well, and to me, he’s the strangest.  Living out West, I’ve seen got to see a lot of Pac 12 basketball, and particularly a lot of Arizona games.  Every single one he’s played, he just couldn’t disappoint. He’s built like a tank, and provides a formidable defensive presence that would to add to any roster.  Yet he can move with a lightness of foot that destroys people on the block.  People have been making a big deal about his lack of shooting.  But that improves as things go—it doesn’t look like he has a shot that won’t develop in the future.  In the meantime, he can bang just enough while being on the move.  He is the perfect combo in a biggish man for the quick-running, anti-plodding league of the present.

This makes him in particular the perfect biggish man for Portland, since the Blazers are one of the foremost teams to embrace these new trends.  He would be, in particular, a wonderful defensive addition for this team—perhaps the quickest way to improve it all around would be to add a potential rim protector can still move like Gordon.  The Blazers are currently light of frame in the paint, with Aldridge away from the rim.  Lopez is their most Hibbertesque man on the inside, and while he has been an absolute ripping success this year—more than anyone could have predicted—he’s about it.

Besides Lopez, the prospects are thin: Freeland has ensured himself a place in the rotation by seizing upon this hole in the defense and becoming willing to play extremely physically and brutally, in the best way.  But he brings absolutely no offense to the table.  Thomas Robinson, who—despite what some critics seem to think—can: he has a great shot and he is one of the best passers on the team among the bigs.  But he can’t quite play physically against the biggest guys, and has to turn to swatting blocks—which he does well, but which involves one’s position already being conceded.  If he bulks up even more—expect him along with Will Barton to be doing this during the summer—this situation should improve.  But someone with a body like Gordon would plug this gap immediately for the Blazers.  An Embiid would be even better—because he’s even bigger, and even more mobile—but if that wouldn’t be possible, Gordon is a great second option for filling out the 4 or small-5 spot.

Marcus Smart: I’m not quite sure about anything with Marcus Smart: he apparently is the best guard in the draft, which is saying something.  It is odd to me that his stock is soaring over that of Randle because…

Julius Randle: Randle seemed to me as providing a more limber version of everything that Wiggins gives, which frankly makes him a more appealing candidate, in my book.  We can say that he’d do everything Wiggins would give to the roster and then some: length, shooting, ability to get to the hoop.  The thing is, the Blazers don’t need more 2’s, really: with Aldridge in there, they have that covered, and when he’s out, they need to be spreading the floor with 3’s unless they go big.  These are, then, three players the Blazers wouldn’t really be dallying with.

Cleanthony Early:  Here’s someone who would add something to the Blazers.  He’s the nearest thing in this draft—from what I can see—to a Wes Matthews.  And the Blazers need more of Wes.  They need bigger players, who preserve their quickness, who use their muscle and who can play defense.  Either that or they need quicker, longer players, and a more demanding defensive scheme with much more movement and much more zone.  It seems like they are moving in the latter direction, but having Early on the roster would not have been a bad thing. 

Nik Stauskas: Do the Blazers need more three point shooters?  No.  Will they take them?  Absolutely they will.  Indeed, among the current roster, expect both Barton and Aldridge and Batum to take more threes next year.  In many ways, Stauskas would serve as a quicker, younger Dorell Wright, who brought so much to the team last season.  Unlike C.J. McCollum, though, he would preserve something of that length as well.

There are more: Vonleh, McDermott, LaVine, Hood, what have you.  Even OSU’s excellent Eric Moreland.  But that seems enough speculation to at least get quite a few table-thumping debates about the future of the Blazers going!  So now that you’re no longer bereft of things to talk about, get going!  It matters hugely who mock-mock-Portland picks!  Let’s do this thing!