re: Jaxson Hayes Interview in The Athletic

The draft is, to a great degree, a crapshoot. There's really no way to know how players will turn out.

If there were a re-do of last year's draft, Herb Jones would be taken in the top ten. Everyone missed his potential, but we succeeded in getting a gem in the 2nd round because we missed it less than everyone else. That's a scouting success.

The night of the 2019 draft, what was reported was that we had Culver and Hayes rated almost equally for the #4 pick. David Griffin looked carefully and the teams picking 5-7 and concluded that one of the two would still be available at #8, which is why we made the trade.

If that was the case, then the trade was a "success" in that our front office still got who they wanted at #8 and picked up NAW and Didi for free.

So, for all the people here who bash the trade, I say that the trade made sense and continues to make sense, based on our draft board that night.

The problem wasn't the trade---it was the scouting. Just as our front office deserves credit for figuring out this year that Herb Jones might better than everyone else thought, they deserve blame for failing to realize that Hayes and Culver would be busts. If course, all the mock drafts had Culver in the top 7, and Jaxson wasn't going to last past #11 or #12, even if we didn't pick him, because there were indeed analytics that showed Culver and Hayes as equal value with RJ Barrett for the #3 pick. I think that using analytics is important, but they can't measure love of the game, attitude, or work ethic---that's stuff that only good scouting can tell you. The construction of our draft board prior to the 2019 draft is the biggest failure of the Griffin administration.

There have, obviously, been other significant failures, such as signing Nicole Melli and losing Christian Wood in the process, the Redick dustup, the expectation that Bledsoe could be a good starter for us, and the Adams trade and extension.

[Edit: forgot the hiring of SVG]

[Edit again, because I forgot the Lonzo trade.]

I said before the season that, if we fail to make the playoffs, Griff should be fired. Even without Zion for most of the season, I still think that he should go if we don't make the play-in, because the West is so weak.

But if our acquisitions of Herb Jones and Jonas Valanciunas and the resigning if Josh Hart (when most of this board thought that Naji would be just as good for less money) help us to make it to the play-in, then I have to give the front office credit for those decisions.

It works both ways.