Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Draft combine deteriorates
Despite top player absences, event still important to Heat
This time the Miami Heat aren’t auditing, as they did last year, and as they likely will next year.
And yet, again with a seat at the table, there hardly is a sense of fulfillment as this week’s NBA draft combine approaches.
“Chicago has become a disappointment,” Chet Kammerer, the Heat’s vice president of player personnel, said of the event that continues to lag behind the significance of its NFL counterpart. “We’ve negotiated over the years. At one time, everybody came. At one time, we had competition. We have three on three. We had five on five. And it slowly has deteriorated.”
For the Heat, that makes the week in Chicago a mixed bag on the six-week roll up to the June 22 draft.
One on hand, practically locked into the No. 14 pick, with only a 1.8-percent chance of moving up in the May 16 lottery, the players in the Heat’s range likely will be in attendance, with only the elite do-
mestic players bypassing the event.
On the other hand, without a draft choice last June, and likely without firstround picks next year and in 2021 due to the 2015 trade for Goran Dragic, intel collection becomes paramount.
“So I get the list and already there’s eight guys of the top 20, probably, who are not going to show up at all,” Kammerer said, with those electing to bypass the event including UCLA guard Lonzo Ball, Kansas forward Josh Jackson, North Carolina State guard Dennis Smith, Duke forward Jayson Tatum, Arizona forward Lauri Markkanen and Florida State forward Jonathan Isaac. “So it’s so disappointing. And it’s not the competition, it’s the fact you have nothing there as far as the physical, the medical.
“So now you have to do individual medicals, because they didn’t come to the combine, to get a full medical report on a player. And all the testing they do there will not be done.”
There also is a trickledown factor due to the lack of elite prospects in attendance.
Just as teams were asked their preferences for those to invite to the combine — with University of Miami guard Davon Reed, University of Florida forward Devin Robinson and Florida State forward Dwayne Bacon among those invited — the Heat also had to submit lists of players they want to interview during the 10 30-minute sessions allotted per team.
With most of the top players bypassing the combine, it means the players in the Heat’s target area likely now will be requested, as well, by teams at the top of the draft.
“What we do,” Kammerer said, “is we’ll put down 30 names. We’ll put 10 players that we like at what we call our A-list. So you put the 10 you would like to have. Then you’d have 10 in your B-list. And then you’d have 10 in your C-list. And you’re not going to get your 10 that you probably prefer.
“In the past, I’d say we’d get seven or eight of our top 10. And we may one get three or four of our Bs. And we may end up with four or five of the guys that we had in our C-list. But you’ll get 20 of the 30 that you presented to them, who you would prefer.”
While the combine no longer represents one-stop shopping, it still brings together every team’s front office, as well as many coaches. And it still is the largest congregation of draft prospects in one place.
That, Adam Simon, the Heat’s assistant general manager, said, still makes it an essential component of the evaluation process, even with elite talent bypassing, even with several international prospects unavailable due to ongoing seasons.
“You want to gather as much information as possible, and if you don’t have it, you’re still going to have to make a decision,” Simon said. “What you’d like to see is all the players be able to have their measurements, not only where you can compare against players right now, but against players from last year and prior years. And so in an ideal world you would have all that from a measurement standpoint and from a testing standpoint. And from a medical standpoint it would certainly be useful to have that information.
“At the end of the day, you’re probably going to be able to get all that at some point. But you would like to have it, not only to help you to know as much about the player now, but even in the future, when not only in a trade but in free agency you could look back and say, ‘Hey, this is what we saw of you coming out and into the draft and now we can prepare you better and be aware of what your body makeup is and how we can improve on that.’ And so, yeah, it helps, we would like to get as much as we can, but there’s no rules that they have to do it. So whatever it is, we have to abide by it.”