Millions pt 2. - Exactly What I Was Talking About

Bill Self is furious.

Darrell Arthur is not sick.

And it turns out I'm clairvoyant or something. That last post I "blogged" this afternoon--the one about how disappointing (and financially costly) it can be when a player falls to a lower draft order than he anticipated--couldn't have set the stage more perfectly for a story emerging today about a player, Darrell Arthur, who plummeted from his projected spot in the early teens to the 27th pick. This nosedive down the draft board could have cost the Arthur family as much as a million dollars per year.

The really crappy thing is that this sudden devaluation was fomented by a false rumor of a mysterious kidney ailment. Arthur's coach at Kansas, Bill Self, worked the phones to try to quash the misinformation as he watched one team after another pass on the talented 6-9 Forward who helped the Jayhawks win last year's NCAA Championship. (view the entire AP article here).

Watching the draft with his players at his home in Lawrence, Self wound up making frantic calls trying to help Arthur get things straightened out.

"I was scrambling around trying to get information myself because this was unknown to me until [Wednesday night] and apparently was unknown to many of the NBA teams until the very end.

"They said one minute before the draft, 'Can't take him. Doctors won't let us take him,' which is sad because then somebody really dropped the ball. I don't know what the reasoning was, but hopefully they had a valid reason."

Arthur was drafted by the New Orleans Hornets and eventually traded to the Memphis Grizzlies.

From a Spurs perspective, it is worth noting that we were the last team to pass on Arthur at the 26th pick. If he ends up being a monster in the league for years to come--perhaps motivated to even greater heights by the injustice served to him yesterday--the Spurs will be one of about 15 teams who will lament this Kidney prank even more than he does.

The Last of the Millionaires

The amount of money a rookie makes from his first NBA contract is dependent on the order in which he is drafted. The number one draft pick makes the most of any rookie ($4,822,800 for Derrick Rose this year), and every player selected after the first pick makes less by increments that decrease from about $500,000 between the first and second pick (Michael Beasely will make $4,314,960 per year in his first contract) to about $7000 between the 29th and 30th pick (Indiana will pay DJ White $964,080 a year, while the Celtics owe JR Giddens $957,120).

So when you see some of these guys who expect to be drafted very high fall a bunch of spots (Mario Chalmers, for instance, was predicted to go in mid to late first round even in the latest mock drafts, but he fell all the way out of the first round to Miami by way of a trade with Minnesota--at 34th overall). It's a big deal for them, and not only because of pride. It could mean a difference of several hundred thousand, or even several million dollars.

Hoopshype.com has a chart that lists every salary for the players taken in the first round.

For what it's worth, our man George Hill is the last player in the draft to earn a million dollar payday at $1,006,200.

Please Don't Call Him a Soufflé

I've started my digging to see just who this George Hill cat is. The more I turn up the more exciting the pick seems.

Mike Monroe of San Antonio Express-News has an encouraging report on how excited the Spurs are about this guy:

All you need to know about George Hill, the player the Spurs drafted in the first round of Thursday's NBA draft, is this: There was a celebration in the Spurs' draft night war room when the Houston Rockets made Frenchman Nicolas Batum the 25th selection of the first round, leaving Hill to the Spurs.

He also picks up on the quote from Pop I referenced yesterday about some players needing to be left "baking in the oven" for a while before joining the team, and claims the Spurs think Hill is, as Mike Monroe puts it, a "perfectly risen soufflé."

Another Express-News piece by Jeff McDonald inflicts yet another food metaphor (Hill isn't big on Tex Mex yet), but gives even more detail on how stoked Pop and the other Spurs brass are on this guy.

A 6-foot-2 scorer who played both guard positions in college, Hill is projected as a point guard in the NBA. The Spurs expect him to compete with Jacque Vaughn for the backup position behind Tony Parker next season.

“He's a really solid player at both ends of the court,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “I honestly believe he will make our team better right off the bat.”

No D-League? No 4 years playing for an Eastern Block European team? If you believe Pop, then this is a very un-Spurs kind of draft. And in this case that's actually a good thing.

UPDATE: I may have been a little hard on the Express-News guys for their food analogies, especially considering some of the silly content of my writing so far. I just really, seriously, don't want "The Soufflé" to catch on as Hill's (or anyone's) nickname.

In the Room with George Hill

Here's an interesting blog that gave a live update of how tonight progressed for George Hill and about 50 of his closest associates. It's interesting to get a glimpse into what a huge and somewhat surreal event this is for the people involved. He was hoping to be drafted by Indiana, but seems pretty happy to be a new Spur.

Is There a Draft in Here?

With the 26th pick in the 2008 NBA Draft, the San Antonio Spurs select George Hill a guard from IUPUI. I'll find out more about this character (along with what exactly IUPUI stands for) tomorrow.
Other notable draft events that I've caught on ESPN in the last few minutes:

*** The Heat did indeed draft Michael Beasley. That sneaky Pat Riley.

*** The Pacers are making a bunch of trades. Jermaine O'Neal is going to Toronto for T.J. Ford. They're also going to have both of the Rush brothers--Brandon and Kareem--after a trade with Portland.

*** The crazy fans at the draft keep chanting "Silver! Silver!" every time Adam Silver, the NBA Deputy Commissioner, comes to the podium to announce a pick. He looks like he's getting a real kick out of it.

With the 45th pick, the Spurs select Goran Dragic, a point guard from Slovenia.*** The Mavericks just selected Shan Foster with the 52nd pick. The commentators are making a big deal out of how he looks just like Usher and that he even plays the piano. Then they showed a clip of him singing a song that he wrote just for draft day. He was sitting in front of a keyboard while it was playing a preset song (or maybe he had recorded it--but he wasn't playing it at that time), and singing about how "no one shoots the 3 like me / I can't wait to play in the NBA.") It was awesome.

*** The Portland Trailblazers have like 20 picks in this draft.

*** 5 Kansas Jayhawks were drafted this year.

Okay, the Spurs have one more pick at 57 in the draft. That's 4 picks away. Hurry up Houston. You know who you're going to pick, just pick. OK. here comes Adam Silver. Maarty Loonin (Maarty with two a's).

OK, Spurs on the clock. It's the 57th pick overall. That's almost exactly where the Spurs got Manu Ginobili.

And...aw, crap. They made a pick during a commercial. I didn't see who they got. Here we go: James Gist, a Forward from Maryland.
Okay, there we go. That's a draft for me. I have beers that need drinking at Don's with my man Matt Cross.

UPDATE: The Spurs have traded Goran Dragic to the Suns for Malik Harrison, a 6-6 Small Forward from Oregon.

Toros on the Clock

There's plenty of drama at the top of this year's NBA draft. Michael Beasley, a player recently expected to be a lock for the first (Chicago Bulls) or second (Miami Heat) pick, seems to be in danger of goofying himself down a few spots. The kid is a joker, and to me that's great. But evidently Heat Honcho Pat Riley is squeamish about drafting the next Agent Zero or Jerry Sienfeld. David Hyde of the South Florida Sun-Sentinal thinks that's all a smoke screen:

Theory I: Beasley is Riley’s hands-down choice. The Heat keeps throwing off the scent by suggesting through back channels (never on the record) they have issues with him. That’s why they brought in Mayo on Tuesday. Everything supports Chicago’s decision for Rose with the first pick, thus leaving Beasley.

Theory II: It really doesn’t like Beasley’s game (no chance). It really thinks Mayo can play point guard (who cares when Wade’s in the same backcourt?) It even thinks Jerryd Bayless could be The One (come on.).

As you can see, Theory I sounds smarter to me.

I'm not sure if I agree. I could see them taking Mayo, or, more likely, trading the pick. How is he going to draft Beasley now after making such a big deal out of disliking his personality?

Anyway it will be interesting to see what happens.

A little further down the draft board, things get much less interesting.

Today's ESPN Mock Draft 7.0 has Ryan Anderson's stock rising a few places to be picked by the Nets at 21, and claims the Spurs may have focused in on one of Tony Parker's countrymen, 6-8 French small forward, Nicolas Batum. But it's also been reported that there may be cause for concern over Batum's heart health after stress echo test returned in the "borderline" area.

Either way, it's almost impossible to know what's going to happen that late in the draft. And, more to the point, it's sort of hard to get too excited about it. The Spurs stole Manu with the 28th pick in the second round in 1999 and Tony Parker 28th in 2001. But those two, along with Tim Duncan, are the only players in the Spurs active rotation this season who were actually drafted by the Spurs. It's not that the Spurs have drafted poorly: other picks such as Luis Scola (2002), John Salmons (2002), Leandro Barbosa (2003), and Beno Udrih (2004) are all playing well for other teams right now. It just seems like it's hard for a young player to break into the Spurs system.

It also seems like the Spurs foreign farm system is running into more problems than it did when they let Manu develop overseas before bringing him in. The Spurs 2007 draft pick, Tiago Splitter, looked like a steal. But it was announced earlier this month that the promising 6-11 power forward from Brazil is signing an extension with his Spanish League Team, Tau Ceramica, that will keep him overseas possibly until the 2011-2012 season. In an article from yesterday's S.A. Express-News, Jeff McDonald includes a great quote from Pop about why the Spurs have continued to work this way:

High-profile struggles in getting draft picks Luis Scola and, more recently, Tiago Splitter into a Spurs jersey apparently have not made the team skittish about going that route again.

“It’s better to have someone baking in the oven than to take somebody who you know can’t play,” Popovich said.

But, to me, it looks like more and more players drafted by the Spurs will do their baking right here in Austin, with the Toros, the Spurs' NDBL franchise.

Spurs 2005 draft selection, Ian Mahimni, led the Toros to the NBDL Championship this year. He was injured and the Toros lost to the Idaho Stampede. But it looks like he'll be able to contribute to the Spurs this season. And there won't be any hang-ups in getting him to San Antonio.

For this reason, I think the NBDL is a far better system than drafting players who then become pros in Europe. Because the Toros are a direct Spurs affiliate, players can be called up and sent back by the Spurs on nearly a daily basis. Toros players also work in the same coaching system as the Spurs (you were wondering why they went to the Championship this year?); plus they don't get a chance to find out how much stronger the Euro is than the dollar.

So whomever the Spurs pick tonight, my only hope is that they'll either use them in San Antonio right away, or that they send them to Austin to laze around at Barton Springs until they figure out how to play basketball.

I'll find some info on whoever we do select either tonight or tomorrow.