jrue holiday
I have always felt that anyone who is going to be more than a role player in the NBA would show something more in college, especially someone who has as many physical talents as Jrue. Of course, if you are drafting to fill a need at 18 - 24 taking a tall, young, pg with skills who plays good defense isn't a bad bet. But, I thought that this topic was started because all of the sudden people started bringing up Holliday's name as one of the best possible PG's based on potential in the draft and all of the sudden he is a Top 10 pick on some mocks.
QHaynes, I think that it was you who said that Holiday has the potential to be a Top 5 PG in the NBA. I am not the kind of person who likes to call people out, and if it wasn't you I apologize, but that's ridiculous. I mean, everyone in the first round has the potential to be a Top 5 at their position, so if that's what you mean than I'm sorry. But, if you think that in 5 years he breaks Top 10 that's a stretch. Paul (All-Star), Williams (All NBA 2nd Team), Rose (ROY), Rondo (Triple Double AVG in Playoffs 2009), Williams (All-Star), Wall (Potential 2010 #1 Pick), Tony Parker (All-Star, Final MVP), Devin Harris (All-Star). That's 8 right there who aren't going anywhere for the next 10 years (maybe Parker might tail off, he's a little older). That's not including Westbrook, Conley, Bayless, Farmar, and other young PG's in the league. Not including Rubio, Steph Curry, Jennings, Flynn, etc. from the 2009 draft and besides Wall, that's not including anyone else entering the league for the next 5 seasons. That's just to make the Top 10. I just think that a position like PG is silly to draft on potential if that player hasn't shown that he can TOUCH that potential against good competition. There isn't room for 10 PG's to be drafted every year and have them all be Top 10 in the league.
All this talk about Jrue and Westbrook makes me hate Darren Collison all of a sudden. Whoever takes him in the draft is making the rest of their guards worse! Ha!
Yea it was me. I said that but I just thought watching his HS games and him going to UCLA where the code there is Defense : he was not comfortable at SG.
I thought the way he played at UCLA he was more of a PG.
Hey everyone is entitled to thier opinion. We think differently its cool. Ridiculous? Maybe but hey maybe i was wrong. Maybe he's gonna be a Bust...we will never know
I am usually with you on a lot of your points, so I'm sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you here. Plus, I have never seen him play 1 game in high school. Didn't know that much about him. Saw a few UCLA games, but if it weren't for this site, I would probably still not know much about him. Could be a stud, we'll find out soon. You have my full support in giving me an "I told you so Scott, you moron!" if you are right.
Plus, on defense, is he really that good? I mean, I don't know that much about him, but is he really a great defender right now in terms of the NBA? At 19? If he is then I completely agree he is worth the lottery pick based on great defense/potentially great defense. But if he just has the physical tools and potential to be a great defender in the NBA, like most guys at this stage of their career, I'm not that sold on his "Star" potential. Of course, he'll probably be a Top 10 pick regardless. Seems like his name is climbing up the mocks.
That will always be the thing with JRue- he was not the starting PG and he was not the leader of the team. OTOH he didn't have a chance, there was a 4-year multiple Final Four starter in Darren Collision, a great college PG.
So ordinarily Jrue would be 'the guy' for them next year, play 1 year of good ball and then come out. But now he isn't going to have to, he can get good 1st round money guaranteed in a month so he's going to take it and be happy.
Guys like him and Curry have question marks for sure, but they also have assets. Basically it just depends on what position you are picking that justifies selecting them, it's just not black or white but indeed very gray with these guys. Remember that he was pretty heralded coming out of HS, that has a LOT to do with it. Him or Jennings could've been drafted right out of HS (I don't know exactly where). The circumstances regarding the UCLA roster for me means that he didn't hurt himself the one year at UCLA, even if he didn't necessarily help himself either.
I am personally very surprised to see him talked up so high, even though I think he will do fine in the NBA. We'll see if someone actually reaches for him in the top 10. I would consider anything in the top 10 to be a reach pick, but if he slides down to mid first round then I think he's a pretty good pick for whoever at that point needs a PG.
Doug Gootlieb has him goin number 3 and Chad Ford has him going 4. I know their opinions don't mean everything, but they are profeesionals who usually have some inside info. Plus, like I said before, I spend a lot of time in Sac and the radio won't shut up about him there. I guess he left quite an impression in his workout. I never said he would be anything special at the next level, only that he has more potential then a lot of other guys and thus should go top 10.
with him going that high he has a good probability to be labeled as a bust.... have a career in the relm of joe smith..a good player who just about every team would love to have but not a star or allstar which is what you are suppossed to be as a top3 pick
First topic? PGs....
Apparently Jrue really shined against most of the other top PGs (Evans and Rubio didn't participate) and looked like a PF compared to most of the other guys....
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/draft2009/columns/story?columnist=ford_cha...
I guess Lawson wasn't that impressive....
Curry, Flynn, and Maynor were very impressive.
Hoilday is gonna shine...he wants to prove to everybody he is a good PG.
If it wasnt for Ben Howland placing him at the 2
and Collison coming back after Derrick Rose killed him in the Final 4 game, Holiday would have played PG and been a good PG all season at UCLA.
I'm not sure why any scouts thought he was so quick to begin with. He is a pretty big PG even by NBA standards, and should be quick and tenacious enough to defend other PG's, but quickness won't ever be his strength.
He has good handles and IMO seems to have pretty good court awareness (from the limited times I saw him run point at UCLA.) His size and relatively long arms (IIRC) will help him in terms of being able to make the basic entry passes, etc. without having to first beat his man. He's not the Hulk or anything, but he seems pretty solid and won't ever be muscled out of his space- especially if they work on his strength training. That's my guess as to how he will fit in physically on an NBA court, and I think other NBA scouts are seeing the same thing.
I think he will be a solid but not spectacular PG in the NBA. My guess or hunch is that he becomes a good starter. He won't be the reason you win a title or anything, but he won't keep you from winning one either. I think if you're in the middle of the first round and need a PG, you're happy getting that kind of value with your pick. As a lottery pick he's a reach IMO.
He will be better than Jordan Farmar. I don't have a very high opinion of Farmar, but Farmar is a good comparison since he was a late first round pick and also a UCLA PG. I think the Lakers are satisfied though with what they got at their draft position- not a great pick, just a solid one. I think the Lakers would trade Farmar for Holiday in one hot second if they could, but the team that drafts Holiday (at whatever spot) won't want to.
They took a calculated risk in Kwame Brown too.
I mean there's no reason to argue since this is a purely hypothetical scenario anyway, and it depends on one's opinion of Holiday. But Farmar is a career NBA backup, and Holiday IMO will become more. And the Lakers are going to need someone to step up and be starting PG very, very soon.
big ucla fan and i cant honestly say he will be better because he didnt show any indication that he will be a starting pg or sg in the nba...people are baseing these opnions about him from what they read about in highschool even though he wasnt even a pg in hs either..and on workouts of him dribbiling through cones and shooting against no defense
my whole thing about him is SHOW ME..i cant give a good opnion about a guy who showed me no starter superstar ability while in college against better competition then he faced in highschool...now imagin that against nba players where he wont get to develope as quickly...there are so many back up and thrid strings that will eat him alive
thing is he doesnt have marvin williams height nor did he have any games where he showed he can take over like marvin did...plus thi is based on what you think he can do as a pg when he never played pg full time on any level..and that ucla system is the same system most nba teams run ..a star play shows star potenial no matter what system they play in thats what stars do
There is no SHOW ME even possible with him, so I completely understand your points.
I didn't see him in high school, I didn't see him in workouts running around cones. I'm not even arguing that he's gonna be great or whatever, or what draft position is justified. I have watched him a bit at UCLA since I'm an alum, and it's just my prediction or hunch that he will develop into a good (not great or top 5 or whatever) starter in the NBA. All the detractors mostly make sense too, but with all that in my mind that is still my prediction about him. And he will be better than Jordan Farmar (again, that's not saying much.)
Other people may think he will be a backup at best in the NBA, and some have said he will be a superstar. I think the majority of people don't really have a strong opinon either way, because he frankly didn't play enough college ball to give much to go on. I have no idea why some are tabbing him to go lottery either, he doesn't strike me as being SO athletically gifted.
I got a chance to talk to a number of the top national recruiting gurus, Dave Telep, Van Coleman, Jerry Meyer, Brick Oettinger, Frank Burlison, Clark Francis, Evan Daniels, Gerry Freitas, Aggrey Sam, Joel Francisco, Patrick Stanwood, and Mark Maggard and get their take on a number of things including this year's draft.
One of the things I asked a number of them about was two of the bigger mysteries of this year's NBA draft: Jrue Holiday and Brandon Jennings.
Nearly everyone feels that Holiday is tremendously overrated. Guys like Burlison and Freitas make a living scouting West Coast talent and have seen these guys dozens of times in high school as well as college (Holiday). Burlison mentioned a number of factors including the fact that Holiday was never a point guard in high school (so why should we assume he's one now?), the notion that he's an athletic combo like Westbrook (not even close to being a freak athlete, like Westbrook) and the idea that he's a lock down defender, he's not (when UCLA played Washington State they had to take him off Klay Thompson because he was giving up too many points).
I think there is some confusion about what being a lottery pick in the 2009 NBA Draft requires... NOT MUCH. There aren't the same amount of stars available in every draft... This year, the question remains, are there 14 people that will be taken ahead of Jrue Holiday, and if there aren't, he is a lottery pick. JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE A LOTTERY PICK, DOESN'T MEAN THAT YOU ARE GOING TO BE A STAR.
It would be a reach to select Jrue in the lottery in past drafts, but the same can't be said for this draft. If you're picking 7th and there aren't anymore potential stars left, what do you do? go for someone solid to add to your rotation...
Someone please make a list of 14 people that they would take over Jrue. My list:
1. Griffin
2. Thabeet
3. Harden
4. Hill
5. Jennings
6. Curry
7. Evans
8. Blair
9 T. Williams
10. Maybe Rubio, haven't really seen enough of him...
my thing is the posters who say hes gonna be a star pg from the get go or period with certainty..yet how can they be so certain when he never played pg in hs rarely in college and was a average college player. after looking at all the evidence im just not gonna draft him over alot of players and alot of people on here would because of what they hear other people say about him...im gonna dismiss most of them now who claimed he was so great as a pg in hs and played out of position when its fact that he played sg/sf in highschool and played the exact position in college that he had played in hs
Alright.... one other thing Josh, not every team plays the same offensive system, which I'm sure you know already... so playing SG in one offensive system might make you interchangeable with the PG because you are both just guards (like eddie jordan's system) and maybe one of you brings the ball up so that makes him the actual "PG" and then there are systems where it's one PG and two wings... I think the biggest thing for Jrue is that he was off the ball A LOT more at UCLA than he was in HS. I think a lot of what went wrong at UCLA was that he had the ball so fleetingly and he had so much pressure to be a stud that he tried to do too much... then he started losing confidence and it went down the tube from there....
so whats gonna happen if hes off the ball alot while in the nba( which he will be)?..and ucla runs the same system most nba teams run...if his confidence went down hill while in college imagin what it will do in the nba where the demand to excell is alot bigger and you are given a even shorter leash???..its not place for a player with average ability to lose confidence
What makes you say that he will be off the ball a lot in the NBA?
Any team that drafts Jrue to play off the ball didn't watch him play at UCLA.
I think that a lot of the confidence issues came from Howland... I donno. I just felt like there was a lot of tension there. I think Howland is really hard on his guys and he was probably hardest on Jrue. it seemed like it wore on Jrue... that and the expectations
nope he hasnt shown he is a better pg right now then what they have there..the only thing you and others can say is hopefulyl he will be able to learn to play the point..he isnt a nba starter right now in any reality jsut because fans want him to be
Baron Davis is a superstar (he just turns it on and off when he wants to) SEE 2007 playoffs.......