One of the most entertaining things about the NBA Draft is the gamesmanship, bluffing and, frankly, manipulation.
Take this article about Duke’s Kon Knueppel.
Blue Devil fans know he’s not 6-7 because he objected to that, saying he was 6-6. At the NBA combine, he was measured at 6-5 without shoes, and his wingspan is just 6-6.25.
And as you’ll see, a couple of NBA types are quoted saying negative things about Knueppel.
One guy says this: “It’s an up-and-down draft. You’ve got Flagg, but he is the only guy who is polished and has that raw talent...Knueppel[‘s]game is polished as it is. He can shoot. I don’t know that he is going to get any better, though...He deserves to be a first-rounder, Top 20. But I would just warn him, I could see him sliding. The size, the athleticism, it’s just not really there.”
The second guy says this: “(Duke) had him at 6-foot-7, and he is not 6-foot-7, but you could kind of tell that. You could see he is lacking length but the measurement was really unkind. If you’re taking him in the Top 10, you’re saying, ‘OK, he is a rotation player down the line, maybe a sixth man at best, and we’re good with that.’”
Well, maybe.
Clearly, there are more athletic players in the draft, but you can run off a list in your mind of great players who were supposedly not very athletic: Larry Bird, Shane Battier, Stephen Curry, Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Steve Kerr, Draymond Green, Paul Pierce, Mark Price, JJ Redick, Bill Laimbeer, Dirk Nowitzki, Zach Randolph and, most recently, Nikola Jokić.
It’s important, but it’s not the end-all and be-all. You could just as easily run off a list of brilliant athletic talents who failed to achieve greatness or at least who couldn’t fulfill their potential: Ed O’Bannon, Walter Barry, Kwame Brown, Joe Barry Carroll, Dajuan Wagner, Dwayne Schintzius, Raymond Lewis and of course Baby Jordan himself, Harold Minor.
This list goes on for days - seriously.
The point is athleticism is only one part of the formula. If you understand the game, you master your skill set and you work hard, you can find great success.
Will Knueppel do that?
There’s certainly a chance he might fail, but he’s pretty smart. Recall just one play to make the point.
Remember this? Knueppel’s reaction was instant, highly intelligent and a brilliant solution to an unexpected problem. It only seems obvious in retrospect. How many players would have had the wherewithal to do this? You may remember that it was a stressful situation too because NC State took it to Duke for much of that game.
It reminds us a bit of when someone asked Jay Bilas if Curry was athletic enough to play in the NBA. He paused for a minute and said that “you do understand that he’s exceptionally smart.”
Well, Knueppel isn’t Steph Curry, but he’s pretty damn smart himself. We wouldn’t bet against him.