Interesting read from the folks at Wages of Wins, regarding the upcoming NBA Draft. Using their "wins produced" metric they've identified 10 players from this class who appear to be headed to Bust Land, or at least Unproductiveville.
The first part of the list, players 10 through six are of the latter variety, players who weren't necessarily terrible in college, but indeed unproductive. Names range from Kentucky's Terrence Jones to UCONN's Andre Drummond.
Of concern for Raptors' fans should be two prime names, Austin Rivers and Harrison Barnes. Barnes will not likely fall to the Raps at eight, and according to Wages of Wins, for that we should be thanking our lucky stars:
Barnes is the epitome of the basketball player that fools the masses with everyone's favorite stat. Yeah, he scores a lot of points. But it's only because he shoots so much. His shooting percentages are poor. So in reality, he's not a good scorer. He's good at taking a lot of shots. But anyone can do that. And when you look deeper into his numbers, you see he's not particularly good at anything. Obviously, that's not what you dismantled your team for.
In many ways the book on Rivers is even worse as he isn't even a good scorer compared to Barnes. The difference is Barnes gets the nod overall because of expectations.
From a Dino perspective, I'm more of a believer in Barnes than Rivers and although I wouldn't touch Barnes iin the top five, I do think he provides some value as a complementary piece and has another level to his game.
Rivers, even as a Duke fan, no thanks.
Obviously there's more to the analysis than simply a list like this but it is encouraging to see some of our favourite options, Lillard, Waiters, Sullinger, Marshall etc not among the top 10.
Showing up on a future underrated list?
Let's hope.