QUOTE (eddog2 @ Oct 19 2006, 10:32 AM)
Who says all those players are going to come out? Do you think all those big men will come out to be mid-first rounders when they could go to school another year and be 10 ten locks.
Most of these guys will be gone by the mid-first though, so you will see many of them in the draft. It's a very post heavy draft, with only a few perimeter players expected to go early. Plus money-wise there isn't that big a difference between picks 10 and 16 or so, so unless you have top-5 potential in the future (some of them do, but so do the perimeter players) it probably makes sense to go. Assessments on their draft status:
Splitter is in regardless, he'll probably go in the 2nd half of the top 10 or the late lottery.
Oden, Durant, Noah, and McRoberts would be pretty much top 5 locks, so it's highly likely they'll be in the draft.
Horford and Wright are probable top-10 picks, so chances are good that they will be in.
Thabeet, Hawes, and Hibbert are projected to go somewhere in the late-lottery to mid-first right now. They could all move up to top 10 or lottery status with a big year though. Yianlian is probably a mid-first unless he kicks some serious butt in workouts. Jermareo Davidson also could sneak up pretty high, and he's a senior. So that's one guy that is definitely in and 4 others that are maybe 50-50 (probably higher, but I'm being conservative).
So that probably leaves you with a minimum of 7 pretty strong post prospects and a fairly strong possibility of 3-4 others being in the draft. Plus with a couple of other perimeter guys with talent coming out like Julian Wright, Chase Buddinger, Jeff Green, Ronald Steele, and Marcus Williams, there's a good chance we could get one of them even if New York just misses the playoffs.
However, that doesn't seem all that likely. They do have some talent, but they also have a lot of ballhogs that are team cancers, and a lack of strong defenders. When you allow 102 points per game, it's hard to win consistently. Guys like Marbury, Francis, Crawford, Rose and Richardson simply can't be as effective as they normally would because of the presence of all of those other similar guys. That's 5 shoot-first guards. Maybe if they traded Marbury for Nash or Kidd it could work, but that obviously isn't going to happen. They were awful last year with virtually the same roster, so I don't see them improving THAT much, though a 10 game improvement is possible.