KingsFans 2021 Draft Board: #6

If all players were available, who should the Kings draft?


  • Total voters
    24
  • Poll closed .
#1
KINGSFANS 2021 DRAFT BOARD
  1. Cade Cunningham
  2. Evan Mobley
  3. Jalen Green
  4. Jonathan Kuminga
  5. Jalen Suggs

RULES
  • You’ll be able to select only 1 player that you think would be the best pick FOR THE KINGS. This isn’t a generic big board. We’ll be making this a Kings specific big board.
  • The poll will be open for 48 hours. After it closes, the player with the most votes will take his rightful place on our KingsFans big board (in the event of a tie, I’ll be the tiebreaker to keep it simple).
  • The player chosen in the current poll will be missing from the next poll. At that point, we would only have 9 options so please post a comment below mentioning a player you would like to nominate for the next poll. The player who receives the most nominations will be added (in the event of a tie, I’ll be the tiebreaker to keep it simple).
 

Capt. Factorial

trifolium contra tempestatem subrigere certum est
Staff member
#3
Amazingly, I'm voting for a Jalen again. That makes 5 votes for Jalens so far (and at least one for each of them) in 6 votes total.

I will stick to my guns on the nomination. The best player not on the board is Isaiah Todd.
 
#5
Amazingly, I'm voting for a Jalen again. That makes 5 votes for Jalens so far (and at least one for each of them) in 6 votes total.

I will stick to my guns on the nomination. The best player not on the board is Isaiah Todd.
I still find it odd that I keep seeing mocks with Isaiah Todd in the 2nd round. I don't see him lasting that long.
 
#7
Any more nominations? The future polls don't work out too well if we're only getting 2-3 nomination votes.

Current nomination votes:
Alperen Sengun = 1 vote
Isaiah Todd = 1 vote
Kai Jones = 1 vote
 
#8
Amazingly, I'm voting for a Jalen again. That makes 5 votes for Jalens so far (and at least one for each of them) in 6 votes total.

I will stick to my guns on the nomination. The best player not on the board is Isaiah Todd.
I'm curious to hear why you prefer Jalen Johnson over Scottie Barnes.

I don't trust Johnson's shooting/3PT%:
  • His mechanics do not look smooth to me
  • He shot 44.4% from 3 at Duke but on only 18 attempts (very low sample size)
  • He shot 63.2% from the free throw line at Duke (24 of 38)
  • He shot 16% from 3 his senior year in high school (4 of 25)
  • He shot 55.4% from the free throw line his senior year in high school (31 of 56)
  • He shot 29.5% from 3 his junior year in high school (28 of 95)
  • He shot 63.9% from the free throw line his junior year in high school (69 of 108)

If you sum his college, senior year, and junior year together, you get:
  • 3PT% = 27.9% (72 of 258)
  • FT% = 61.2% (224 of 366)

I can't find the shooting stats for Barnes' senior year in high school, but I see them for his junior year. If I sum his college stats with his junior year, you get:
  • 3PT% = 32.4% (33 of 102)
  • FT% = 61.6% (98 of 159)

I also think Barnes' mechanics are much smoother than Johnson's as well. I wouldn't at all be surprised if Barnes is the better shooter in the NBA.



So if Johnson is a similar shooter to Barnes (or questionably better), what else is there to bank on? I would give the advantage to Barnes on the following attributes:
  • Length
  • Strength
  • Athleticism
  • Ball Handling
  • Passing
  • IQ
  • Defense
  • Motor
  • Character

Johnson obviously has better rebounding & shot blocking stats, but I'm wondering how much of that is a product of Florida State using Barnes on the perimeter (specifically guarding PGs).

Curious to get your POV on why you favor Johnson over Barnes.
 

Capt. Factorial

trifolium contra tempestatem subrigere certum est
Staff member
#9
I'm curious to hear why you prefer Jalen Johnson over Scottie Barnes.
When it comes down to it, I think the bottom line is that I see Johnson as a guy who can take over a game on the offensive end, and I don't see that in Barnes. Barnes just didn't seem to command the attention of the defense, and just seemed to go with the flow on offense. A good passer, yes, but I kept waiting for him to make things happen - to show up and scream "I'm the lotto prospect on this team" - but those moments seemed few and far between. Johnson did that a couple of times in his short stint, had those games where you just couldn't miss him him on the floor.

I've never been one to delve into high school stats - I don't really know how indicative they are of how a player will fare in college, much less the NBA, since competition varies so widely. But I don't get the same impression of relative 3PT shooting ability that you argue for. Barnes' shot does not look terribly smooth to me, and I'm not optimistic that he'll be an effective 3PT shooter in the NBA, while I do like Johnson's stroke more. Despite the low N at Duke and his poor FTs, I feel like he can be a solid outside shooter, but this is just eyeball and gut.

Obviously Barnes is the better defender, and yes, the Kings need defense, but I don't think you can take an individual defender and plop him down into a bad defensive team and suddenly see a massive improvement. We've got to have a team-wide, coaching-led change in our defensive philosophy. Adding Barnes won't fix us on that end.

And I don't put a huge amount of stock into the perception that Barnes is the higher character guy than Johnson because Johnson bailed on Duke late in the season while (apparently) a bit injured. For one thing, from sitting at the TV set there's a lot we don't know about dudes' characters, and they kind of end up being coin tosses - sometimes guys you thought didn't have character issues turn out to be problematic and vice versa. So not having access to full info on that sort of thing, I tend to weight it very lightly. And, don't forget, Mitchell Robinson left Western Kentucky high and dry just a few years ago, and I'm sure we'd all welcome him to the Kings with open arms based on basketball skill.

I'm not down on Barnes, but I feel like he's going to have an Aaron-Gordon-with-better-passing type career - a fine player, but not a guy that really turns the ship around on a team like the Kings. Johnson is more boom-or-bust, but he's got a ceiling that could actually make him into a big-3 type player who could optimistically vault the Kings not just into the playoffs but in a few years into being a contender. A roll of the dice with Johnson for sure, but it's a chance I would take.
 
#11
Agree - we do not know the detail with Jalen Johnson. And if the Kings meet with Jalen Johnson, decide they like him, and draft him, then great, I’ll support him. But even if you take out the speculation re his character, and simply ask ‘objectively, how much do we know?’ As he only played 13 games, compared to many other draftees, the answer is not much.

I guess one of my slants with drafting is that there always seems to be guys that don’t turn out as well they could have or should have. And sometimes you look at for the reasons why and you see a guy didn't play much for his past team or played a lot but wasn't very efficient or didn't play like a team guy or whatever. So I guess I feel one of the ways to avoid mistakes is to try and make informed decisions using as much information as you have. It doesn’t always work out for me. Given disabling back injuries are incredibly recurrent, and spine surgery has relatively poor outcomes, I didn’t think Michael Porter Jr would be that great a pick. But now he’s on the court and looks great.

From what I hear Jalen Johnson looks like a very talented basketball player. But – if someone takes Jalen Johnson – and he doesn’t shoot well, the effort is not consistently there, he doesn’t buy into the team concept, or his injury history trickles along the same path – they won’t be able to complain that they did not see it coming. For me, I think a later pick where it is easier to argue risk vs reward is more justified.