Joe Dumars on Brandon Knight: It's about talent, not fit

There are similarities between Chauncey’s scoring profile in college and Knights — both shot a ton of 3’s and were poor finishers inside, but good from the free throw line.

The big difference is Chauncey’s steal rate was where it should be for a highly rated PG prospects (almost 2 steals per/40 as a freshman, well over 2 as a soph), while Knight’s was abysmal (0.7 per 40). This is a scarily bad sign. Steal rate is one of the most important athletic indicators, very few guard prospects with a steal rate that low make an impact in the league.

In fact, according to hoopsanalyst’s Ed Weiland, there are only two guards who had long NBA careers after posting a steal rate of less than 1 steal per 40 their freshman year in college — Mark Jackson and Steve Kerr.

Subjectively, I like Knight probably more than I should. He does come across as a nice, intelligent kid. I just wish the odds weren’t so heavily against him.

OK, the upside is that Knight might be really good, and that this makes it even more super clear that we have to make some big moves (smaller guys for bigger guys, in a nutshell).

The continuing problem is that the moves we now need to make even more are still going to be hard to make because several of the guys we need to move the most have really bad contracts.

Now hoping the league can reach a deal so this kid can start working with the team as soon as possible.

If there was ever a time to deal our army of guards, it is now. Hold on to Monroe and Jerebko, use everybody else to get rid of those guys.

He’s the next Ben Gordon. except with out as many steals. Or assists

just wanted to say congrats on drafting BK. It seem many of you are not that excited about it, but trust me, he will prove you all wrong. I went to high school with him, he is an extremely hard worker on and off the court. As a freshman, he had a few games that killed his stats (it seems that is what many of you are looking at), but as he grows us, he will become more consistent. Pairing him with Monroe gives you two good players to build the future around…

Drafting Knight would be a massive mistake, he can’t play point and BG is better at the two. For the money he’s gonna cost the best move would be to trade all the other guards now.

Except Oedipus and Rico Suave.

does this pave the way for the glorious return of Chris Wilcox?

So after sleeping on it for a night, this is the net result of the draft for Pistons fans:

1. We are likely to return the identical, or at least very similar roster, that stumbled into 30 wins this season.
2. We still have a front court rotation consisting of only two players that produce, and one of them only plays there part-time.
3. We picked two guys in the second round who may not even make the team, and if they do, are all but guaranteed to be practice players.
4. There is no objective argument in favor of our lottery pick actually being a good player. Not one. We only have subjective impressions and hunches about shooting ability (easily debunked by the facts), character, and potential. At best, he’s a useful player in three years. At worst, he’s a complete bust (I don’t give a shit about what the pundits say, they’re wrong so much more often that they’re right it’s amazing they still have jobs.)

But the facts, as I see them, are that we did precisely nothing to improve the team in the short term — and you can even make a case that the short-term has been made worse by the devaluing Knight is bound to have on our few perimeter assets — and at best, we’re only marginally better in the long term.

This draft was not the worst draft in Dumars’ history. But all things considered, it’s right up there. Shit, we’re not even on the mediocrity treadmill at this point. We’re not good enough to get there.

As I said about Stuckey last year, it’s hard to develop as a point guard when your roster is so ridiculously unbalanced that you can’t run anything like a normal offense.

Billy King is a bad GM, so I feel like he’d probably be dumb enough to do it. They need a shooting guard! Vujacic isn’t going to get it done for New Jersey and they seem to have no confidence in Anthony Morrow. Humphries is stealing boards from Brook Lopez and making him look bad! They’ve already got their franchise PF in Travis Outlaw anyway. PULL THE TRIGGER, BILLY!

In 15 games at home he shot almost 48% from the field 46.4% from 3 (which make up almost half of his attempts), he got to the line about 4 times a game and his assist to turnover ration (5 to 2) is pretty OK.

In 10 road games, he shot about 44% from the field, a still excellent 43% from 3 and his free throw attempts went up to more than 5 per game. However, his assist to turnover ratio is god-awful (3.3 assists to 4.0 turnovers).

In 13 games at neutral sites, Knight was ABYSMAL. He shot 36% from the field, 25.8% from 3 and had about a 1 to 1 assist to turnover ratio.

Not sure why he was so terrible at neutral sites, but if you take only his home and road numbers, they’re actually pretty OK. He’s still not good at running an offense, but his three point shooting was pretty excellent if you remove neutral sites, and his shooting efficiency is considerably less terrible overall.

All I’d like to do is thank Joe Dumars for drafting Jason Terry 2.0 and Mike Dunleavy Jr. Jr.

Fire Joe Dumars. I want this to happen, now.

It seems like this site is completely biased towards what Dumars does because of a few bad moves in the past. Its just plain silly to write a player off before he has yet to take a step onto an NBA court or because of how many “combo” guards we have on the roster. Besides, we don’t even have that many. I have a real hard time believing that all three of Ben Gordon, Rip Hamilton and Rodney Stuckey are going to make it through the offseason.

Stuckey is really the main combo guard we have, Gordon plays 2 guard most of the time, and Rip can just come off the bench. I personally don’t have an issue of with a lineup that includes Knight at PG, Gordon at SG, Daye at SF, Jerebko at PF and Monroe at center with Rip coming off the bench. Its a rag tag lineup, but thats probably good enough to get into the playoffs in the east if you have the right head coach in place

But I wasn’t going to be high on anybody that they drafted at No. 8 once things played themselves out the way they did. The bigs they would have conceivably drafted (Kanter, Thompson, Jonas 2 and Biyombo) were obviously off the board and that scenario probably took the Houston trade off the table. In those kinds of scenarios, you usually see the GM go for the best talent available and that’s what Dumars did, at least in his mind.

What’s concerning is that digging into Knight’s numbers beyond the traditional box score statistics shows that he’s a long way from being a solid contributor at the NBA level. This is not at all surprising, though. Joe hasn’t used advanced statistics in the past, so there’s no reason to believe that he’s changed. That doesn’t bode well for this team’s immediate success of Joe’s future with the organization.

As for right now, Knight is the most intriguing member of the backcourt, if for no other reason that unknown commodities are more exciting than known commodities, especially if those known commodities are known to suck. Dumars can absolutely NOT go into the next season, whenever that may be, with Knight, Stuckey, Hamilton, Gordon, Bynum and White on the roster. Stuckey definitely shouldn’t be brought back (though I imagine he will be anyway) and at least one of Joe’s overpaid shooting guards needs to be shipped out of town. Most of these guys can’t play together anyway. Ugh. We’re totally fucked, aren’t we?

I read a lot of the comments last night..most of which were from butthurt fans because we didn’t get Biyombo. By the way, the mobile version of DBB had something like 2000 comments. Don’t know why for the glitch…

Look at it this way…if MJ had to get that 7th pick, considering how well he has evaluated talent in the past, to get Biyombo…well, how good is Biyombo is going to turn out? The other thing you might want to consider, is how effective would Biyombo be playing next to Monroe? I don’t think they compliment each other, and Biyombo is probably more a rotation player than starter.

I felt like we got great value with the Knight pick. Time will tell of course, but this means Rip is gone, and perhaps Stuckey too. I mean, the role Stuckey would now fill is the third guard/sixth man, and let me cut to the chase, he’s no Microwave.

If Dumars is pressing the re-reset button, he has a pretty good core so far in JJ, Monroe and now Knight. If this is the case, then pretty much everyone else is in play.

How did Chad Ford grade our draft?

There weren’t very many good players in it. It’s entirely possible that NOBODY in this draft will develop into a game changer. There was no player in this draft that was going to change turn the Pistons into winners. There was no player in this draft worth getting upset over. It was a bad draft, we were never going to get an elite player at 8 in a bad draft. The only possibility of getting a good player at 8 was to take a gamble on a player with upside. That’s exactly what you all wanted. That’s exactly what we did. Why are you so upset about it now? Because it wasn’t the particular gamble that YOU wanted? A gamble is a gamble. We’re not going to know whose roll came up 7 and whose came up snake eyes for years. Certainly not the day after. Joe D took a chance on a player with great upside. Exactly the way you all wanted him to.

Rumors came out well before the draft that Tristan Thompson would go to the Cavs. Additionally the trade between charlotte/milwaukee/sacramento was more or less confirmed before the draft began. That said, why wouldn’t JoD have been working on a trade with Washington to jump up to 6?

Washington was the only team who wanted Vesely and dropping back to 8 wouldn’t have changed much. Charlotte would have taken Walker at 7 instead of Biyombo because we would have taken Biyombo at 6. Washington is left to take Vesely at 8.

We probably could have gotten this done with a swap of 2nd rounders. Now your thoughts?

I’ve adopted the ’Let’s suck as badly as possible and get a legitimate star in next year’s draft class’ mantra, so let’s keep all the guards and make a sitcom out of it for the next year!