Last NBA Draft Thoughts - Post-Draft Analysis

In no particular order

• It's kind of sad that the Sixers were regarded as having "won" the draft by dint of A)not doing any of the egregiously stupid things they were rumored to be doing and B)simply taking the best player available when their pick came up. This got them better players at 24 and 26 than they might have expected, thanks to a run starting around pick 13 on "Who the hell did they just draft?" guys, but after years of bad draft luck, it's about time something went the Sixers' way. They didn't screw up. That counts as progress.
• It seems likely that the pick-by-pick draft grades for The Vertical were done by a drunken gibbon with a dartboard and Brad Ziegler's throwing motion.
• Here's the cognitive dissonance of the NBA draft in a nutshell. Everyone agreed it was a weak draft, with a talent drop-off after the first two picks and then another one after roughly pick 8. The same pundits talked about what great value picks guys who went in the 20s were. Either those guys didn't have the chops to crack the top 8 of a weak draft, or it wasn't such a weak draft after all. Go figure.
• Simple math says that a lot of the guys picked even in the first round are going to go bust. There's only so many NBA-quality players in any given draft, and there's 60 draft slots to fill. Then, you have consider fit, team, coaching - who knows how Darko might have turned out if Larry Brown hadn't hot-glued his ass to the bench in Detroit - injuries, you name it. and the odds are against any of these guys succeeding. So in a couple of years, when your favorite team's draft is widely derided as a bust, remember, that unless they were drafting at the very top of the order, that was the likely outcome from the beginning.
• If you claim to know who Georgics Papagiannis was before the Suns drafted him at #13, you are almost certainly a liar. If you claim to know who he now, you're probably still lying.
• For all the pre-draft talk about how crafty Boston GM Danny Ainge is and how the whole draft ran through the Garden because of the #3 pick, the Celtics' evening was pretty underwhelming. They may have had roughly 46 picks in the draft, but the first few guys they grabbed were all "projects", which is a nice way of saying "they really don't know what they're doing on the court yet". There's a very good chance they end up getting more out of the polished but unexciting second rounders they picked than from their small army of firsts.
• Once again, we have learned that having a mailing address in LA or Boston automatically adds the word "genius" to your resume, regardless of results.
• Speaking of which, once again we saw the "we have no idea if this guy can actually play but maybe someday" narrative trump the "we have been watching this guy play for years and know exactly what he can and can't do" when it comes to the draft. Bored now, want a new trope.
• Look, I know that the younger a draft prospect is, the greater his odds of developing further and succeeding on the next level. But. The next time I hear a bunch of 50-something dudes talk about how a kid is too old because he's 22, I go after somebody with an axe.
• The Sixers drafted a guy named Furkan. Every basketball headline in Philadelphia for the next five years just wrote itself.