Sekou Smith of NBA.com: Craziest Top Of Draft In Years... This has been easily the craziest top 10 of a NBA Draft in recent memory ... (Noel was taken by) the New Orleans Pelicans where it was assumed he would form a wicked shot-blocking duo with another former Kentucky Wildcat, second-year forward Anthony Davis , the No. 1 overall pick in the 2012 Draft. He even bragged about the block party he and Davis would throw in the Big Easy. That was minutes before word spread that the Pelicans were moving Noel to Philadelphia for All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday... The deal makes sense for Pelicans, who have no need for two slender power forwards who will not be able to hold down the middle as undersized centers. (people have jokingly been calling the idea of Davis and Noel together the "Thin Towers")
Sekou Smith on the upcoming 2013 free agency period: Free agency...is a wicked venture that plays out every July, with the biggest stars holding most of the leverage and the desperate teams flush with cap space ready to do whatever it takes to win their favor. The winners and losers in free agency are revealed rather quickly. Spend wisely (like the Miami Heat three summers ago, with the aid of cap space and key sign-and-trade assets LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade on South Beach) and you can move into elite company immediately. Spend frivolously (see the Detroit Pistons’ 2009 summer of Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva ) and you’ll be making an annual date for the lottery. That superstar list this summer is short, starting with the top unrestricted free agents Dwight Howard and Chris Paul, and falling to a second-tier that includes Josh Smith , David West, Andrew Bynum , Al Jefferson , Andre Iguodala, Paul Millsap, Monta Ellis , Manu Ginobili and others. There is also an intriguing list of restricted free agent crop includes talents like Brandon Jennings , Jeff Teague , Nikola Pekovic , Tyreke Evans , Tiago Splitter and others that some teams with cap space will poke around at in an effort to fill out their rosters. ... There are as many as 14 teams that could be $10 million under the salary cap, meaning there could be close to $300 million in collective cap space available for spending this summer. And that doesn’t include the sign-and-trade assets teams will have at their disposal to make deals. That said, not every penny of that available cap space will be spent. But it’s out there. And you better believe the agents representing all of these free agents, restricted and unrestricted, have their designs on every penny. ... With so much money and so many teams flooding the market, the agents are counting on someone being willing to overpay. League rules require teams to spend 90 percent of the cap, the figure was $49.337 million for the 2012-13 season and is expected to rise $3 million more for the 2013-14 season. Expect there to be more short-term deals instead of the long-term monster deals of the previous CBA that teams fretted over, seemingly always after the fact. “It’s a different world than what everyone is used to,” said a longtime Eastern Conference executive. “Everybody has to wrap their head around a new way of doing things, we do and the players and their agents do, too. The ‘future’ used to mean four and five years down the road. Now it’s more like two and in some cases three years for the guys who don’t change your culture.”
Danny Ainge, GM of Celtics (the GM that brought KG and Allen to Boston to form their Big 3, and a former All-Star guard for the Celtics that played on two of their championship teams in the 80's) On the 2014 Draft: “Next year’s draft we don’t see as loaded. We see it as top-heavy,” he said.
Editor of Pelicans blog: 2014 draft has five guys to get really excited about IMO, and our pick is....wait for it....... Top-5 protected!
Doesn't top-5 protected just mean that if our pick ends up being one of the top 5, then we keep it, and the 76ers get a 1st rounder the next year? If we are a top 5 pick, then that means we sucked this year, which isn't the plan w/JHoliday coming on board. So, the five guys to get really excited about are unlikely to be a Pelican anyway.
Sucking is never the plan. But guys get hurt, and it screws up the plan. Seems like it happens every other year for this team; three starters miss 30 games at once and the season is shot. Other than EG, we were pretty healthy last year; we're due for another injury-riddled season.
What i was getting at was the people that wanted us to keep tanking at least one more year, pulling our starters late, etc like we've being doing, we can still do that if we so choose to try and get our pick in the top 5, and would hopefully give us #1 in the draw again so we can get Wiggins. But, like a lot of good posts have said, if we expect EG and the rest of the team to be on board with winning, we can't plan to tank every year...esp with a young superstar like Davis....teaching him to play to lose is not good for his development as an all-time great
And like McTiger said, injuries happen (hopefully not to us). EG and Davis both had injury problems last year, as did Nerlens Noel, Kobe Bryant, and others. Key injuries change everything
The brief time thinking about Noel and Davis developing together as a dynamic low post duo reminded me of when Shaq and Webber could have become teammates via the draft. Opting for Penny over Webber made some sense at the time, much like going with Jrue over Noel. Still, it makes you wonder. Especially if Noel and Davis end up with 8-10 All-Star appearances each.
I haven't seen Noel play much although two things I heard last week were interesting: 1. Noel would have been the #1 pick out of high school if eligible. He was also thought to be the #1 pick just before his injury and also when the season ended. With so much time between the end of the season and the draft, it became trendy to pick at his faults (i.e. selling articles). 2. He averaged 4.4 blocks and 2 steals per game and is known for playing with high intensity at all times. Being a lefty and so young gives him a lot of offensive upside.
