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By Trevor, Section NBA
by Trevor Freeman
"As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Erik once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job."
The fundamental problem when a player like Tayshaun Prince slips to a contending team is simple. The gap between the haves and the have nots increases. In the 2002 NBA Draft, there were eleven "swing" players drafted prior to Tayshaun Prince. The most notable teams that missed were Denver (Nikoloz Tskitishvili), Cleveland (DaJuan Wagner), Houston (Bostjan Nachbar), Philadelphia (Jiri Welsch), Toronto (Kareem Rush), and Portland (Qyntel Woods). Fans of those teams can only shake their heads now because their team's history could have been dramatically altered had they pulled the trigger on Tayshaun Prince. Imagine the Philadelphia 76ers and Cleveland Cavaliers with Tayshaun Prince playing second fiddle to Allen Iverson and LeBron James. Just think about what we would be saying about a Toronto Raptors team that has a frontline of Chris Bosh, Charlie Villanueva, and Prince. "He's the only player in the history of the SEC with three hundred hits and two hundred walks," says Paul, looking up from his computer." Common sense truly failed every single GM who passed on Tayshaun Prince. In Prince's four years at the University of Kentucky he added his name to one of the great record books in college basketball history. In four years he scored 1,775 points which ranked him seventh in Kentucky history. Prince was also second in three-point field goals made (204) and attempted (621) and fifth in blocks (142). That last sentence is truly telling as those are the skills that have made him one of the best forty players in the NBA. To top it off, Tayshaun Prince had a 41 point NCAA Tournament explosion which should have given notice that Prince is a "money" player. Compare that to a Bostjan Nachbar who got drafted on the basis of his 13.7 points and 4.1 rebounds a game for Benetton Treviso (coincidentally the team that currently employs a man by the name of Andrea Bargnani). It hasn't just been Tayshaun Prince. The following year, Josh Howard was drafted 29th by the Dallas Mavericks. Howard was a first-team All-American and the first unanimous choice for ACC Player of the Year since David Thompson in 1975. In 2004, Jameer Nelson went 20th to Orlando despite being the consensus National Player of the Year. Unbelievably enough three point guards including a certifiable bust in Sebastian Telfair were drafted ahead of him. Should it surprise anybody that all three of these guys have won starting jobs? Was it really that far-fetched to believe that Tayshaun Prince and Josh Howard could be top-tier guys on NBA title contenders? "All eight are college players. Most of them are guys the scouts either did not particularly like, or, in a few cases, don't really know." The upcoming NBA Draft will be the most interesting in years because of the large amount of high-level upperclassmen on the draft board. There are two names out of the top ten on espn.com and nbadraft.net that a basketball version of Billy Beane wouldn't pass on. The first is J.J. Redick. No matter how much you hated him at Duke, you have to respect the numbers Redick put on the board. J.J. Redick graduated from Duke as the most prolific scorer in ACC history. He also is the NCAA career leader for most three pointers made. I can already see Redick drilling daggers for some NBA playoff caliber team within the next two years. The other is Dee Brown. Brown was a first team All-American as a junior and a second team All-American as a senior. He leaves Illinois ranked third on their all-time scoring chart with 1,812 career points. Brown is also second in school history in career 3-pointers (299), career assists (674) and career steals (231). His 674 career assists ranks him fifth in Big Ten history. With the NBA Draft coming up later this month, I want you to take a look at the players that go 20-29. In this grouping will be a player who did nothing but dominate at the collegiate level. Apply what will now be known as the "Tayshaun Prince Corollary" and know that one these players will step in and help a team already at the top of the NBA food chain. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me at trevor.freeman@realityfanforum.com.
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---- NBADraft.net, which is the most detailed NBA Draft site on the internet
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