Celticsstrong 2021 Historical Draft - VOTES ARE IN

[Jvalin]

With the 3rd pick of the 6th round, the Milwaukee Bucks select Pascal Siakam.

• NBA champion (2019)
• NBA All-Star (2020)
• All-NBA Second Team (2020)

Kawhi and Siakam reunite, this time in Milwaukee! We know for a fact that they were a great fit next to each other. One of the best defensive duos of the modern era (if not the best)!

I will select Siakam's 2018/19 season. He was the perfect complimentary piece for the Raps next to Kawhi. In fact, here are his on/off stats from that season.

Offense: +8.4
Defense: -5.9 (the Raps were conceding -5.9 points per 100 possessions with him on the court)
Net rating: +14.3

The Raps were 14.3 points per 100 possessions better with Siakam on the floor! This is an absolutely ridiculous number! In comparison, LeBron's net rating in 2019/20 was +10.3. Giannis' net rating was +13.5.

Siakam was arguably a top 10 player in the league during the 2019/20 regular season. Obviously, he wasn't equally effective during the playoffs. I would argue that Siakam is the perfect glue guy. He ain't good enough to be a go-to scorer in the playoffs, but that's perfectly fine by me. I plan to use him in a complementary role on offense, just like the Raps were doing in 2018/19.
 
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At last, my starting lineup is complete.

Ball handler: DJ
Wings: Middleton, Kawhi, Siakam
Big: Jokic

That's a super versatile lineup on both sides of the court.

[Celtic Fan Forever]

The Wizards take the Celtic killer himself, Bam Adebayo.

[Somebody]

Can't post in the ''How Does My Team Look'' thread. Is it locked? Anyway, I'm posting here.

@mods
Feel free to move the post to the other thread.

Seeking for opinions about my squad, or advice on what type of players should I get to improve it.

I've never watched Dandridge, Porter and Gus Williams play. I started following the NBA in the mid/late 90s, but I was just a little kid at the time. That being said, I read your previous post carefully. Your comps for Dandridge and Porter are intriguing to say the least: Paul Pierce and Chauncey Billups. Wow!

If your comps are indicative of their skill set, then you got one of the best teams in the draft.

PG: Billups
SG: Butler
SF: Pierce
PF: Draymond
C: Gobert

I'm with Rody regarding Draymond's shooting. Sure, he shot 38.8% from 3 on 3.2 attempts per game that season, but that's just 1 season. His career average is 31.9% from 3 on 2.8 attempts per game. Can't take the 38.8 number at face value, much less given that he was playing next to Steph and Klay. He got tons of wide open looks next to them.

All in all, I believe you have built a very balanced team. Best defensive team in the draft, no doubt about that.

I disagree regarding Draymond, I'll just paste my post defending his shooting ability here:

I suggest you take a closer look at Draymond's work in 2016 - he was a legitimate three point threat who burnt teams when they sagged off of him (he shot 38.8% from 3 on 3.2 attempts per game and came up huge in the playoffs against non-OKC teams when he didn't need to bang with 2-3 bigs all by himself: he averaged 38.9 on 3.6 attempts in 5 games against Houston, 43.3% on 6 attempts in 5 games against Portland and 40.6% on 5.3 attempts in 7 games against Cleveland). It wasn't like it was a one-season wonder as well - he shot 34.4% from 3 on 3.6 attempts per game from 2015-2017 in the RS and averaged the same percentage on 4.4 attempts per game in the same span in the playoffs. This is clearly at least a slightly above league average shooter on high volume (remember that bigs weren't shooting 5, 6, 7+ threes until the last season or two) and he really has the look of a strong big man floor spacer in 2016. The claim that he was shooting them with no one around him is simply false: a quick look at the tape would show that he was used as a pop big and was a real target for kickouts before his decline. Teams respected his jumpshot well enough that some would have a big stuck onto him and close out on him quickly in defensive rotations, giving Draymond the spacing effect that stretch bigs had on offence

But it is a one year fluke in otherwise poor to mediocre shooting career.  That is like someone claiming Magic Johnson was a really good shooter because he had that one year late in his career where he shot 38.4% on 3.5 attempts even though the two surrounding seasons were 31.4 and 32.0 and he never really showed shooting touch earlier. 

People aren't just going to look at Draymond and call him anything other than a poor shooter, because that is what he was.  And I get that we are using only one season, but that doesn't mean people aren't going to think about the other seasons when they think of who the player was.

The spirit of the game is that the season picked is important because players have up and down years and years with injury. Take a guy like Grant Hill. Which year you select makes a massive difference. Most remember the player he was most of his career because he was pretty good, but he was special before the injury.

Magic and Draymond had a season or two where they shot the three at a good rate. You select that year and though they weren't noted to be good outside shooters, they were in those seasons and that should be how they are judged.

Of course, you can't force people to not consider a player's entire career, but the original concept of choosing one year was that the way the player performed in that season mattered. And so, if they had a career year in shooting, or rebounding, or scoring that is how the player should be perceived.

You can't make people judge things in that manner, but that is the way the game was designed. And if people aren't going to judge it that way, what's the sense of picking a year.

It isn't that the season picked doesn't matter, id absolutely does, but for me it is more that the season picked isn't going to fundamentally change how I view a player, especially if that season seems out of place for the totality of the career.  I mean Rodman had a season where he shot 31.7% from 3 on 1.2 attempts a game (and teams only averaged 7.6 attempts and 33.1% that year so Rodman wasn't much below average).  You will never be able to convince me that Rodman will keep anyone honest from deep, even if you picked that season where he wasn't terrible.

Then there is no sense in picking seasons. If you pick a season and that player shot well in that season, then that good shooting version of that player is who you get. That's the entire point of picking the season. If that doesn't count for anything, then let's just get rid of picking seasons because it means nothing.

I tend to agree more with nick.  Aberrations / career seasons should count.  Now, you might argue a player was benefitting from a system that’s not similar to what he’s playing in here, but overall, if a guy was great in the year chosen, there’s no reason to think he won’t repeat the same.

I'm just of the belief that a flukey season is more a reflection of the special circumstances of that particular season and not necessarily duplicatable in this sort of setting because the player never actually duplicated in real life.  There are players that just have an amazing season, that they never were able to replicate.  Some of them may end up being drafted in here, so I don't want to talk about that much.  That said, I can think of at least 2 players that nearly doubled their career averages in ppg, rpg, and apg in one season and in that season many of those career bests were in the neighborhood of 40% better than their next best seasons (and one of those guys actually saw a decrease in minutes that season, the other played more).

Again, I'm not saying the season doesn't matter, but there has to be context and I'm not just going to assume that because Draymond Green had one excellent shooting season in a career of mediocre to poor shooting seasons, that he is automatically going to have an excellent shooting season in this just because the year selected he managed to actually shoot pretty well. 

I'm similarly, going to give a guy more of a benefit of a doubt the other way as well.  I mean if for example, you chose Lebron James' title season in Cleveland where he shot a very bad 30.9% from 3, I'd be more inclined to believe that is a fluke since he hadn't been lower than 33% in nearly a decade at that point.  Couple that with the fact that the 3 seasons before he shot 40.6, 37.9, and 35.4 and the 2 seasons after he shot 36.3 and 36.7 and it isn't difficult to conclude that his shooting that season was flukishly bad and Lebron was in fact a much better shooter than he showed.

No one ever said that Draymond was an excellent shooter though, we're scoffing at your opinion that Draymond was a poor shooter at his very best. A three year span of shooting 34.4% on 3-4 attempts per game over a three year span in both the regular season and playoffs (especially when all 3 of those playoff runs were trips to the finals) is strong evidence of a player being a pretty good shooter, especially for a big - Al Horford is considered as an excellent big man shooter and he averaged ~37% from 2015-2018 on a similar number of attempts per game. Obviously the 3% difference is significant, but it's not enough for the worse shooter to be poor or mediocre while the better shooter is excellent. But hey let's go with your narratives over the eye test and data because everything that disagrees with them are wrong, they're all lying about who Draymond was in his 3 year offensive peak amirite .

The 3 year span is skewed significantly by the 38.8% season though.  33.7 is his next best.  He had a 33.3 on 2 attempt season but otherwise has never been above 30.8 in a season.  And that 33.7 season, the league average was 35.0 so he wasn't even league average.  So in his entire career, he has been above league average 1 time.  That makes him a poor shooter.  It just does.  If the conditions are correct, there is obviously evidence that the components can come together to create a situation where he can be an above average shooter, but the conditions have to essentially be perfect,  You are going to have convince people that your team has created the situation where Draymond is going to shoot well, and frankly, I don't think you've done that with your roster construction.  Draymond is a great defender, superb passer, rebounder, etc.  I wanted him on my team for all of those reasons, but to act like he is a plus shooter is just strange to me.  And he will keep teams honest, but I don't think you are going to convince many people that you have a 39% shooter from deep from him, despite the fact that he actually did that in a season.  It just seems like a perfect storm of a season that is hard to replicate, since you know he never actually came close to replicating it.

As Jvalin said, the league average is skewed by elite three point shooters that were mostly (if not all) non-bigs the same way you're pointing out that Draymond's percentage in that three year span is skewed by his 2016 campaign - Draymond was likely above average among bigs as a three point shooter (and it isn't like the 1980s where an above average big man shooter would still provide poor value by shooting threes, the low-mid 30s on 3-4 attempts per game is a decent enough percentage for defences to start guard you on the perimeter with the average return on halfcourt offences being around 0.9 PPP).

You, not me, are going to have to convince people to say that prime Draymond with multiple seasons' worth of RS and playoff data was a poor shooter. You might also want to convince yourself to read entire posts when I have made it clear that I don't expect Draymond to be shooting 39% from three in multiple posts, but rather as a mid-30s shooter on medium-high volume when you consider how good he was in that playoff run as well with Curry playing through injuries in that playoff run - the situation around him wasn't perfect and he still shot 36.5% on 4.5 attempts per game. I certainly believe that a team with on-ball stars like Butler, Dandridge and Williams who can all move off the ball is a situation no worse than a team with only a hobbled Curry as their on-ball engine and Klay as their off-ball creator, even when you account for the superior defensive talent that teams in this draft have.

[RPGenerate]

Two modern guys I was hoping to drop to the later rounds off the board. Not sure whether it's too early for them or not.

[Moranis]

Two modern guys I was hoping to drop to the later rounds off the board. Not sure whether it's too early for them or not.

probably a bit early for both of them, but both clearly talented players that have already had very solid seasons. 

[nickagneta]

Two modern guys I was hoping to drop to the later rounds off the board. Not sure whether it's too early for them or not.

To me they are early. But some people felt two of my picks were early, so who am I too say at this point in the draft.

[gouki88]

Two modern guys I was hoping to drop to the later rounds off the board. Not sure whether it's too early for them or not.

To me they are early. But some people felt two of my picks were early, so who am I too sat at this point in the draft.

Now that we’re firmly in “picking for fit” mode I think we’ll see lots of surprises. Don’t think either of these are early really - goofnAll-NBA talent on winning teams

[Somebody]

The Houston Rockets select

Gus Johnson

[gouki88]

The Houston Rockets select

Gus Johnson

Crazy level rebounder for his size. Nice choice

[nickagneta]

The Houston Rockets select

Gus Johnson

Houston = Gus squared

[Moranis]

With their 6th pick the Toronto Raptors will select tenacious defender, HOFer, and champion Chet Walker. 

We will select 67 when the Sixers were one of the greatest teams ever and Walker averaged 19.3 p, 8.1 r, and 2.3 a.

His nba.com profile.  https://www.nba.com/history/legends/profiles/chet-walker

some notable sections from the profile for those that are less familiar with Walker's game.

Chet “The Jet” was among the best open-court forwards of his day. He particularly enjoyed drawing fouls. Walker played tenacious defense and proved remarkably durable. He never missed more than six games in any season, and became one of the few players to appear in more than 1,000 games (1,032) for his career.

Walker’s teams made the playoffs every year, and he had identical career scoring averages of 18.2 points in both the regular season and the postseason. His impact was most evident in Chicago, where the Bulls reached the playoffs in each of Walker’s six seasons but not in the year before he arrived or the year after he left.

[Somebody]

With their 6th pick the Toronto Raptors will select tenacious defender, HOFer, and champion Chet Walker. 

We will select 67 when the Sixers were one of the greatest teams ever and Walker averaged 19.3 p, 8.1 r, and 2.3 a.

His nba.com profile.  https://www.nba.com/history/legends/profiles/chet-walker

some notable sections from the profile for those that are less familiar with Walker's game.

Chet “The Jet” was among the best open-court forwards of his day. He particularly enjoyed drawing fouls. Walker played tenacious defense and proved remarkably durable. He never missed more than six games in any season, and became one of the few players to appear in more than 1,000 games (1,032) for his career.

Walker’s teams made the playoffs every year, and he had identical career scoring averages of 18.2 points in both the regular season and the postseason. His impact was most evident in Chicago, where the Bulls reached the playoffs in each of Walker’s six seasons but not in the year before he arrived or the year after he left.

It was between him and Johnson for my pick - great selection.

[gouki88]

Always felt that Chet Walker had a musicians name.

Good choice!

[Moranis]

The Houston Rockets select

Gus Johnson

2nd most famous basketball player from Akron. 

[Moranis]

With their 6th pick the Toronto Raptors will select tenacious defender, HOFer, and champion Chet Walker. 

We will select 67 when the Sixers were one of the greatest teams ever and Walker averaged 19.3 p, 8.1 r, and 2.3 a.

His nba.com profile.  https://www.nba.com/history/legends/profiles/chet-walker

some notable sections from the profile for those that are less familiar with Walker's game.

Chet “The Jet” was among the best open-court forwards of his day. He particularly enjoyed drawing fouls. Walker played tenacious defense and proved remarkably durable. He never missed more than six games in any season, and became one of the few players to appear in more than 1,000 games (1,032) for his career.

Walker’s teams made the playoffs every year, and he had identical career scoring averages of 18.2 points in both the regular season and the postseason. His impact was most evident in Chicago, where the Bulls reached the playoffs in each of Walker’s six seasons but not in the year before he arrived or the year after he left.

It was between him and Johnson for my pick - great selection.

My only hesitation was that he was a SF throughout his career and I'll probably start him at SG.  Now he was 6'6" and a great athlete, so I think he'd be fine at SG, but I usually don't like to play guys out of position.