International saturation

NBA can't get enough of good thing with foreigners

It was inevitable, really. Combine the recent influx of foreign talent with the putative decline of the college game, and voila! The NBA draft becomes a potpourri of consonants.

People used to complain that we only got to watch most of the draftees play for a year or two in college, but on Wednesday night in New York we will get treated to a parade of complete strangers -- Yao Ming, Nikoloz Tskitishvili, Nene Hilario, Jiri Welsch, Bostjan Nachbar, Lazaros Papadopoulos, Nenad Krstic, Mladen Sekularac and Luis Scola. Some of those guys will turn out to be solid pros and some undoubtedly will not, but you can be sure the deluge will continue for the forseeable. Once the NBA gets a hold of a good thing, the league can’t help but saturate it through its own gluttony.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of foreigners coming to the U.S. to excel in hoops, and I’m dismayed the NCAA is still doing everything it can to shut the door on overseas players who want to play for American colleges. And I understand why every NBA executive is panting at the idea of landing the next Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitzki or Predrag Stojakovic. But those players at least had considerable playing experience before coming to the NBA. Tskitishvili, by contrast, barely got off the bench for his Italian league team, Benetton Treviso. Likewise, Hilario was far from dominant in Brazil. Yet both of those players will probably be chosen in the lottery because they have something that’s much more important than ability. They have "upside."

The downside to drafting upside is that it’s hard to know who will reach his potential. It’s even harder to figure that out when analyzing foreign players because we know less about their personalities. But the league can’t help itself; it simply prefers the unknown to the known. That’s why someone such as Casey Jacobsen is so anxious to enter the draft before he’s a college senior, even though he’s not a guaranteed first-round pick. Jacobsen knows the longer he stays in school, the closer he will come to realizing his potential. And the less attractive he will become to NBA teams.

So as we prepare to watch pro basketball’s annual exercise in inexactitude, it’s worth asking whether the NBA has become too enamored with the unfamiliar. It will take another couple of years before we know whether the chances taken Wednesday night were wise ones. As for the men who make those decisions, they had better hope the wait isn’t too long.

Some pre-draft superlatives

Most underrated: Drew Gooden, Kansas. It’s a little tough to argue that the likely No. 4 pick is overrated, but for all the Ming-Williams-Dunleavy talk of the last month, it seems that many people have forgotten that Gooden was arguably the best college player in the country last season. He seems to have dropped off the layman’s radar screen ever since he played poorly against Maryland in the Final Four, but as a 6-foot-10 power player with tons of ways to score, Gooden has the ability -- not just the potential -- to be an immediate star.

Runner-up: Jared Jeffries, Indiana. He measured even taller than his listed height at 6-9 and he has added 15 pounds of muscle since the end of the season. This man is very smooth with the ball in his hands.

Most overrated: Might as well shoot for the top. The 7-5 Yao Ming will be the top pick in the draft based completely on his height. He’s plenty agile and has soft hands, but he’s neither strong nor quick, and he’s far from nasty. Look at the players he’s compared to most often: Shawn Bradley, Gheorge Muresan and Rik Smits. Hardly a Hall of Fame front line.

Runner-up: Rod Grizzard, Alabama. Nice size and a sweet stroke, but anyone who watched the Crimson Tide play knows Grizzard hates to drive to the rim. If he couldn’t do it in college, he definitely won’t in the pros.

Dumbest move by an underclassman: Marcus Taylor, Michigan State. It’s not even close. Taylor’s decision to enter the draft may be the worst of its kind of the last five years. Lots of players enter the draft who aren’t ready to play in the NBA, but most of them were either compelled to do so because of high draft stock or because they had no other viable options. Taylor falls into neither category. His draft position would have improved immeasurably if he had stayed another year in Lansing.

Dumbest move by a high school player: Lenny Cooke. The 6-6 swingman from New York apparently decided several years ago that he was going to head straight into the NBA, so he dropped his studies completely and now has no choice. Don’t be surprised if he goes undrafted.

Biggest sleeper: Juan Dixon, Maryland. A classic case of being too much of a known quantity. Sure, Dixon is small (6-3, 165 pounds soaking wet) and a tweener, but he knows how to play and he damn sure knows how to win. Prospects are too often analyzed on what they’re not. If Dixon slips into the second round, he’s going to make some lucky GM look like a genius.

Runner-up: Johnny Salmons, Miami. He doesn’t appear in a lot of mock drafts, but as a 6-7 two guard who can shoot it deep and explode off the dribble, Salmons has been very impressive in private workouts and might have played his way into the first round.

Sports Illustrated staff writer Seth Davis covers the college basketball beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.

 

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