Very thoughtful post. But do you think that the Cavs could have gone deep into the playoffs and been as good as those teams were with a Mark Price / Kevin Johnson backcourt? Two classic point guards who were the smallest guys on the court? How would that have worked?
I'd say this isn't a lesson on being patient with young guys, it's a lesson on how inconvenient it is to have two very good guys at the exact same position, because you end up having to trade one of them and don't get good value for it.
Partially agree. Do I think we would've ever made it far with two of the best point guards of their era on the same roster? Probably not. With that being said, KJ was so devastating with the ball in his hands, Price was an all-time great shooter and both both had amazing court vision. I think in
today's NBA, you could find a way to make it work.
Positions were much more rigid in the 1980s and 1990s, though. Most SGs were in the 6-5 to 6-7 range, bigger than a lot of SFs in today's game. It was also much more physical and, by having two conventional big men on the floor at the same time as basically every team did in that era, the kind of pace and space that a KJ/Price combination would flourish in would be greatly diminished.
Beyond all of the inertia of that particular situation, you take a couple steps back and see the benefit of drafting both KJ and Price, even though KJ ended up being great somewhere else. The Cavs felt like those were the two best players available at the positions they were drafting in and they went with their instincts instead of looking at positional needs. I firmly believe that BPA is the way to approach a draft unless you have two players close in the potential you see in them and you use positional needs to push one past the other.
Mark Price was actually on the team before KJ, taken in the 1986 Draft (25th overall). There was no longterm answer at PG on the roster at that time so positional arguments for that pick are moot and Price obviously ended up being one of the top players in that draft. The only guy who went after Price that even has an argument for being better was Dennis Rodman taken 27th and he was probably one of the biggest wildcard picks in NBA Draft history alongside Antetokounmpo and maybe one or two others.
Kevin Johnson ended up being arguably the BPA where we took him (#7 overall) a year later. I only say 'arguably' because Reggie Miller was taken a few picks later but you can debate those two in terms of greatness. Price hadn't asserted himself as the obvious PG of the future and, there we sat, with Kevin Johnson staring us in the face.
You take the best guys and figure out the rest later. It ended up working out for the Suns, but getting Nance wasn't a horrible consolation prize. Taking Reggie Miller would have made even less positional sense since Ron Harper was our best player in those years.
So we ended up taking the two BPsA and sticking with the one that seemed to fit the team best. A little hasty in moving on from KJ, sure, but it worked out for all parties in the end, making it a solid draft strategy.
In that same way, I liked the Garland pick because I think they went into the pick with the same mindset... get the best players available and things will work themselves out later.
