AROUND the NBA:

[KillerLeft]

We will see how the OKC picks play out.  They are big on culture and guys buying in and sacrificing.   Both of their picks are players who I could never reach a consensus on this year.    I think both could be good, but I also left the draft not exactly sure what OKC left with.   I think both players have unique skills but also don't really fit the blueprint of what made OKC so good the last few years.   Will be interesting to see if they were right with these picks.

I think both players are overrated as hell, and wouldn't have wanted either in Dallas. Stirtz, in particular, looks like just a guy out there in summer league, to me. I'm sure he's as smart as people say, but I don't see a player who'll ever be more than 3rd or 4th guard on a team at best. 

However, I think OKC is in the "maintain" stage of roster building, and using even high draft picks on players who can play or grow into specific roles is basically the goal. They need to be able to let older players walk in the coming years, and you could even make a case that drafting players who will slot into specific roles and salaries for their first and second contracts could be helpful. In other words, it's not the end of the world if these guys aren't great, as long as they understand what's expected of them, can do that and are excited about it. 

But, I'd also say that Presti has really never impressed me as a talent evaluator. He has obviously done a great job in OKC, but where I think he's succeeded is in the area of longterm strategy and asset management. He spent a long time amassing draft capital at the expense of winning, giving himself an exhorbatant amount of attempts to find cost controlled talent, but tbh, not many of the picks have really hit. I'm still a believer in Chet Holmgren, but many around here have turned on him after this past post season, and isn't he the biggest "get" of all those picks? What Presti has undeniably done well is this: when he doesn't want to use his assets, he turns them into FUTURE assets, so no matter how successful or unsuccessful any particular move ever turns out, the near future always offers more opportunity - more chances. 

I'd also suggest that he and OKC are uniquely a good match for one another. If he had tried this approach in Philly...NY...LA...probably even Dallas, they would've run him out of town way before that super long rebuild had a chance to take form. That's what I think, anyway. I'm not saying it would've been justified, but the reality is that you have to win in places like that or you get fired - in OKC, they're lucky to have you, to an extent. I LOVE him as a negotiator and longterm planner, and I think those are both super important parts of the job, so I'm in no way trying to disparage the job he has done. He won a championship in OKC! But, he did so not by finding SGA in the draft, when others couldn't see the potential, he did so by having the vision to leverage the "Kawhi Leonard fever" going on in LA by stealing SGA (with much more data than before the draft) and a thousand picks from the Clippers because they had to have Paul George. WONDERFUL piece of GM business, but it's not like he saw something in SGA nobody else could see - he just had the guy Kawhi wanted to play with and maximized the opportunity.