The only thing you can really say about Bennett at this point is that the draft he was taken 1st in was thought to be historically weak. There was no consensus top pick. Nerlens Noel was seen as the best prospect, but his injury caused him to fall and nobody really thought he was a superstar prospect either. Nobody really saw Bennett as a potential superstar. The draft was seen as a crap shoot. He was universally seen as a reach at the time he was drafted, but the Cavs apparently thought he had the highest ceiling if he could figure it out. I watched him his first couple years and he was obviously terrible, but you could see glimmers of what the Cavs saw in him. He had some tools. Good mobility, large body, explosive, decent shooting mechanics. He occasionally showed signs of being a decent player. He performed well for Team Canada and in Summer League. You could at least get a sense of why they drafted him and the type of player he could develop into if he put the tools together.
In terms of how a #1 pick ended up, yeah... Bennett is a disaster. But I could see a case being made that Greg Oden is a bigger bust simply because expectations were sky high for Oden. That's the definition of a bust for me. It's the same reason I don't look at failures taken 15-30 as "busts". Nobody should reasonably expect a guy like Fab Melo to become a star - he was just a nice cheap late-round gamble in case he figured it out. I don't think anyone reasonably expected Bennett to be a star. He just had tools. We've seen guys with tools who don't figure it out at all. We've seen guys with tools who put it all together. And we've even seen a rare instance of a guy with tools who disappeared for years only to return as a functional NBA basketball player (Gerald Green comes to mind).
There was enough of a glimmer of potential with Bennett that I made an infamous post during the dregs of the 2015 offseason hypothetically asking if it would be worthwhile to trade the #16 pick for Bennett:
http://forums.celticsblog.com/index.php?topic=78383.0I admitted up front that the trade didn't make any functional sense, because of Bennett's contract. It was never going to happen. I myself never actually said I'd do it (though others did). I admitted up front it was a ridiculous premise... I literally open the post by saying "ok, let me know when you're done laughing." I was more just trying to start a conversation about targeting buy-low candidates who might have a higher ceiling than the players available at #16. I later made a post asking if it would be worthwhile to trade #16 for Nik Stauskas.
It would be the equivalent of me asking, "If the 2016 picks falls to #6, would any of you trade it for Mario Hezonja?"... Naturally, if Hezonja never reaches his potential you'd have guys here years later taking my question out of context and suggesting I thought Hezonja was a future superstar. The "buy low" idea was a premise based on actual behavior from Danny Ainge. Back in 2006 Ainge looked at his options with the #7 pick and decided he'd rather trade it for a buy-low candidate named Sebastian Telfair. It didn't really work out. Likewise, in the 2014 draft there was a strong rumor that Ainge was considering moving the #6 pick for Ben McLemore.
Naturally, my comments were taken out of context and you'll see in dozens of threads, "LarBrd33 is an idiot... he thought Anthony Bennett, Nik Stauskas and Ben McLemore would be superstars". Saw one of those as recently as yesterday. I'm clearly an idiot, but at least find the stuff I'm actually an idiot about.
Anyways. Bennett hasn't figured it out and probably never will. But I'm not sure I'd say he's the biggest bust. I saw Bennett the same way I saw Kedrick Brown. Brown was a massive reach, but you could kind of see the things that were appealing about him. He never figured it out. In terms of guys who had massive expectations only to fall short, there's probably better examples than Bennett.
Topic: Anthony Bennett = top number 1 draft pick bust of all time? (Read 7687 times)