The Pacers Draft Miles Plumlee

If Larry’s draft history is an indicated, this pick could be a mistake. Take a good look:
2006: Pacers take Shawne Williams, miss out on Rajon Rondo (maybe not Bird’s fault, but he was in the office).
2007: No picks (due to bad deals). Got the rights to Stanko Barac from Miami (w/e).
2008: Pacers trade Jarryd Bayless for Brandon Rush, miss out on George Hill and almost miss Roy Hibbert if not for a trade to Toronto (Bird finds a way to make up for his mistakes).
2009: Pacers take Tyler Hanbourgh, miss out on Darren Collison, Jrue Holiday, and Ty Lawson (Again, Bird finds a way to make up for a mistake…almost. Collison is backup PG now. Personally, I wanted Ty Lawson back then and now he’s the starting PG for Denver).
2010: Pacers take Paul George and Lance Stephenson (Paul good, Lance gets in fights).
2011: Pacers trade Kawhi Leonard for George HIll (Keeping the pick or doing the trade was a win-win situation).
2012: Pacers take Miles Plumlee (see Tyler Hansbrough).

Other 2nd Round picks, James White, AJ Price. Useless foreign Stanko Barac, Davis Bertans

The draft track record of Larry Bird says to me, “I can’t pick ‘em but I’ll try to fix it later.” Good news, Larry’s gone and can’t fix this mistake if Plumlee tanks (which seems likely).

Let me analyze your nonsense.
2005: Granger. Hello??
2006: Worst draft probably in NBA history. 20 other teams passed on Rondo. And he went to a team and flourished with 3 future hall of famers.
2007: Bad deals? We traded the pick to get Al Harrington back from ATL. He’s been in the league for a long time now and has had an above average career. That 11th pick? Acie Law.
2008: What is Bayless doing these days? Rush averaged 10 points last season and was one of the best three point shooters in the league. He had off the court problems with the Pacers that no one can predict on draft night. Roy was not a favorite pick for people. I remember everyone thought he wouldn’t pan out. Too slow.
2009: I’ll admit Hands bro wasn’t a great pick. But not terrible either.
2010: People thought George was a reach, turns out he wasn’t/ Lance is a second rounder. And fights? Really?
2011: I’m still for Hill. I’ll take a proven NBA ball handler/shooter over a hustle guy out of college 9 times out of 10.
2012: You can’t even say anything.

@Mike/Jordan (!):
2005: “Crediting” an executive for drafting a player that fell into his lap, when it was a matter of consensus that Granger should have been drafted higher and simply wasn’t, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. And if you are going to credit him for Granger, you also have to add Erazem Lorbek to the list of 2nd-round duds.
2006: Bad draft, sure, but he’d get a little less grief from me if he didn’t demonstrate the certainty about it that he did (said a week before the draft he had his guy picked out already, adding “he’s known.” Can’t find the article, but I’m sure somebody like Mike Wells would remember if someone tweeted him). And then he traded their second-round pick and TWO FUTURE second-rounders to Portland to move up in the second and draft James White, who then got cut in camp.
2007: Traded the pick for Harrington, and then promptly sent Harrington to GS. Whatever slice of the Murphy/Dunleavy trade that pick bought did more harm than good. Kicked one of the #2′s down the road to take Stanko Barac.
2008: I actually thought this was a pretty good draft. No complaints, honestly.
2009: Hansbrough, like Plumlee, was a terrible pick. More on that in a minute. Price is a fringe-NBA player, who may actually be Larry’s best second-round pick. That is not a compliment to either of them.
2010: George was a good pick. Stephenson’s getting into fights I think was meant to indicate what modest value he does bring (he also, like, threw his pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs, but whatever, I’m content to just say he hasn’t contributed anything in this first two seasons)
2011: I actually liked the trade at the time, but it’s no longer clear to me that George Hill is better than Kawhi Leonard by himself, let alone 3 second-round picks better (although it can be argued that two of those “picks” are actually guys, and those guys are terrible and may never make it stateside, although it could THEN be argued that those terrible guys were also drafted by Larry Bird). Or to put it another way, going into the 2012 draft, from 8 years of second rounds of drafts, setting aside whether they’re still playing in Indy, simply in terms of drafted players playing in the NBA, Larry turned 8 second-round picks into AJ Price and Lance Stephenson. Eight. I know you can’t expect a lot from second-round picks, but you’d think you’d at least either hit (really hit) on one out of eight, or get at least, I don’t know, FOUR middling fringe-bench guys?
Which brings us to 2012. Don’t know Johnson, but I’ve heard good things. But for the same reason I hated the Hansbrough pick, I don’t like this one either because it ignores VALUE. You can say you think Plumlee will contribute meaningfully, and that’s an opinion that can’t be proven wrong until he plays. But what can’t be credibly argued is that he could only have been had at 26 (ditto Hansbrough at 13). If you really want Miles Plumlee, and you absolutely can’t work out a deal to trade down to a pick where you would be confident you’d still get Miles Plumlee, but Perry Jones is universally believed to be a higher-end talent who would fetch more in a trade, then you draft Perry Jones, and you wait for someone else to draft Miles Plumlee, and you offer them Perry Jones for Miles Plumlee and SOMETHING. If they dig their heels in and say “no, you’re not getting Miles Plumlee,” then you make the same offer to someone else for another player, and live with not getting the great Miles Plumlee and settling for some other backup center–AND SOMETHING ELSE, or, absolute worst-case scenario, you live with getting a borderline lottery talent at 26. Gauging the interest of other teams in players is a part of the process, and failing to exploit the obvious discrepancy between teams around the league’s interest in Perry Jones and teams around the league’s interest in Miles Plumlee is just laughably bad business.

This was a terrible pick. Do you really look for Jeff Foster like talent in the first round?!?! Perry Jones III should have been the pick. David West is 30 and has one more year on his contract. As much as I like him, it’s only down here from here. Our starting 5 is set; so why not have Jones III learn from West as a project?

Baylor was a pretty selfish team with a lot of talent, and all of their players were “me first” kind of players, which hampered how good Perry Jones III can be. The leg problem is overrated. Michael Jordan got hurt his second year and he turned out pretty good.

Plumlee 20 min per game at Duke his senior year?….umm Mike is no idiot, he didn’t play that much for a reason

Everybody keeps saying their main issue is this guy projected as a second rounder. News flash: that was never the case. According to multiple sources (including Mike Wells, I believe) the T-Wolves had been trying to trade up in the early twenties the entire draft so they could draft Plumlee. So stop all the ‘he would’ve lasted to 36 nonsense’. I did think we should’ve drafted PG3 but I wonder how many people who are super-zealous that we didn’t take him were just looking at the fact he was graded as the 10th best talent in the draft. I thought Plumlee was a n odd pick until I researched the reasoning more, but I could argue that Doron Lamb or Marquis should’ve been higher on the Pacers board than PG3 regardless. People act like these picks are a sure-thing. Kwame Brown, Hasheem Thabeet, Derrick Williams, all players drafted very high woth huge hype and almost all were ‘sure-things’. Hell, I remember there was buzz last year that Bird was trying to trade one/two of our core players to get up to the second pick and get Williams. (Let me just add I think he will actually be pretty good, just not worth what most teams would’ve traded for him)

We needed a backup Center, and one or two scorers off the bench. We have our backup Center, and everyone hates the pick. We got this Johnson kid who may not even make the team, and everyone loves the pick. We still have free agency to go, I expect Pritchard to go after Brandon Roy for a one-year minimum salary deal, and pursue Chris Kamen, along with someone who can score off the bench. Hopefully we could get a couple of those, chances are we’ll be lucky to get just one. Whatever else we need, trade trade trade. That’s just how it works.

*ahem* Anyone saying that drafting Perry Jones was such a huge risk needs to look no further than our own Danny Granger. Danny was expected to go early in the draft but his knees were a concern. So he slid all the way to us and we picked up the “allstar” talent because he was the best available. So when Jones slid to us because of his knees, someone who has far more potential than Danny did (whether he’ll capitalize or not is a different story) why the hell would we not take him? Then instead of buying Orlando (who I have no problem with at all. Welcome to the team) we could have bought Plumlee since practically no one was after him at all. Larry screwed up big time in my opinion.

And also I’d like to give a shout out to Robbie Hummel. I don’t think he’ll see much time, if any, but congrats on getting drafted.

I agree with NexSerenade (Mike) point about “sure things.” There are no such things in the NBA. Also, the 3 busts he notes are still in the league. Why? Because they are big, can move out of their own way, and have 6 fouls. Miles will have some trade value if nothing else.

So many “Just look at the stat sheet, Plumlee is a joke” comments. Okay–22 boards in a game, against Maryland, most for any Duke player in over 40 years…and I am pretty sure Duke has played teams worse than Maryland in the past 40 years, with players who can rebound the ball supposedly “better” than Plumlee, so why is this irrelevant? He is a big man with great athleticism who can rebound the ball…or exactly what the Pacers needed.

My 6 and 8 comment for Plumlee is only overstepping by a rebound, so I will say 6 and 7…23 NBA centers were able to accomplish last year, playing at least 20 minutes, and I don’t see why he could not have the same level of production.

Trust the Bird

Why did so many other teams pass on PJ3 though? Are they as dumb as we are?

Hey don’t get me wrong, I’m still annoyed we didn’t take Jones.

But Mike’s right though. I think everyone drasticly overrates the goings on of anything in the 20′s.

Free agency is what matters to us.

Gregors nails it. Pacers don’t have a backup center, so they drafted one. A backup center, not a PF playing out of position, would have made a big difference in the Heat this year.

1. Can’t believe people constantly expecting every draft pick to be a success. If you aren’t picking in the top half of the lottery, it’s a total crap shoot. The difference between the average guy drafted at 10 and 26 is very small because the average 10th pick still doesn’t have a great career.

Average 10th pick:
10.2 ppg 4.4 rpg 2.2 apg in 24.6 min

Average 26th pick:
6.0 ppg 2.8 rpg 1.3 apg in 15.8 min (only 3 out of 20 26th overall picks have averaged more than 15 (pts + reb + ast) / game in their careers).
For fun, Jeff Foster: 4.9, 6.9, 0.9

LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS. GETTING A POOR MAN’S FOSTER IS AN ABOVE AVERAGE OUTCOME FOR THE 26TH PICK.

2. Perry Jones seems not to be a very smart kid. I listened to an interview and basically he threw all his coaches at Baylor under the bus for not using him correctly. Even if he thinks that’s true, you cannot say stuff like that. Complaining about your coach when you KNOW people are paying attention to what you’re saying prior to the draft? That’s like interviewing in a wife-beater. Besides it’s not like PJ produced in college much more than Plumlee so that argument seems moot.

3. I think the Pacers FO’s opinion is that the team is going to improve organically. All their rotation players are still on an upward career trajectory except West who has been steady and productive. Obviously they were looking to fill a need.

They could have went with Draymond Green but they have watched more film than me so who am I to second guess. Green has less size as well–I think the FO thinks there’s at least some chance they can coach Plum up like they have done so well with Hibbert.