The ONE AND ONLY Luka Doncic discussion thread

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#64
Remember when everyone laughed at me when we went through the draft and I had Trae Young as a future superstar? hehe.. I knew it! He is a very vocal leader and will not get shy if he misses shots. He will keep shooting!. I know this is a Doncic thread, but those were the two players I was looking at. Doncic and Young (because at that time I was not impressed with Fox at all).
 
#65
What I am saying is that declaring a player to be a bad NBA pick, before seeing him play in the NBA, is a biased statement. The only thing that can actually tell you what a player will look like in the NBA is playing in the NBA. Any projections based on anything other than that are, at best, a semi-educated guess. Granted, there are many people in the sports business who are paid exorbitant sums of money, based on their ability to make educated guesses, but that doesn't mean that their guesses aren't rooted in biases.
Well then its probably better to just close all these draft topics in this forum. No reason to speculate or form (educated) opinions if the official doctrine in here is that you cant know anything until they have played in the Nba. Although in this case there is a full season of sample size in the Nba in addition to all the other data but it still isnt enough to form a solid opinion aparrently.

More to the point, I don't subscribe to the belief that a pick is bad, just because you could have gotten a better player. The Kings passing on Kawhi Leonard to get Jimmer Fredette wasn't a bad pick because Kawhi Leonard is great, it was a bad pick because Jimmer Fredette is bad. Likewise, the Kings passing on Damian Lillard to draft Thomas Robinson wasn't a bad pick because Damian Lillard is great, it was a bad pick because Thomas Robinson is bad. Is Marvin Bagley bad? It doesn't seem so, but it's too soon to tell, either way. If Bagley turns out to be a great player, then he wasn't a bad pick, even if Doncic is better.


First of all (and I know you know this) its a huge difference if you have the 2nd or the 7th pick. At the 2nd pick you have a lot better odds to draft an allstar and a lot more options to choose from. If you fail to draft an all star at 2 its a much bigger mistake than if you fail to draft an allstar at 7.

When you draft 2nd overall, you have more choises. Fans these days have acces to so much film and data that they are perfectly capable to form their own educated opinions. If year after year the popular choise by fans keeps being much better than the pick this franchise does, it warrants a huge amount of criticism. Especially when you have the obvious choise, backed by all this tape and data and your disfunctional franchise passes on him, it will cause some discussion and when after a year the difference is so huge between these two players, it will hurt this franchise and this fanbase.

Since Luka was the obivous choise by all the information you got, then it is a mistake to pass on him. Its not about if Bagley could develope into a solid player, its about passing on an impactfull player that even the fans would've picked but for some reason the FO was idiotic.

Now, bigs tend to have a steeper learning curve than wings (see also: Andre Drummond, Jusuf Nurkic, Nikola Jokic), so I'm not prepared to call Bagley a bad pick...
Im not buying that bigs take more time than others. If I remember correctly @tyguy had some analysis on that. I would say that point guards or other ball handling creators take usually a year to be effective, for example Fox was one if the worst in advanced metrics in his rookie year.

but, in the interest of full disclosure, I also don't have any "skin" in the "game," and it's not going to mean anything to me, even if he is one. I remain more interested in the macro conversation of whether someone can be retroactively declared objective, because an initially biased opinion ended up being validated by future events? I don't think that it can, but you appear to disagree.
So is the argument still that you cant be objective about this situation if pre draft you were saying that Luka should be the pick? If thats your argument, IMO it doesnt make any sense. If you had a strong argument for your opinion pre draft that proved to be right post draft, that doesnt make you biased or unobjective. IMO basing your opinion on facts and data available is objective.
 

SLAB

Hall of Famer
#66
Remember when everyone laughed at me when we went through the draft and I had Trae Young as a future superstar? hehe.. I knew it! He is a very vocal leader and will not get shy if he misses shots. He will keep shooting!. I know this is a Doncic thread, but those were the two players I was looking at. Doncic and Young (because at that time I was not impressed with Fox at all).
I was dead wrong on Young. Good call.
 
#67
I was dead wrong on Young. Good call.
If we're talking Tre Young I was pretty high on him too:

Draft is close so might as well try to put these prospects in order and in tiers

Tier1
1. Doncic
-Most important skill in todays Nba is shot creating for himself and others. Most important position is wing. Doncic is an elite playmaker, he will destroy traditional pick n roll coverage every time, he is actually very elite pick n roll ball handler. Pick n roll is also the most common way of creating offense. All in all its just a no brainer.

Tier2
2. Porter
-Porter being #2 would require a full go from team doctors regarding his back. All in all very risky pick, a lot of unknowns but there just isnt a lot of 6'11 wings with his skillset. Good shooter, very good off the dribble, very good shooting contested shots, good athlete, can finish at the rim some, can catch lobs, has some defensive potential as a weak side blocker. Again, very risky but the upside is just very good. Wouldnt be comfortable taking him top 2 without all the available info on his injury and potential future injury risk ect. Very hard to evaluate but since I dont have his medical records, I have to assume he is the same player as he was in high school.

3. Jackson jr.
Elite defender which is the most important skill for a center, showed some real defensive instincts in college and didnt just dominate with athletisism. Can switch about everything and thats extreamely valuable in todays Nba. Not an offensive force but can hit spot up and pick n pop threes and that increases his value over guys like Bagley. Not an elite rebounder. Almost 100% guaranteed valuable productive player in the Nba but very small chance of becoming a superstar.

4. Tre Young
Again, most important skills in todays Nba: Shot creation for himself and others. Young is good at both of those and has a chance of being elite in creating for himself. He is able to hit shots with consistency that most of the Nba players cant. He is also a great passer and assist rate usually translates very well from college to Nba (his assist rate was great).
Forcing teams to hard hedge or switch every pick n roll including him as a ball handler is extreamely valuable and will boost the team offense a lot. Defensively a big liability so he is only 4th and tier 2 on my board. Offensive upside is just so big and on top of the draft I value a potential offensive game changers a lot. A lot more superstar potential than JJJ but also much bigger bust potential so hes ranked #4 behind JJJ

5. Ayton
Hard to decide between him and Young at 4 or 5 but positional value puts Young ahead of Ayton. To me Ayton is a guy who will put up big box score numbers and will definetly boost the teams offense but defensive liability as a center havent been the recipe for succes in this league. On the top of the draft I want players that are able to contribute at the highest level of competition and I'm not seeing a probable path on Ayton being a best player or 2nd best player on a conference finals team. If he had shown even little bit more defensive instincts, I would be more confident with him but unfortunately that wasnt the case. Will probably be a little overrated for his whole career. Big (empty) stats on a bad team kind of player.

Tier3 i dont want to spend too much energy on. It would be something like Bamba, Bagley, Mikal Bridges, Miles Bridges, Carter. Bamba has a lot of upside because of his measurements and athletic testing, both Bridges are more pieces of already good team altough very valuable pieces (3&d wings so a premium position). Bagley is more of a gamble with higher upside and lower floor. Carter is a solid player but not enough upside for me to pick a center top 5-top10
Also seems like I nailed my draft board. Hey Vlade, if you need help in the future just slide into my DM's:cool:
 
#71
Or get this? We could have had Fox and Doncic.
I mean ya that’s the simple solution, haha


Remember when everyone laughed at me when we went through the draft and I had Trae Young as a future superstar? hehe.. I knew it! He is a very vocal leader and will not get shy if he misses shots. He will keep shooting!. I know this is a Doncic thread, but those were the two players I was looking at. Doncic and Young (because at that time I was not impressed with Fox at all).
yup, I remember I was in the camp of taking Luka than trading Fox for a top pick to build around Luka, I wanted Luka/Trae combo
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#72
Well then its probably better to just close all these draft topics in this forum. No reason to speculate or form (educated) opinions if the official doctrine in here is that you cant know anything until they have played in the Nba.
This seems like a spectacular misinterpretation of what I wrote. I'm just not sure whether it was a willful misinterpretation, or not?

So is the argument still that you cant be objective about this situation if pre draft you were saying that Luka should be the pick? If thats your argument, IMO it doesnt make any sense. If you had a strong argument for your opinion pre draft that proved to be right post draft, that doesnt make you biased or unobjective. IMO basing your opinion on facts and data available is objective.
Are you trying to misinterpret my post this hard, on purpose, because I thought that I was clear with my meaning, and what you appear to think I said is not what I said. What I said was that people can, and have, formed opinions rooted in personal biases, and that if future events validate their biased opinions, that doesn't mean that their opinions were objective, the whole time. What you appear to be getting out of that is I think that everybody who thought that Doncic was better before the draft was biased, but that's neither what I meant, nor what I actually said.

I think that part of the disconnect is that you appear to be operating from the belief that everybody who was pro-Doncic before the draft came to their opinion on the merits of "facts and data" alone. I make no such assumption. It's been my personal (admittedly anecdotal) experience that people without biases aren't as driven by the need to be acknowledged as being "right" as some of the people around here.

Im not buying that bigs take more time than others. If I remember correctly @tyguy had some analysis on that. I would say that point guards or other ball handling creators take usually a year to be effective, for example Fox was one if the worst in advanced metrics in his rookie year.
Posters like @tyguy are exactly why I question some posters' objectivity. I consider his analysis to be a textbook example of the abuse of numerical data. Numbers, as they say, don't lie, but they can be manipulated to either prove or disprove just about anything, and I truly believe that @tyguy is someone whom staked out his position, and then worked backwards from there to find the data that supported what he'd already made up his mind to believe.
 
#75
Vlade really ****ed up if the NYK rumors of offering Porzingis for Fox are true. We could’ve had a core of Luka/Buddy/Bogi/Porzingis
Not to mention you’d still have Giles too.

PG - ??? / Ferrell
SG - Hield / Bogdanovic
SF - Doncic / Bogdanovic
PF - ??? / Bjelica
C - Porzingis / Giles

You’d definitely need some great defenders at PG (Brogdon, Beverley) and PF (Aminu) to help the perimeter defense but that would be a great looking team.

The shooting/spacing would be unreal though with Brogdon, Hield, Bogdanovic, Doncic, Bjelica, Aminu, and Porzingis. My lord...
 
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#77
29/12/9 (but an L)
He shot poorly too from the field but that's the nice thing about Luka.......even on poor shooting nights and losses he still puts up ridiculous numbers.

Dallas is still short one guy. I think in today's NBA you have to have 3 top-tier players to succeed and they only have 2 (Luka and Porzingis) and then a substantial dropoff.
 
#78
Meh

“Ridiculous numbers” poor shooting and another loss? Would we really care about his numbers if we were still losing at the same time? lol

Yay, i guess.
 
#80
I remain more interested in the macro conversation of whether someone can be retroactively declared objective, because an initially biased opinion ended up being validated by future events? I don't think that it can, but you appear to disagree.
Biased opinions* are by definition not objective. Furthermore, objectivity does not require correctness. Objectivity only requires (according to the definition) exclusion of emotion when forming a judgement. Hence, validation or invalidation of that judgement has no bearing on determining whether the original judgement was arrived at objectively**. Therefore, the question posed has a trivial answer.

*Not making a comment on whether the opinions you are referring to were indeed biased, just commenting on the posed question.
**This comment applies only to the meta conversation about objectivity, not to the current context of Luka/Bagley discussion
 

SLAB

Hall of Famer
#81
He shot poorly too from the field but that's the nice thing about Luka.......even on poor shooting nights and losses he still puts up ridiculous numbers.

Dallas is still short one guy. I think in today's NBA you have to have 3 top-tier players to succeed and they only have 2 (Luka and Porzingis) and then a substantial dropoff.
Are you saying even when the shot isn’t falling he adds his own “imprint”?

:p
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#82
Biased opinions* are by definition not objective. Furthermore, objectivity does not require correctness.
I agree, objectivity does not require correctness. The question is, does "correctness" confer, with it, ex post facto objectivity?

Therefore, the question posed has a trivial answer.
Well, it turns out that "questions with 'trivial' answers" tend to be the ones of most interest to me.
 
#83
Remember when everyone laughed at me when we went through the draft and I had Trae Young as a future superstar? hehe.. I knew it! He is a very vocal leader and will not get shy if he misses shots. He will keep shooting!. I know this is a Doncic thread, but those were the two players I was looking at. Doncic and Young (because at that time I was not impressed with Fox at all).
Think I had Young as the guy with the highest ceiling in the draft but the lowest percentage to actually reach that ceiling. He looked like a true boom or bust prospect to me and the way it's looking, he's going to find his way into the upper echelon of players in this league before we know it.
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#85
^^^^ Well then, now that we agree on that, that brings us back to the question: was everyone who was pro-Doncic before the draft basing their opinion on objective data alone? Because I'm willing to stipulate that some were, but I'm not remotely convinced that all of them were. Or, quite frankly, even that a statistical majority of them were. I certainly don't believe that the loudest, most obnoxious ones were; I'm sure that they found the correct data to support their position, but people who are that invested in being acknowledged for being right don't make stands rooted in objectivity.
 
#86
^^^^ Well then, now that we agree on that, that brings us back to the question: was everyone who was pro-Doncic before the draft basing their opinion on objective data alone? Because I'm willing to stipulate that some were, but I'm not remotely convinced that all of them were. Or, quite frankly, even that a statistical majority of them were. I certainly don't believe that the loudest, most obnoxious ones were; I'm sure that they found the correct data to support their position, but people who are that invested in being acknowledged for being right don't make stands rooted in objectivity.
I agree. Vast majority of opinions stated on sports fan forums are not rooted in objectivity :). It is a self selected sample of passionate individuals which have an emotional stake in the topic of discussion. So in such an environment the meaning of "objectivity" gets downgraded to something like "presenting agreed upon facts which support the conclusions that I have made (as opposed to just stating the conclusion)"
 
#89
Doncic has been a professional athlete for a long time. He has stepped right in and played well. Last night he was really good.

Bagley is a freakish athlete that is what 20 years old? He is going to take some time to figure out how to use all of that God given talent. He needs to grow some more, but what he really needs is to learn to make better decisions. He is going to be a great player, but it will take longer than for Doncic.
 
#90
Not to mention you’d still have Giles too.

PG - ??? / Ferrell
SG - Hield / Bogdanovic
SF - Doncic / Bogdanovic
PF - ??? / Bjelica
C - Porzingis / Giles

You’d definitely need some great defenders at PG (Brogdon, Beverley) and PF (Aminu) to help the perimeter defense but that would be a great looking team.

The shooting/spacing would be unreal though with Brogdon, Hield, Bogdanovic, Doncic, Bjelica, Aminu, and Porzingis. My lord...
Wow that's a team...please don't do that to me.
 
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