There is something inherently unfair about the next sentence I’m about to type, but here goes:
If I were the 76ers, if I were Daryl Morey and his scouting staff, and if I were given the opportunity to select either Dylan Harper or Ace Bailey in next week’s NBA draft, I would pick someone else.
I would not pick someone who played at Rutgers last season, which Harper and Bailey both did. I would not pick someone who was one of the two best players on a team that finished 15-17, that lost 12 of its 20 games in the Big Ten, and that failed to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. I would not presume or bet or even hope that one of the two best players on a team like that would turn out to be one of the two best players on an NBA team that had any chance of winning a championship or winning a division title or even making the playoffs.
I would not do that, no sir. I would pick someone else at No. 3 and live with Harper or Bailey or both of them developing into NBA superstars. I would pick VJ Edgecombe from Baylor or Tre Johnson from Texas or Jeremiah Fears from Oklahoma. I would pick one of those three players even though the consensus among NBA insiders and draftniks and scouts seems to be that Harper and Bailey are the two best prospects in this draft behind Duke’s Cooper Flagg.
I would pick someone else even though the counterarguments to my position have plenty of logic and reason and reality underpinning them. A draft is about looking ahead, about projection. It’s less about who a player is now than it is about who he will be. Harper is 19 and 6-foot-6 and the son of longtime NBA player Ron Harper, and he is so highly regarded that it would be surprising if he was still available for the Sixers to take at No. 3. Yet if I were the Sixers, I would not trade up to get him. Bailey is even younger — he doesn’t turn 19 until August — but is 6-8 and fluid and was at times a dominant scorer for the Scarlet Knights, putting up 39 points against Indiana on Jan. 2 and 37 against Northwestern on Jan. 29.
I would pick someone else even though it’s possible, I suppose, that the coaching and supporting players around Harper and Bailey were so substandard that nothing either of those guys could do would have turned Rutgers into a winning team. I would pick someone else even though I spoke Monday to a person who follows Rutgers basketball closely, whose insights and opinions should be taken seriously, and who told me, “Reading the Ace Bailey criticism, a big one is, ‘He never passed the ball.’ Dude, there was no one to pass the ball to.”
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I would pick someone else even though college basketball is getting older; even though players are staying in school longer; even though, in their only season at Rutgers, Harper and Bailey were going up against opposing teams that were mentally savvier, physically stronger, and more mature. I would pick someone else even though the primary reason I would pick someone else — and I’ll get back to that reason in a second, promise — is a classic example of the danger of intuitive thinking, of being reductive, of relying on the past to draw conclusions about the future.
I would pick someone else because — with all of those caveats and all of that context and all of Harper’s and Bailey’s talent and potential — I cannot get past one nagging thought: If Harper and Bailey were truly outstanding players, if they were truly worth using such high picks on them, then Rutgers would have been better for their presence. If they were that good, the Scarlet Knights would not have been perhaps the most disappointing team in Division I basketball last season.
I would pick someone else because, in 2016, I listened to people dismiss what turned out to be legitimate concerns about Ben Simmons. About his refusal to shoot open jump shots. About his inability to make those open jump shots. About the fact that LSU had gone 22-11 and made the NCAA Tournament in 2014-15, then added Simmons — billed as a transcendent player — and somehow got worse in 2015-16, going 19-14, failing to qualify for the NCAAs, and not even bothering to play in the NIT. About how LSU’s coaches and Simmons’ supporting cast were responsible for that regression, not him. About how no one could blame Simmons for maybe not being totally into the whole college hoops thing.
“No knock on LSU,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on The Dan Patrick Show in June 2017, “but he’s a bright young man, and he was saying, ‘I’m only here because I’m being forced to defer going to the NBA for a year.’ The NCAA Tournament didn’t seem all that important to him, and it may ultimately have been a lost year in his development because he’s not fully engaged in school, and he’s not fully engaged in basketball.”
I would pick someone else because, in 2017, I listened to people dismiss what turned out to be a legitimate concern about Markelle Fultz: that Washington went 9-22 in his only season there. I would pick someone else because, just after the Sixers traded up to take Fultz with the No. 1 pick, former Huskies head coach Lorenzo Romar told me that Washington’s awful record “had nothing to do with Markelle.” I would pick someone else because Raphael Chillious, the coach who recruited Fultz to Washington, told me, “He can’t put the ball in the hoop for everybody. He can’t rebound for everybody. He can’t get them layups and make their free throws.”
I would pick someone else because those explanations for why Simmons’ and Fultz’s college teams weren’t that good sound a lot like the explanations for why Harper and Bailey’s college team wasn’t that good. I would pick someone else because Bailey, over his final 11 games at Rutgers, when the Scarlet Knights could have made a push to save their season, shot 41% from the field, averaged 12.1 points, and scored eight points or fewer in a game three times.
» READ MORE: Trade up for Dylan Harper? Sure, but Sixers have a fine consolation prize at No. 3.
I would pick someone else because there’s more to evaluating a player than the film and the obvious skill and the attributes that anyone can see. I would pick someone else because I keep thinking of Stanley Tucci’s line in the film Spotlight: “I’m not crazy. I’m not paranoid. I’m experienced.”
Yep. When it comes to the Sixers, I’m experienced. I’m jaded. I’m skeptical. I might turn out to be wrong about both of these players. I’ll own it if I am. I’d still pick someone else.
