“Every year people can say that all those guys who were in the top 15 in the draft or the top 10, discussed about where we were or who we should take, Brandon Jennings was probably the least talked about because he had been overseas and hadn’t played very well. But everyone thought that Tyreke (Evans) was going to be a good player, and Johnny Flynn. You had (James) Harden. All the guys who were up there drafted were discussed and debated. With our team the way it was last year, we felt we needed to add some wing players and we needed to add some defensive players. Hasheem was the guy who was blocking all the shots in college and we felt like he would be able to do that in the NBA and still feel that way. He’s probably further behind than all of those guys and you are going to get a lot of debate on us taking this guy or that guy because big guys usually do take a little bit more time. The fact that his inexperience in the games lends for him to be even further behind, but I think that he has come a long ways, he has played well when he is in there. He gets a lot of bogus opportunities, he just walks into the fouls, he pushes people and he’s so big. He commits fouls that in a year or two he won’t be committing. But those other guys are good players, that’s just the way the draft goes and you have to live with the decisions that you make. Hopefully he will pan out the way we think he will, we believe that. He’s not going to be the dominant 30 point scorer, but we think that we had scoring and needed something else to shore up the rest of our game and he’s done that so far.â€
I don’t think it was wrong to draft Hasheem Thabeet. I think it was wrong to draft Hasheem Thabeet with the number two pick overall with so many impact players available. But what else are they going to say? “No, we definitely screwed up, should have taken Evans/Jennings/Harden/Rubio/ANYONE ELSE? You can’t go down that road. So you’ll continue to hear about them developing the kid, even though he wasn’t anywhere near ready for the NBA game coming out of college.
The Grizzlies are starting to actually play well. Just imagine how good they could be if they hadn’t wasted the #2 overall pick.
