Drafting kids: how do Raptors know who’s ready?
By Brian Boake
The dimensions of an NBA player’s body can have an outsize impact on his career. Will Raptors do the research?
Those of you who read my review of Skal Labissiere know I spent some words on looking at aspects of the young man’s body. I was greatly pleased to find an excellent piece on this exact topic at ESPN. I urge you to read the entire post about the NBA’s best body, which belongs to the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo. Talk about the Greek Freak – this fellow won the genetic lottery.
The post expands greatly on some of the points I made about size of hands. I won’t spoil the writer’s thunder; suffice it to say Giannis Alphabet has a monster pair of claws.
Perhaps the most remarkable and happy accident was finding the young man had actually added 2+ inches of height in his rookie season, without sacrificing coordination.
What does all this have to do with the Toronto Raptors? The Bucks got lucky – good on them, who cares? We fans should, and here’s why.
A lottery pick in the single digits represents potentially a huge upgrade to any team. From ownership’s perspective, there’s also a significant financial commitment. Here’s the table for mandatory salaries. For the scout who pushes a player, to the General Manager who concurs and makes the selection, drafting a difference-maker can make, or break, a career.
According to the reverse standings table, the Raptors pick in June continues to hover around the #8 spot. Career-maker selections at #8: Brandon Knight, Rudy Gay, Jamal Crawford. Career-breakers: Rafael Araujo, Joe Alexander, Shawn Respert (significant asterisk here: this fellow, who briefly was a Raptor, suffered from stomach cancer early in his NBA career – talk about the importance of physicals! He recovered, fortunately.)
The Raptors now have the ability, the importance of which was not truly appreciated until recently, of examining all aspects of a potential draftee’s body. But there’s still guesswork, particularly given how young so many of these kids are. The one-and-done freshman “phenom” is the norm today, which is great for the teenage marvels’ bank accounts but a headache for those responsible for guessing their futures. Will our precocious man-child grow any more? How will his body respond to long hours in the weight room? How susceptible is he to chronic injury?
This topic isn’t new; Leonardo Da Vinci created Vitruvian Man around 1490. I plan to research what kind of work, if any, has been presented at Sloan or elsewhere on the topic of optimal ratios (legs to torso, hands to arms, feet to height) for a basketball player. I assume cleverer folks than I are busily getting after it.
I don’t mean to play down the importance of talent, high IQ (basketball and otherwise), emotional stability, and so on. Clearly those are important matters to research. I remember being in attendance at the Air Canada Centre when the Raptors selected DeMar DeRozan in 2009. Shortly after the announcement, Maurizio Gherardini told a small number of us fans about how he spoke to a teammate of DeMar’s to get the final word on his personality, and how positive that word was.
As Marcus Stroman, the tiny Toronto Blue Jays pitcher, has famously expressed it in tatoo form: HDMH, or Height Doesn’t Measure Heart. Absolutely right, but we can and should measure everything else.