A few days after the draft, Smooth provided links for me to watch Tristan's games in full at Texas. I watched about 4-5 of them, in their entirety, and came away feeling as if... at best, he would be a solid backup/rotational big in the vein on 90's era Tyrone Hill, PJ Brown, Michael Cage, Kurt Thomas, Davis Brother, Shelden Williams kind of power forward. Set a good pick, use a big ass to box out, and have a jheri curl at some point in time during his career.
I projected that without seeing a single statistic, and he looks well on his way to becoming that.
The problem then, as it is now, is that the game is/has trended more towards a open floor, faceup big spacing the court for primary ball handling guards type of game, and those power forwards who were able to anchor your defense as strong hard hat rotational bigs, are simply not valuable enough without being able to also space the floor and faceup for you.
That was known back in 2011. You could see where the game was trending with or without stats. And you could see that a player like TT, how he looked in college and how he projected to play in the pros, was going to have a long uphill battle in making himself the kind of player worthy of being a cornerstone.