Luigi Datome, Gerald Wallace, Tayshaun Prince, Evan Turner, Jeff Green, Crowder, Coty Clarke, John Holland, Chris Babb, Chris Johnson.
Those are the SFs A.P. After Pierce. It was a long miserable struggle to find the 6'6" athletic, strong, cover anyone type of athlete that Pierce was and Jaylen is. With that Said Jaylen is an important player on nearly any roster. Hes an asset.
Hield was the best player at the time of the draft and Buddy is a perfect fit for today's game. He's a lights out shooter and solid defender with length.
Jamal Murray was the best long term prospect by a considerable margain. Period. He drafted out of need instead of taking the best player on the board.
He didn't know we were getting Tatum and Hayward, if he did. Rest assured he would have went in a different direction.
So what exactly is your point? Ainge didn't reach for Brown, Brown was always projected to go in the 3-8 range of the draft right in that same group with Murray, Heild, Bender and Chris. Chris and Bender are borderline NBA players right now and may be out of the league next year. Murray for all the love he gets on this site has been only marginally better than brown offensively and is mediocre defensively on his best days. Heild is 26 years old. Brown has struggled this year, but he was still the right pick.
You can't say he was the right pick. That's TBD. He drafted the Raw project wing. Over Two guards that we're far more developed. One much older. The other had a historic season at Kentucky.
Umm... no, that's incorrect. You CAN definitely say whether he was the "right pick" because the pick is right or wrong based on the information at the time.
Whether the player will prove to be the best NBA player of the various (reasonable) options (or not) is what is "TBD".
I mean, you can never really judge a pick based on this criteria because we never really know all the information that the GM had at the time.
I think the best way to look at it is to try to figure out what the reasons were in favor or against taking a player at the time, and then several years in the future you can look at whether the team has gotten out of the pick what they expected to get out of it based on those pros and cons.
If a player turns out to be a star, but the team drafting that player had no way of reasonably expecting that the player would turn out to have the skills or talent level to become a star, it seems like a lot of luck is involved. (Marc Gasol ... Nikola Jokic ... etc)
Whereas if you draft a guy based on perceived high talent level, while knowing that he's got some red flags with his knees, if that player ends up being a bust because of ongoing knee problems, it's fair to say that the pick didn't pan out. (Greg Oden)
But, even with that last example, if you used a late 1st round draft pick on that player, perhaps the risk / reward was reasonable. You're going to have some misses even if you always make the "right" choice. (Jared Sullinger)
I don't know. It's hard to say exactly how we should judge if a pick was "good" or not.
We can say with some confidence whether a team has gotten the value out of a player that one would expect from a pick at a given point in the draft, but grading the GM's decisionmaking is a lot murkier.