NBA Mock Draft: Analyst projects Pacers waste their lottery pick
By Joe Lyon
Garry Parrish of CBS Sports has come out with another mock draft overviewing what he believes that teams will do post-trade deadline. And his best guess, is that the Pacers will go for……. another shooting guard.
And to be clear, currently we have Nembhard, Hield, Duarte, and Bennedict Mathurin all vying for shooting guard minutes. But this mock draft has the Pacers taking another one, albeit a promising young talent.
These are the picks that the Pacers make in the projected draft:
- 6th Keyonte George, Shooting Guard, Baylor
- 26th DaRon Holmes II, Power Forard, Dayton
- 30th Reece Beekman, Shooting Guard, Virginia
And while there isn’t anything wrong with any of these players necessarily, it would be a major front office oversight to draft Keyonte George when the following forwards (the biggest position of need for the Pacers) were still available:
- Cam Whitmore, SF, Villanova
- Ausar Thompson, SF, Overtime Elite
- Gradey Dick, SF, Kansas
Just take the first one for example. Cam Whitmore would be a perfect fit on the Indiana Pacers team. He has the size and shooting as well as the defensive ability that the Pacers have needed in the power forward position for years now.
Alternatively, we could draft another shooting guard that will likely never see any minutes because there are 3-4 shooting guards ahead of him in the rotation.
This upcoming draft will make or break the Pacers rebuild
Teams only get so many opportunities to draft high in the lottery, and failure to convert high draft picks into on-floor talent is a surefire way to set your franchise back decades. What makes this an even bigger deal for the Pacers is that we are a small market team, unable to lure large free agents to Indy we have to build through the draft.
We shall see how the mock drafts develop over the next couple of months. For now? They have the Pacers making a terrible mistake.
