Dave in Green

One NBA team that, unfortunately, appears to have little interest in Zeke is the Cleveland Cavaliers. Bob Finnan (@BobCavsinsider) writes in the Cleveland News-Herald:

Cody Zeller will aparently not be working out against Zeke in Portland and perhaps not in Minnesota after all. Zeller had a private workout with Portland yesterday: Zeller is being projected as a possible lottery pick, and his agent is probably thinking his client has more to lose than to gain by direct comparisons with players like Zeke. From the perspective of NBA teams who might have an interest in Zeke based on his performance in workouts, it's in their best interests not to have a buzz about Zeke. More than one team may be thinking that the less buzz there is about Zeke, the better chance they have of grabbing him with a late second round draft choice. Hopefully one team will be smart enough not to risk losing a shot at Zeke and will draft him earlier.

@Blue & Gold, we were just discussing that in the posts prior to yours. It appears to be not uncommon to invite multiple centers (or forwards or guards) to workouts for direct comparisons. You can clearly see that in the HoopsHype.com lists of upcoming workouts and past workouts. These lists usually include the names of many but not necessarily all of the players at each workout. The upcoming June 12 Minnesota Timberwolves workout lists not only Zeke and Steven Adams, but also Cody Zeller, Mike Muscala and Rudy Gobert. That's quite a lineup of quality bigs getting a chance to show their stuff against each other.

@Zip2Go, that would help explain why GameChngr44 was so excited about Zeke's draft status the last time she posted.

George Thomas makes a good point that Zeke has a great opportunity to elevate his draft status by working out against bigs projected to go in the first round like Pitt's Steven Adams and Indiana's Cody Zeller: Zeke Marshall working against other big men

Just how many commercially viable football leagues are there? If there was another one that played in the spring you'd think that GP1 would have mentioned it here by now.

Zeke said in the video interview that he had no problem keeping up with the fast pace of the Phoenix workout, which according to the comment below may be designed to test players' conditioning. Zeke's good conditioning and ability to run would raise his value with the Suns. Link

Finally! Zeke gets a video interview after his Phoenix workout:

Zeke is already an NBA star, at least in one NBA sim. Real Sports Lounge's Fast Break Basketball shows Zeke scoring 34 points to lead the Pistons to a 99-95 win over the Supersonics. So whatever performance numbers they've entered into their software to represent Zeke must be pretty healthy.

@Dr Z (and anyone else reading this), please excuse my personal compulsion to do postmortems on misunderstandings in the interests of self-improvement. I'm kicking myself for misunderstanding the nature of your question. Had the question been "do you have any hard data to back up that statement," I would have immediately gotten the point. What really threw me was the following: I interpreted the "N" word as "never," and that made no sense at all to me. In retrospect I should have been more specific in questioning what you were looking for. Apologies to anyone who found this discussion disruptive. To those who found it amusing and entertaining, consider it a free benefit of visiting ZN.o.

Oh well, anyone who decides they want to discuss the "plausible theory" of NFL team draft priorities being influenced by the success of other teams won't have to go to the effort of starting a new thread now in the appropriate forum. Maybe someone will even stumble across definitive proof some day.

Lukewarm reaction to Zeke's draft status from this Mavericks blogger on SB Nation:

That's it? All you wanted was for me to say that I had no definitive proof? And here I thought I was missing an important point that you were trying to make. If you challenged every statement like that posted on ZN.o the forums would be unreadable. It goes without saying that there is no definitive proof that it hasn't happened. What a waste of time.

@Dr Z, I tried to give you a chance to clarify your question, because as posed it strikes me as pointless and irrelevant. The cartoon you posted was cute, but doesn't help me better understand your point. So I'll just have to do my best to give you as straight an answer as I can based on your limited input. As best I understand your question about my out-of-context sentence fragment from all the various boldface and pretty colors, you appear to be asking me to cite a specific instance when a team went for running backs in the next draft to try to replicate the winning formula of an NFL championship team. The answer, of course, is that I cannot cite a specific instance. The reason I can't is because no one but the decision makers on NFL teams know for sure how much they may have changed their priorities in the next draft based on the success of other teams. They typically don't share that level of detail about internal business decisions with the public. Do I think that some NFL teams over the decades have been influenced by the success of other teams to change their draft priorities to move running backs ahead of other positional players? Absolutely. That was the point of my original statement.

@Dr Z, you seem to be obsessing over a sentence fragment that does not in itself express a complete thought. In the context of the original post, the examples given made sense for the point being made. The wording could have been more carefully crafted in a way that would have lessened the chance of someone latching onto a fragment and trying to make a big issue out of it. But who cares if everyone got the main point? If you have a point to make here, it's not yet clear to me.

That reminds me of a corny old riddle: Railroad crossing, look out for the cars, can you spell that without any r's? Clever answer: t-h-a-t @Dr Z, sometimes I lose sight of the fact that others haven't been around as long as I have. I should have gotten the clue when you originally quoted me but crossed out NFL championship and inserted Super Bowl. Maybe the Super Bowl represents the only NFL championship in your lifetime. But the NFL started crowning championship teams in 1920 and the first draft was held in 1936, several decades before the first Super Bowl. Do you honestly believe that no NFL championship won with a dominant ground game has ever influenced other teams' priorities in the following draft?

@GameChngr44, it sounds as if you may have just heard something that you're not free to discuss with us.

The NFL part of this discussion now has its own thread right here.

Rather than continue the following OT football discussion in the basketball forum, I thought it would be best to give the subject its own thread. The following exchange is from the thread about Zeke and the NBA Draft (with Dr. Z's that referring to the NFL part of my first comment): I think most will understand that the broad point I was making is that the draft priorities of pro teams are influenced by what is currently successful. So, for example, when teams with the best passing games are more successful, that influences other teams into drafting similar positional players to the most successful teams. The same happens in the NBA. If teams with big, dominating centers are having more success than small ball teams, more teams are influenced to prioritize drafting centers. But since Dr Z was more interested in debating the football side of it, anyone who's interested in joining the debate can weigh in right here. I'll start it off with links to a couple of articles: Recent draft trends show running backs a less valued commodity by NFL teams The Draft Shows That Running Backs Are No Longer Important To Most NFL Teams

@Dr Z, just a random example of trends I've noticed in many decades of following the NFL and NBA drafts, and not intended to start an OT football discussion in this basketball thread.

Zeke is Mr. Popularity. Will be interesting to see when word starts leaking out about how well he's doing in the workouts. Bobcats added below. Also, Zeke is ranked #48 of all the players in the draft in a Win Share Model calculation that's been good at predicting the performance of NBA players based on their college performance. Note that only 56 potential draftees have projected win shares. Players from #57 down are all rated as zero. In the Bust Or Star ranking on this site, Zeke is ranked #36 of all players in the draft with a 12% chance of being a starter and a 36% chance of being a bench player. Both of these suggest that Zeke is at least a solid second round draft choice. Link Dallas Mavericks May 31 Detroit Pistons June 2-3 Houston Rockets June 5 Phoenix Suns Friday, June 6 Minnesota Timberwolves June 12 Portland Trail Blazers June 13-14 Los Angeles Lakers June 17 Chicago Bulls June 18 Charlotte Bobcats June 19 Philadelphia 76ers June 21 Indiana Pacers June 22

@GameChngr44, Timberwolves added below. One question: Who gets all of Zeke's frequent flyer miles? @Legend Of Zippy, good comparison with Roy Hibbert. One thing about professional sports is that teams tend to have their draft influenced by what's working today. That is, if a team wins the NFL championship with a running game, there's more temptation for teams to go for running backs in the next draft to try to replicate the winning team formula. In the NBA, championship performance by a team with a dominating center tends to make teams more likely to draft big centers in the next draft. So Hibbert's success against the Heat is generally good for Zeke. @akronzips71, it's true that different SOS makes direct comparisons between two players' stats less accurate. That 2007-2008 Pitt team had an SOS of #36, while the Zips' SOS this past season was #135. Also, Hibbert played against larger, more talented opposing centers on a more regular basis. On the other hand, many of Zeke's best performances tended to be against the few teams the Zips played that had big, talented centers. Zeke seemed to have more trouble against smaller players who he likely would not face in the NBA. Zeke has more to prove out of college than Hibbert did, so it's good that so many NBA teams are giving Zeke a chance to show what he's got in private workouts. The important thing is to show that he's close to being NBA ready and has a big upside. Dallas Mavericks May 31 Detroit Pistons June 2-3 Houston Rockets June 5 Phoenix Suns Friday, June 6 Minnesota Timberwolves, June 12 Portland Trail Blazers June 13-14 Los Angeles Lakers June 17 Chicago Bulls June 18 Philadelphia 76ers June 21 Indiana Pacers June 22

Surely there's some gold somewhere on that bobblehead to match the nice blue sweater vest he switched to when he came to UA. Maybe it's in the socks, underwear, cuff links, watch, pants zipper, dental work, etc.

If the Aeros approached UA to get permission to give away Jim Tressel bobbleheads in Zips colors as a promotion, I can't imagine anyone in a position of responsibility at UA refusing. There are legitimate connections. Canal Park is primarily used by the Cleveland Indians minor league affiliate and also by the Zips baseball team. Beyond that, Tressel cooperated with the Indians when they called on him to help "recruit" Nick Swisher. So there's a history of cooperation among the main parties. While I think it's generally positive for everyone involved, it's understandable that some will find reasons to be less than thrilled. The important thing is that it comes out a net positive.

I was laughing at the posts ahead of mine.