Fit shouldn’t factor into the Sixers’ draft plans
During an appearance on Bleacher Report Radio’s NBA Sunday Tip last weekend, new Philadelphia 76ers general manager Bryan Colangelo shared the team’s rationale for determining who it will select with the No. 1 overall pick in next month’s draft.
“The bottom line is, we’re going to pick the player that we think is the best fit for our team, and the best piece for us to build around and with,” Colangelo told Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck.
If taken on face value, that line of thinking should send chills down the spines of Sixers fans everywhere.
If fit is the determining factor in Philadelphia’s debate between LSU forward Ben Simmons and Duke swingman Brandon Ingram, the latter wins in a landslide. Given the Sixers’ glut of young big men—they already have Nerlens Noel, Jahlil Okafor and Richaun Holmes, while Joel Embiid and Dario Saric appear poised to join them this fall—the 6-10 Simmons would only further contribute to the frontcourt logjam. Ingram, meanwhile, could help fill the team’s glaring hole at shooting guard or small forward, as his long-range sniping ability makes him a dream prospect to pair alongside post-centric big men such as Noel and Okafor.
This past year’s Sixers squad lacked a single player who knocked down more than 38 percent of his three-point tries, which allowed opponents to pack the paint and double-team Okafor whenever he received an entry pass. Ingram, who shot 41 percent from downtown as a freshman, would theoretically command enough defensive attention to open up spacing for his Sixers teammates. While it’s impossible to draw definitive conclusions about the potency of his long-range shooting ability given the small sample size of his collegiate career, the Duke freshman’s acclimation to the NBA’s three-point line already appears to be well underway, according to ESPN’s Chad Ford.
“He has an effortless stroke,” Ford recently wrote after viewing one of Ingram’s pre-draft workouts. “He didn’t seem to be straining at all on the threes. That’s unusual for most prospects, even great shooters, so early in the process. Typically it takes players some time to adjust. Ingram is well on his way.”
Whereas three-point shooting projects to be Ingram’s biggest selling point leading up to the draft, the polar opposite is true for Simmons. He knocked down only one of the three triples he attempted as a freshman and shot just 32.9 percent on two-point jumpers, per Hoop-Math.com. More than 50 percent of his shots came at the rim, where he converted 75.2 percent of his looks, but he was far less productive when forced away from the basket. Until he proves capable of knocking down a jump shot, NBA opponents will sag off of him and make him beat them from the perimeter.
Considering the importance of three-pointers and floor spacing in today’s NBA, the concerns about Simmons’ shooting stroke limiting his upside are valid. If the Sixers are convinced he’ll never develop a half-decent jump shot, hindering his chances of developing into a superstar, drafting Ingram at No. 1 is the logical play. Basing that decision largely upon how each prospect fits on Philadelphia’s current roster, however, would be wildly misguided.
As Layne Vashro of Nylon Calculus wrote prior to the 2015 draft, roster churn defeats the purpose of factoring fit into the equation when weighing prospects:
"On average, half of the team has been overhauled by a player’s second season, and by that third and fourth season when rookie-scale players are typically most valuable, the team has almost completely changed. It makes little sense to select players in the 2015 class based on fit, because it is impossible to know what rosters will look like in 2018 when the current class becomes meaningful contributors."
One look at the Sixers’ current roster bolsters Vashro’s argument, as there isn’t a single player from the 2012-13 team who still plies his trade in Philadelphia. They’re not an outlier in that regard, either:
The Milwaukee Bucks don’t have a single holdover from their 2012-13 team. Just two players from the Minnesota Timberwolves’ 2012-13 roster—Ricky Rubio and Nikola Pekovic—were on this year’s squad, too. Gordon Hayward, Derrick Favors and Alec Burks are the only three Utah Jazz players left over from 2012-13. The lone remnants of the Miami Heat’s “Heatles” era are Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and Udonis Haslem.
Even the San Antonio Spurs, who have been an annual 50-plus-win fixture over the past decade-and-a-half, only have seven players remaining from their 2012-13 roster (Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Tim Duncan, Patty Mills, Boris Diaw, Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard).
Weighing how Simmons or Ingram fit alongside Noel and Okafor is inconsequential, as there’s no guarantee either player will be on the Sixers’ roster in two years’ time. If Philadelphia doesn’t sign Noel to an extension, he’ll become a restricted free agent next summer, which opens the door for him to leave. If Embiid avoids any further health-related setbacks, the Sixers would almost certainly dangle Okafor as trade bait (assuming they don’t already ship him out on draft night).
Both Noel and Okafor tout tantalizing upside in certain respects, but each player has enough flaws to merit concern about building around them long term. The former’s superhuman instincts and lightning-quick hands give him Defensive Player of the Year potential, but his inability to consistently knock down mid-range jumpers limit his two-way impact. The latter is a low-post dynamo who ranked second among all rookies in scoring (trailing only unanimous Rookie of the Year Karl-Anthony Towns), but his struggles guarding pick-and-rolls hold him back from being considered a franchise cornerstone.
Until the Sixers are sure they have at least one superstar on the roster—that was the entire point of Sam Hinkie’s three-year “Process,” after all—they can’t fret about how Simmons or Ingram fit with their incumbent players. As Colangelo conceded upon his arrival in Philadelphia, it remains unclear at the moment whether Embiid, Okafor or Noel deserve that moniker.
“Are there potential players in that regard? I think the answer is yes,” Colangelo said. “But a lot has to happen. Health has to happen. Development has to happen.”
If Embiid turns into Greg Oden 2.0, planning around him becomes moot. The same is true if Noel leaves as a restricted free agent or if Okafor remains a defensive sieve when asked to patrol away from the paint. Eschewing the “best player available” strategy in favor of weighing how prospects fit alongside incumbent players ignores the enormous amount of roster churn teams go through on a year-to-year basis.
Look no further than the Cleveland Cavaliers for an example of how drafting for fit can have detrimental ramifications. In 2013, after having sunk top-five picks into Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters over the previous two seasons, the Cavaliers bypassed Indiana’s Victor Oladipo with the top overall pick to select UNLV’s Anthony Bennett, who has since fallen out of the league. Aside from Noel, whose medical reports may have scared off Cleveland after he tore his ACL in February, Oladipo was the consensus second-best prospect on the board.
Placing a premium on fit (Bennett) rather than upside (Oladipo) led the Cavaliers to make a suboptimal decision that only worked out for them after another stroke of lottery luck the following spring. The Cavs also certainly weren’t accounting for LeBron James returning home when selecting Bennett the year prior. Nor could they have expected to flip Waiters in a three-team trade to Oklahoma City for a late first-round pick less than two years after picking Bennett over Oladipo. Bypassing talent for fit-related reasons often has long-term deleterious effects, as Cleveland proved.
If Colangelo’s comments to Beck were simply a filler soundbite, or if he was largely referring to which player would better help establish a so-called winning culture, that’s one thing. But if the Sixers really do plan on factoring fit into the Simmons-vs.-Ingram equation, they’re at risk of scuttling away the golden opportunity that lies in front of them.