What’s the Point?
Everyone is pretty upbeat about the Combine, but one constant question from many of the people here, including the players, is what’s the point of holding a Combine without scrimmages? You can only learn so much from watching guys run around cones.
I just bumped into Omri Casspi again and he echoed the familiar sentiment. “I’d rather play one-on-one or three-on-three,” he commented. Why not a full-on five-on-five scrimmage? “The problem is that everyone is trying to prove themselves. If we played five-on-five, some guys wouldn’t pass.”
When you get this many people together the conversation can go in a lot of directions. It’s striking that so many conversations are about how guys fared in interviews and not necessarily about how they drilled.
Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of talk about drill times, vertical leaps, and all that. Danny Green, for example, measured longer than expected. Luke Harangody, who outbenched everyone here, is being called Matt Bonner with muscle. DeJuan Blair is short. Terrance Williams can really jump. DeMar DeRozan looks fluid. You hear these things. (Green, by the way, worked out for San Antonio and Harangody interviewed with them last night.)
But you also hear plenty of stuff about how players carry themselves, how they account for past mistakes, whether or not they can maintain a conversation without texting. Teams take notes. A well-connected source who had read my recent post about Vladimir Dasic pulled me aside to say that many teams wouldn’t touch him because he was “not all there.” Otherwise, I was told, he’d project much higher. Too much risk.
Still, for as helpful as interviews and psychological profiles and reliable measurements can be, almost everyone here would just rather play.
