Having had a few waking hours to digest the draft I have a few thoughts to save for posterity.
1. Going off of my tiered big board my pick would have clearly been Michael Foster Jr., I had him #34 in a large tier then ran from prospect 27-40. My next 3 would have been from the next tier ranging from 41-50 and the picks in that grouping where Justin Lewis, Butler Jr and Nzosa. Nzosa would have been my pick if Foster was off the board.
2. I was not high on Davison and had him #59th overall with Jordan Hall, Aminu Mohammed and Dereon Seabron ahead of him.
3. Despite having Davison just out of this draft I completely understand the pick. The Celtics have retained the major players in Danny Ainges front office to work with Stevens and JD Davison follows a couple of the previous drafting patterns they have established when drafting less .
He is an athletic sort of point guard with a great physical profile. Kadeem Allen, Demetrius Jackson, Terry Rozier, Etwan Moore, Avery Bradley, Lester Hudson, and Gabe Pruit all loosely fit this profile in the Ainge era.
He also fits into the pattern of targeting highly ranked "blue chip" high school prospects. J.D. was ranked 15th over all in the class of 2021 by ESPN coming out of high school with a scouting grade of 94. Rozier was a 92, Bradley a 98, Jackson 89, Langford 95, Young 94 along with Tatum, Brown, Smart, and Rob all being highly ranked out of high-school.
With this being our second Brad Stevens draft we may also see a pattern forming where Stevens prefers elite athletes with high ceilings over skill. Begarin last year was a swing for fences on a player with the physical profile of a lottery pick but a skill set that needs major development. The Davison pick fits as a high profile athlete who needs to develop. Long term this the front office betting on the players to work and the coaching staff to be able to develop these athletes into NBA players.
Drafting Davison was basically a "pre-draft" pick. Meaning the Celtics took a under productive freshman who could have easily worked himself into the first round had he stayed in college. His stats are actually very similar to freshman year Terry Rozier. JD had a very low usage rate as a freshman at only 18% had that bumped up into the TyTy Washingtons 22% and he shots a few % points better from 3 he would be a 20yr old 14pt 6rb 6ast prospect.
4. On the non celtics side of things I will be interested to see how a few groups of comparable prospects pan out
At the top Paulo vs Chet vs Smith will be interesting. Three talented but drastically different types of NBA big.
How do the "project" wings play out? Houston, Watson, Monott ,Brown and Walker all where drafted as developmental guys. I was supervised that Brown and Walker where taken so late given their college productivity compared to the others.
My early rookie of the year pick is Ivey, I think he is in the perfect spot to thrive
My early pick for 2nd rounder to make all rookie team is Koloko