Monday, April 02, 2007

Mad Dog says "good luck" to the GM with the first pick

From Mark Madsen's blog:
Trenton Hassell told me that if he was an NBA General Manager he would rather have the 2nd pick in this year’s NBA draft instead of the first pick. When I asked him why, he said, “Because you can’t go wrong with the 2nd pick….I’d hate to be the GM that had to choose between Greg Oden and Kevin Durant.”


Mad Dog is sympathetic to league GMs when it comes to making decisions about the draft, saying that there are certain things about a player that are "impossible" to predict.

He then goes on to describe the "great lengths" to which GMs go to collect info on potential draft picks:
When Brevin Knight was a senior at Stanford, the rumor circulation around campus was that there was a private investigator going around campus asking questions to verify Brevin’s very high personal character. We were told that for the top 10 projected picks, private investigators came around asking questions.