Trail Blazers' Draft Projections Murkier Than Ever
With two weeks left before the draft, national projections are all over the place—even more so than usual.
The two weeks before the NBA Draft are peak misinformation season. That’s true every year, but especially in this one, when there’s less consensus than ever about who the best players are and who’s going to be picked where.
If it feels like there hasn’t been much to write lately, it’s because there hasn’t been much worth updating. The Trail Blazers, along with every other team, have been bringing prospects into their building for predraft workouts.
Sean Highkin
Some of these have been publicized, with us media members even getting to talk to the players for a few minutes (but not watch the actual workouts). Others, at the behest of certain agents trying to control the process, are guarded as closely as the nuclear codes. This is silly—most of the teams picking in the same range are looking at the same general group of players, and bringing someone in for a workout is not a legally binding agreement to draft them. Teams can, and do, draft whoever they want even if they don’t get them in for a workout.
The major media outlets covering the draft put out new mocks every so often, and those don’t offer any more clarity on teams’ plans than the workouts do. The projections have changed week-to-week, some doing so several times before any of the lottery-level prospects even started their private workout schedules. Nobody can agree on what the Blazers will or should do with their two lottery picks, which are Nos. 7 and 14 overall.
Sean Highkin
For example:
- Immediately following the May 12 lottery, ESPN’s mock draft had Portland taking Serbian guard Nikola Topic seventh and French forward Tidjane Salaun 14th. In their first update 10 days later, Topic remained the projection at No. 7 but now had Purdue center Zach Edey as the pick at 14. The latest update, released on May 31 after the early-withdrawal deadline, has them taking UConn center Donovan Clingan seventh and Colorado wing Cody Williams 14th.
- The Ringer’s post-lottery mock landed Portland with Zaccharie Risacher (now firmly projected to go top-3) at No. 7 and JaKobe Walter at No. 14. Their newest update has Salaun going seventh and G League Ignite’s Ron Holland going 14th.
- The Athletic’s post-lottery mock had Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht going to the Blazers at No. 7 and Salaun going 14th. Their subsequent update has Clingan going seventh and Duke guard Jared McCain going 14th.
- Yahoo Sports’ post-lottery mock draft had Holland going seventh and Baylor center Yves Missi going 14th. Their latest update has Portland taking two bigs, neither of whom are Missi: Clingan at 7 and Indiana’s Kel’el Ware at 14.
- Bleacher Report has published four mock drafts since the lottery order was revealed. The initial one had Clingan going seventh and Walter going 14th; an update the following week had Knecht at 7 and McCain at 14; the next version changed the pick at 14 to Ware; the latest one has Kyshawn George as the pick at the back of the lottery.
- CBS Sports has mock drafts from four different analysts, all updated earlier this month, and with eight different players mocked to Portland—not one repeat—between them.
You get the idea.
Some of these mocks are based on intel from conversations with agents, who want to talk up their own clients and steer them where they want them, and executives, who have their own motivations for speculating on where other teams are leaning. Others are based on those analysts’ own opinions about who would fit best where.
I have no doubt all of the intel in these mock drafts is legit, in that the person reporting it heard it from someone they trust. But it’s still an inexact science. As players go through their workouts and interviews with teams, word starts to circulate about who’s looked good and interviewed well and who hasn’t, but that doesn’t lead to much public consensus. In the latest ESPN and Ringer mock drafts released last week, the top two are the same—Risacher goes No. 1 to Atlanta and Alexandre Sarr goes No. 2 to Washington—but they don’t agree on a single other pick in the lottery.
Inevitably, one of these projections is going to end up right and most of them will end up wrong. Or, they could all end up wrong and the Blazers could take someone none of these mock drafts have predicted. None of them, for example, have had Cody Williams going seventh, and that’s been my don’t-overthink-it pick for best combination of fit and upside since the day of the lottery.
Last year, Portland also had two picks in the first round. There wasn’t much mystery around the third pick—they were always going to take whichever one of Brandon Miller or Scoot Henderson didn’t go second to Charlotte. But the projections around the No. 23 pick were predictably all over the place. ESPN and Bleacher Report accurately predicted Kris Murray would be the pick; The Athletic, Yahoo and The Ringer had other players going there.
The year before, the Blazers infamously telegraphed their choice pretty strongly by hiring former ESPN draft analyst Mike Schmitz as an assistant GM during the predraft process after he’d said on an episode of The Woj Pod following the lottery that they should take Shaedon Sharpe with the No. 7 overall pick. But the top of that draft was also shrouded in mystery, highlighted by the sudden betting-line movement the night before the draft going away from Jabari Smith Jr. to Orlando’s eventual No. 1 pick, Paolo Banchero.
All of this is to say that two weeks out, I don’t know what the Blazers are going to do with their four draft picks, and neither does anyone else, including Joe Cronin. Not every player on their board has even come in for the workout-and-interview car wash yet.
I believe very strongly that they are not going to take a guard in the top 10, for obvious reasons—certainly not one of the two undersized Kentucky guards, Reed Sheppard or Rob Dillingham. Topic’s recently revealed partial ACL tear could cause him to slide to No. 14, where he could be an intriguing upside play; recent combine measurements downgraded his wingspan from a rumored seven feet to 6-foot-5, which makes the idea of drafting him considerably less appealing.
Clingan is the latest rumored Blazers draft target, and they could very well jump on it if he falls to them at No. 7. He could go before then, though, and I have a hard time seeing them trading up for him or anyone else in this draft, as has been rumored, when they could just stay where they are and get someone they like.
Knowing this front office, they usually swing for upside rather than a high floor, at least when they’re drafting in this range. But they did bring in Knecht, and by all accounts he had a good showing.
These are all things I think and things I guess, not things I know. Front-office executives around the NBA have no incentive to tell reporters the truth about who they’re targeting in the draft, and plenty of incentive to lie about what they think or know other teams are going to do.
Between the short Conference Finals, the week off in between, and what’s looking like it could be a four- or five-game Finals, there’s been a larger than usual void in the news cycle this year, notwithstanding the Lakers’ out-of-nowhere and ultimately failed pursuit of UConn coach Dan Hurley. That void needs to be filled with content for fans of the 28 teams not still playing. And so we have a new set of mock drafts every week, a steady stream of new Trade Machine ideas and misattributed aggregation of those trade ideas and things floated on podcasts. One of these half-baked concepts takes hold, spreads on social media as a fanbase talks itself into a hypothetical scenario as fact, and then burns itself out when the next one comes along.
You can either take all of it at face value or take none of it at face value. I’ve been doing this long enough to know which side of that fence I land on.
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