Draft Culver 6 (Forgot they didn’t keep the Culver pick and flipped it for Saric and Johnson who went 10 spots too high…)
Initially Simmons listed the selection of Jarrett Culver because the of the NBA’s super-weird draft day trade/no-trade rule (which was the pick that most people wanted the Suns to take), but then amended the information in his first subsequent tweet as I have added in the parenthesis.
If Culver turns into a Dwayne Wade-type player; a hall of famer; then yes, James Jones is going to have huge egg on his face.
Even if Cameron Johnson turns into a solid player and Dario Saric is good, potentially passing on a hall of famer is going to burn hard.
However, the odds of that are a million to one, and with the NBA Draft being such a huge crap shoot, it’s not like there is any guarantee that Culver is going to be great and that Johnson won’t.
Plus, the deal netted the Phoenix Suns a guaranteed starting power forward in Dario Saric as well as a draft pick who just happened to shoot near 50% from beyond the arc last season.
As a shooting guard (who shot a terrible 30.8% from beyond the arc last season in college), where was Culver going to play this coming season anyway? He certainly isn’t going to play ahead of Ricky Rubio and Devin Booker, so he would have been a sixth overall pick backup, whereas by trading him, Phoenix added a starting power forward and a primary 2/3/4 backup who can shoot the light’s out.
Only time can tell with this one and obviously Phoenix Suns fans have to hope for the best.
But on paper through, this deal sincerely does not look nearly as bad as many people (like Bill Simmons) would have it seem.
(Oh! And one more thing: to say that Johnson went “10 spots too high” is both a misnomer and disingenuous. He didn’t go “10 spots too high,” he went exactly where he went to a team that obviously valued him at that position. Who is to say that if James Jones had traded back another 10 spots to 21 that he would have even been there? Does Bill Simmons know this to be an absolute truth? Can anyone? Absolutely not. Cameron Johnson went where he went and thus his value is right where it is: 11.)