I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the Clippers will be mediocre. I’m not crazy about extending Harden as I see him as an albatross. Also, I would like the Clippers to move Powell while he still has value.

I’m still trying to move on from the Paul George trade for SGA. That should be a blueprint for the FO not to be led around by a star dictating what your roster composition will be.

I’m rooting for Cam, Trentyn, the “Swiss guy,” and the 2 Kobe’s to come through.

This statment summarises everything as proven by the trade with NYK.

We decided to get Yanic Konan Niederhauser (Clint Capela type center, chemistry with Harden) who no one wanter before pick30 and Kobe Sanders (tall pointguard, he has guard skills into a wing body, Preston 2.0 if you will) at 50 who we probably would have missed if not for the correcting trade.

All this happened in advance, way before draft night. Both are prototypes of players we don’t have in abundance or at all.

I’ll begin with, this was not a safe pick at all. This is the type of pick you’d feel better about in the 2nd round as a gamble and hope to hit on. But with the size and traits I can see why you’d maybe be worried he wouldn’t last.

So this kid has not been tall for long, I believe they said he grew from 6’1 to 6’9 from 15-17, which is pretty old in basketball years. Not sure if he even played much until he hit his growth spurt or if he did he probably played guard or wing. I think the tricky thing about him as a prospect is that he has been a pretty mediocre player for his college career. His 1st 2 seasons came on a pretty bad team and played against weak competition. And he didn’t even produce that much (didn’t play that many minutes either). I don’t think he’d have even been drafted if he came out after his Sophomore year. His first year he barely even plays for a bad team. 2nd year he’s a role player on that bad team. Then he transfers to a better team (Penn St.) and into a better conference, playing against better competition and even with the big jump in competition takes a pretty sizable leap from being a role player to a very decent starting C finishing the year strong.

Then a couple months later at the G league elite camp he impresses to the point that he gets invited to the NBA combine and tests really well athletically.

So basically it sounds like this kid was super raw and has just been improving super rapidly. If he was basically this type of player for 3 straight years then there’d be less unknown with him. Is he going to be even way better than he is now in a year? Or will he level out and hit a bit of a plateau. I don’t really know, but he is a slightly more intriguing with this context. It probably shows that he is a hard worker, but was incredibly raw at 19. The pick definitely carries a lot of risk, his production was much weaker than some of the other bigs he went before. But if you want to believe that he’s on a trajectory that will keep rapidly going up then like Frank says you can squint and see that too. Would be curious to know if there’s other guys who had this type of trajectory to compare to.

Congrats to the young fella! Not many people make it to the nba. Who knows, he might be a hidden gem in the second rounder like some turn out to be.