The conventional wisdom is simple: You can’t develop five first round picks, let alone that plus a second rounder ... and two 20-year-olds in Noah Clowney and Dariq White who are younger than about a third of the 59 players who’ll be taken tonight.
It’s mostly about development. The tendency is to work hard on the top picks, while the others can sometime languish. That can lead to big mistakes down the road. As Simone Casali, the Nets director of international scouting said last year.
“We must not underestimate how history is full of players who struggled in their first team and then exploded in the second because there they found the right situation and the right context.