Draft Days are the Best Days

By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)

Things are about to get weird. Tonight’s NBA Draft should be more active than any one in recent memory. There are teams looking to trade both up and down, clubs in the lottery looking to win now and possibly land a quality veteran as part of a deal, huge free agents complicating matters (including the best player on the planet), and a probable Kevin Love trade to shake things up. We’ve already seen two fairly significant trades go down just yesterday between the Knicks and Mavericks, and Pelicans and Rockets.

With a deep pool of talented players at the top of the draft, no one is quite sure who is falling where. But after going through my ideal, likely unrealistic, scenario for the draft yesterday, let’s run down my official predictions for the top 10 players called this evening. Hold on to your butts.

1) Cleveland – Andrew Wiggins

Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert is obsessed with getting back into the playoffs, so although swapping down to 4 in a deal with the Magic might allow them to pick up some quality assets and still select Joel Embiid, I don’t see them passing on one of the top guys that can help them win this season. With a ton of offense-skewing players already in Kyrie Irving, Dion Waiters, and Anthony Bennett, the defensive prowess of Wiggins is a much better fit for Cleveland than adding another ball stopper in Jabari Parker.

2) Milwaukee – Jabari Parker

Parker has a promise from Milwaukee to be taken at 2. He basically tanked his workout with Cleveland in the hopes that the Cavaliers wouldn’t take him and he’d get to play less than two hours from where he grew up in Chicago. This might be the hardest anyone’s ever fought to go to Wisconsin.

3) Philadelphia – Dante Exum

We did it guys! A year of tanking for the kid from Australia who nobody knows anything about and has barely played against even D-1 level competition! Exum projects to be a Dwayne Wade/Russell Westbrook type, not a huge leaper, but incredibly fast and able to get into the lane to finish at will. Brett Brown knows him probably as well as anyone due to his team with the Australian national team, so if the organization feels Exum is their team, we have to trust them. Unfortunately, I don’t see how a backcourt of MCW-Exum could work with both guards being below-average shooters (ominous foreshadowing).

4) Orlando – Joel Embiid

The Magic are pissed because they liked the idea of an Exum-Oladipo backcourt and the Embiid injury flushed all their plans down the toilet. Instead, they’ll bite the bullet on the guy in the draft with the best chance of being a franchise game-changer and earn another high lottery pick next year in the process.

5) Utah – Noah Vonleh

The Jazz have big man pairing of Derrick Favors and Enes Kanter that struggles offensively because neither guy is really capable of stretching the floor. Vonleh fits perfectly in that scenario as he’s projected to have three-point range, while still having the body to defend opposing power forwards. He would pair well with Favors, and give Utah flexibility to not have to pay big money to Kanter when he enters free agency.

6) Boston – Aaron Gordon

Danny Ainge is all about collecting assets and Gordon is a good one. He’ll never be a dominant scorer but he does everything else so well that he projects as the perfect role player on a championship-caliber team. Boston is a potential destination where free agents or stars wanting to be traded are willing to go, so the Celtics have other options rather than getting the franchise guy through the draft.

7) Philadelphia – Julius Randle

Hinkie! I really think the Sixers make another move to get an additional top 10 pick and the Lakers are the most likely landing spot. However, I don’t think Hinkie wants to unload his only two tradeable assets, Michael Carter-Williams and Thaddeus Young, in the same deal. I believe LA eventually settles for just MCW in the swap (maybe getting one of Philly’s second-rounders as sweetener), getting the young point guard they want, while also unloading Steve Nash to free up another $9M in cap space and make a serious run at the big free agents out there. The Sixers get a guy in Randle who will be a bruiser on the interior and has the capability to be a good jump shooter, so he could play with Nerlens Noel in a frontcourt pairing.

8) Sacramento – Marcus Smart

Despite the fact I think Isaiah Thomas is very good, the Kings don’t want to pay the restricted free agent big money and seem set on getting a point guard through the draft. Smart and Elfrid Payton have been neck and neck in all their workouts, but I think they’d be happy to snap up Smart if he falls past the LA spot at 7 to them.

9) Charlotte – Nik Stauskas

The Hornets(!) desperately need outside shooting at the wing position with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist never having panned out offensively, and the Al Jefferson-Cody Zeller frontcourt having limited range to the perimeter. They could also go Doug McDermott here but they have more of a need for the natural 2/3 position in Stauskas.

10) Philadelphia – Gary Harris

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though any of those second-tier guys are going to fall to the Sixers at 10, which is why I think Hinkie is so determined to secure that third pick up there. Gary Harris is one of those guys who does everything pretty well and could be a good role player for when the Sixers have a competitive team down the road in 2016-17. Harris shoots well enough that pairing him with Exum wouldn’t kill the team’s spacing offensively, and the size of that backcourt would be a terror for opposing offenses (Editor’s Note: to clarify, Exum’s size combined with Harris’ defensive acumen, if not necessarily his height).

There you have it, feel free to point out everything that I got wrong when there’s four other trades tonight and chaos reigns supreme. Most of all, enjoy the draft!