The 10 most irresponsible 2017 NBA Draft prospect comparisons

5. Caleb Swanigan is not the next Draymond Green

If you want to talk unfair expectations, this is probably the premier example. This comparison is another based on draft position and size, as well as an incomplete understanding of skill set for the players involved. Swanigan was a great offensive player at Purdue, and there’s an NBA role for him as a small-ball center, thanks to his potential to space the floor, developing passing ability, and powerful frame to compete with bigger centers. But to immediately leap to Draymond Green is jumping from the idea that “Swanigan could be useful” to, “Swanigan is going to be an All-Star.

The biggest limitation here is on defense, where Swanigan struggles. He only posted a 0.5 percent steal rate and 2.5 percent block rate this year, and struggled to handle defense on the perimeter when forced to defend pick-and-rolls. There’s a question of whether Swanigan can defend at an NBA level, which makes the leap to Green, who’s somewhere in the top 30 defensive players ever, somewhat ridiculous.

Green also played almost as a pseudo-guard at Michigan State, and his passing ability is better than what we probably will ever see from Swanigan. Green posted nearly a 24 percent assist rate at Michigan State, which made the transition to his role in Golden State much simpler than the leap Swanigan would likely need to take for his passing to be a big part of his game. We cannot forget that Green’s passing ability was an outlier from the beginning, not something he developed in the NBA.

Swanigan has a shot to be useful at the NBA level — if he can continue to improve his conditioning, much as Green did, he can have value as an offensively-focused bench big creating matchup problems somewhere. But to expect an undersized five to become Draymond Green ignores a lot of the context about what makes Green special.