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Mocking the Draft – February Edition

Mocking the Draft – February Edition
Feb 02, 2006, 08:53 pm
At Draftexpress.com, we specialize in bringing you the most comprehensive scouting information available, so you can follow the blue chippers and mock draft all day and night. Our coverage is so thorough, not only do we mock the NBA draft, we mock the mock NBA draft. Here is the first installment of “Mocking the Draft,” complete with all the hits and misses you’d expect from the Volume Shooter. Feel free to refer to DX’s NBA mock to get your bearings.

1. LaMarcus Aldridge – Aldridge plays NCAA basketball like you play Nerf basketball. You put a Nerf hoop up in your room, and after a few dunks, the game gets boring. So you start to develop a jumper. A few weeks later, you’re making 10 footers regularly, so you start shooting hooks. Your hook shot develops, and you switch to turnarounds. Before you know it, you’re practicing no-look left-handed set shots from your desk across the room, while looking at internet pornography – and you’re hitting a respectable 50%.

Then after a night of sauce, your drunken roommate challenges you to Nerf one on one. First possession, you jab step and shoot one of your patented 25 footers, which barely rims out. Roomie gets the ball, pushes you out of the way, runs up to the goal and Shaq-Attacks it, destroying your hoop and winning the game 1-0. The moral of the story: don’t get too cute. Aldridge should physically dominate every game, but he has grown bored of dunking on Kevin Bookout and takes twice as many turnaround jumpers as he needs to. For someone as physically gifted as he is, the J is a nice complement, but he can’t forget about the power game.

2. Roberto Benigni – I’ve seen Life is Beautiful, and to be honest I’m not convinced. Listed at 7’0, he’s closer to 5’8, and he demonstrated no sign of a post game in the film I watched. In fairness, he saw double and triple teams from the Nazis all night and they all had rifles. I guess I was impressed with his poise under pressure, but he and Dirk should never be mentioned in the same sentence again.

3.Adam Morrison – Now we’re getting somewhere. The first guy on the board who actually cares about winning, and has the mustache to prove it. Strong and skilled, he hustles and scores. He also looks like the janitor/dj/owner of a 1970s Times Square peep show theater. Simply scary.

4.Tiago Splitter – I’m totally down with the Brazilian invasion thanks to the 9th wonder of the world, Anderson Varejao’s hair. A quick word of advice for Tiago, there are two things he should do differently than Nene: 1. keep the last name, because sports names don’t get any better than Splitter. 2. not cultivate a ridiculously high opinion of himself prior to shredding his knee like the Valerie Plame memo.

5. Tyrus Thomas – Nobody who is serious about basketball goes to LSU, and why any GM would willingly draft a carbon copy of Stromile Swift is beyond me. Thomas stayed home to eat his mom’s cooking when he could have gone somewhere with a real program and turned himself into Larry Nance. I guess he could still rock the bald-in-the-middle, afro-on-the-sides Larry Nance hairstyle, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

6. Rudy Gay – Not even Rudy can stop himself from being a star. For someone who has no interest in the game unless he’s by himself on a fast break, this kid is a phenomenal player. Though his ears are freakishly large, he should be given some slack on his physical. Calhoun has been screaming at him nonstop since he showed up in Storrs, and your ears would be swollen too if you had to listen to Jimmy’s brutal New England accent every day for two years.

p.s. - For those of you who are disappointed with the lack of opportunistic ‘Gay’ jokes, they’re not funny, so go suck an egg. As a general rule, if Jimmy Kimmel has done it, I haven’t and never will. And that includes dating bitter, insecure, thoroughly mediocre women.

7. .J.J. Redick – Somewhere between Michael Redd and Trajan Langdon, but neither of those comparisons really makes sense. To me, J.J. Redick is like Denzel Washington. Your whole life, Denzel is held up as the best black actor since Sidney Portier (because we can only compare black actors to other black actors, and Don Cheadle is too classy and understated). Women love him, men respect him, and his peers can’t find one negative thing to say about him. But you’ve been beaten over the head with the Denzel stick for so long, you’ve got massive internal bleeding, and you resent him for it. So Training Day comes out, and you rush to the movies opening night to see Denzel fall flat on his face. You know his range has been blown completely out of proportion, and there’s no chance in hell that he can be convincing as the bad guy. An hour and a half later, Alonzo has just finished the epic monologue where he tells the gangsters, “I’m the police! King Kong ain’t got @#$* on me!” and you realize you’ve peed in your pants, and you’ve been shouting “you the man!” after everything Denzel says for the last 10 minutes.

J.J. Redick’s range has not been blown out of proportion; he’s the best shooter we’ve seen in 5 years, and King Kong ain’t got @#$* on him. I tuned into the Georgetown game to watch him get locked down by a more athletic defender in a hostile environment, and his 41 was pretty much the toughest 41 I’ve ever seen in a college game. Greg Paulus was throwing passes like Jake Plummer, and Shelden Williams spent half the game on the bench. Redick confirmed everything we already knew about his stroke and he proved he could get his own shot. He is the Denzel Washington of college hoops, and if you think Paul Davis is going to bump him out of the top 10, you’re sorely mistaken.

8. Ronnie Brewer – Rob Babcock will somehow find his way into another job with a bad team, because the NBA machine requires that someone draft a hopeless tweener in the lottery every year. With Babcock at the helm, Houston, Portland, or Seattle will be treated to the misfortune of Ronnie Brewer with this pick. He might end up as a low budget Josh Howard, but 8 is about 15 slots too high for a guy who can’t shoot, can’t run a team, and would rather play zone than man to man. A classic example of a guy who would end up in round two if he didn’t wear those fancy high socks, Brewer is fun to watch at Arkansas, but will be much less fun in the NBA.

9. Shelden Williams – Came back with nice showings against Virginia and Virginia Tech, but Williams was exposed in the Georgetown game, and we should stop the Elton Brand talk right now. Shelden will end up being more like Boozer, without the gimpy hamstring, overbearing wife, and wooly chest hair. A bad image, I know, but it’s actually quite a compliment. Let’s move on…

10. Darius Washington – Some players have upside because they’re new to the game and have a lot to learn. Some players have upside because they’re still growing. Darius Washington has upside because he is temporarily handicapped by his shorts, which are literally 6 feet long. The fact that he can execute a between the legs crossover at full speed, waddling around in Lorenzen Wright’s old warm up pants, means he has the best quickness and handle in the draft, bar none. Once he submits to David Stern’s fascist uniform law, Washington will flourish.

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