Good article.
I like Rose a lot, and really wished we'd had more luck that year with the ping pong balls. But I do think that Wall will be better. I'm not sure that his first year or two will be better than Rose's were, but I think he has more upside due to his freakish physical tools. Once he's done being raw and mistake-prone, I have extremely high hopes for him.
I watched Kentucky play more than any other team. It seemed like they were on a couple times a week there for a while. As you know I'm a big Evan Turner fan. But I will say this. I can't think of any other player I watched this year (in college) that was as electric as Wall. Almost every time he had the ball you expected to see something special. Of course it didn't always happen. But the fact that he made you feel that way made him special.
So I have great appreciation for his abilities. Now I'm going to compare him to another player. And the comparison isn't a comparison of skills persay, but a comparison of how both players made me feel. I'm talking about J. Will. Or White Chocolate as he was called. I personally never cared for that moniker, but whatever floats your boat. J. Will did as much to put the Kings on the NBA map as any other player on the team. If a King made the nightly ESPN highlight reel, more often than not, it was J. Will. No one will ever forget the night he posterized Gary Payton.
He was a completely different kind of player than Wall. But he had the ability to create the same kind of electricty. You never knew what the hell he was going to do next. And if you needed two freethrows with no time left to win the game. He was ice..
He was exciting. flashy, and one of the most creative players I ever saw. It looked at times like he had the ball on a string. But in the end, the less flashy Bibby was a better fit. You might call Bibby boring by comparison. He was less intertaining, but made fewer mistakes. Instead of being the highlight, he helped create highlights.
I'm by no means trying to say that this comparison is indicitive of what would happen if we were to draft Wall. But I'am saying that sometimes we get too caught up in the glitz and the hype. And we assume possibilities that may be improbable. Never assume anything! I've been disappointed too many times by players with great athletic ability. I doubt that will happen with Wall. And even if it doesn't. That doesn't mean that boring might not be better.
Did you get a chance to see Turner much?
