This kid is the primary reason I'm still in wait and see mode on the Kyrie trade. He's got legit super-duper-star potential.
total side-bar here, but when does wait and see mode end?
Like does it end when the season ends? Does it end on lottery night? Does it end on draft night? Does it end when the player acquired with that pick reaches his prime?
I think its really hard to decide when the fair time to judge a deal is.
I mean Danny Ainge acquired the Nets picks with no idea that theyd result in a #1 pick, a #3 pick and another presumed top 10 pick. Yet he gets tons of credit for it.
If Brown and Tatum were megabusts would he get the same level of credit for those trades? I mean the trade itself had nothing to do with the selections Danny made.
Another example is the KG trade. We sent Minny the pick they used to select Johnny Flynn.
When we look back at that trade it looks like KG for Big Al and whole bunch of nuthin. But what if you crossed out Johnny Flynn's name and penciled in Steph Curry?
All of a sudden its not the robbery its made out to be.
I think its interesting.
You can only evaluate a GM on the facts he had available at the time. Len Bias wasnt a bad pick because of his tragic death, but Ainge cant control that any more than he can control the ping pong balls in the lottery machine, or the decisions the Nets FO makes. Do you judge a trade based on the results, or the possible results, or some combination of the two?
This has been a rambling somewhat incoherent post, but I think its an interesting thing to think about if anyone can parse through my horribly constructed post and get the gist of what Im getting at.