Many of this year’s top prospects, including Lonzo Ball, Jayson Tatum, and Josh Jackson, won’t be participating in this week’s draft combine in Chicago, continuing a trend that has been established in recent years. While it’s hard to blame many players for their decisions when top prospects in 2015 and 2016 didn’t see their stocks negatively impacted by skipping the combine, it’s a letdown for team executives, writes Ira Winderman of The South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“Chicago has become a disappointment,” Chet Kammerer, the Heat’s vice president of player personnel, said of the combine. “We’ve negotiated over the years. At one time, everybody came. At one time, we had competition. We have three on three. We had five on five. And it slowly has deteriorated.
“I get the list and already there’s eight guys of the top 20, probably, who are not going to show up at all,” Kammerer continued. “So it’s so disappointing. And it’s not the competition, it’s the fact you have nothing there as far as the physical, the medical. … So now you have to do individual medicals, because they didn’t come to the combine, to get a full medical report on a player. And all the testing they do there will not be done.”
As Bobby Marks of The Vertical noted last week (via Twitter), the NBA and NBPA have agreed to work toward a solution for this problem, but in the interim, this week’s combine will lack the star power of some past events.
Here’s more from around the basketball world:
- With Kyle Lowry headed for unrestricted free agency, Tim Cato of SBNation.com identifies some potential landing spots for the All-Star point guard, suggesting that the Spurs would be a great fit if their cap situation were a little more flexible.
- Given the way the Warriors and Cavaliers are constructed, competing for a title in the present has become something of a futile exercise for the NBA’s other 28 teams, according to Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical, who focuses on LeBron James and the Cavs in an examination of the league’s current landscape.
- In an interesting piece for HoopsHype, Alex Kennedy takes an inside look at the chaotic lives of agents who are responsible for representing players — and who end up doing much more than just negotiating contracts for their clients.
- While “blow it up” is a common refrain from Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer, he admits that’s easier said than done, and that it doesn’t make sense for every non-contender. O’Connor runs through most of the NBA’s teams, identifying which clubs are in a better position than others to “blow up” their rosters.