NBA Draft: The Calm Before the Storm

Let’s pause for a second while I collect my nerves from off of the floor. Every draft day, there are rumors galore, and almost none of them come true. But gazing upon Hoops Hype this morning, I got this awful sense of foreboding. Like, there could be a lot of damage to the league as we know it in the next 24 hours. Not in a good or bad way, necessarily, but you really get the sense that a lot of teams are really, really interested in making a change. Baron on the move, the Pistons breaking up, a Suns fire sale, Denver doing something ... that Toronto/Indy trade was just the beginning.↵
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And don’t for a second forget what a mess this draft is. In the largely fatuous Simmons/Ford showdown, one of them remarked that no one’s in the right slot in this draft. I feel that. We’ll have more on that later, but suffice it to say that, starting with Miami, almost everyone would rather be picking a few spots higher or lower. For lots of team, it seems like they’d like to move down -- there are just too many potential “reach” picks in the air, or situations where the pressure of “best available” could lead to awful redundancy. This draft class looks pretty strong, so teams want to get this one right. Or maybe they’re just feeding off of the restless energy that’s infected the league since teams started getting eliminated. Or vice-versa. Who knows. I’m drunk already.
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↵Best draft nugget so far: The ordinarily awesome Ivan Carter with some serious analysis (via Mr. Irrelevant): ↵↵⇥The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Wizards president Ernie Grunfield is either going to stay at 18 and take the best player on his board or move up or down.↵↵Preach on, interwebs. I’m going to visit the doctor and pray for rain.↵