Bill Self Hates NBA Mock Drafts

Bill Self, the Kansas basketball coach, has some thoughts on NBA Mock Drafts. Let me guess, you want to hear these thoughts about as much as you want to look at an NBA mock draft six months before we even know the order or who is declaring? He said the following last weekend after Kansas nipped Utah at home, and two of his highly-touted freshman, Kelly Oubre and Cliff Alexander, struggled:

"“The mock drafts don’t mean anything,” Self said. “And I would tell the guy if he was here doing the mock drafts. They don’t mean anything. They’re ridiculous.” “You can follow the mock drafts, and they will have 120 players that are going to go in the first round this year,” Self said. “That is true. You can count them. That is going to be true. So obviously they don’t know, and they’re guessing. And some kids it takes more time in the system.”"

About the first part … he’s not wrong. Mock drafts “don’t mean anything.” That is 100% true. It’s pure opinion, sometimes informed, sometimes not.

But I’d disagree with calling them “ridiculous.” Mock drafts can stimulate discussion and generate debate, among other things. We’re less than two months into the NBA season and for probably eight teams – Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Minnesota, Utah, Indiana, the Lakers and Celtics –  2014-2015 is over.

(I’m leaving Charlotte and Indiana out of this discussion in the event Lance Stephenson is traded back to the Pacers; perhaps both teams make a run at the 8th playoff spot. But neither is winning a title or throwing a scare into Cleveland, so … yeah.)

And as such, fans of those teams turn their attention to improving, through free agency and … yes, the 2015 NBA draft. Informed fans want to know: Who should we draft? So they watch college basketball (or, more than just March Madness). Inevitably, they scour Mock Drafts.

Mock drafts are going to happen. They should happen. You know what else should happen? College basketball coaching staffs should be informing their players to pay no attention to them, and to instead pay attention to what the NBA tells players after they ‘test the waters’ to see where they’d go in the draft. The NFL does the same thing. Surely college coaches have been saying this to their players for over a decade now, right?

This isn’t going to stop parents of players from perusing the mock drafts, or getting gassed up by reading Twitter. We’re talking about teenagers, after all. And it’s not going to stop their parents/relatives/crew from getting in their ear with advice culled from Mock Drafts. But let’s not pretend unscrupulous agents aren’t doing the same thing so they can lock up the Next Big Thing.

If Self is angry that he recruited two players who were considered 1-and-done before the season, and now they’re playing with the NBA in mind, that’s his issue. Coach K recruited two of those players as well – Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow. Both of them are playing like the lottery picks everyone thought they’d be.

Alexander, from what I’ve seen so far, is playing nothing like the beast he was as a prep star in Chicago. He’s extremely limited offensively, isn’t a defensive force, and doesn’t have ownership of the paint. And he’s 6-foot-8/maybe 6-foot-9, in the era of the Stretch 4. It’s early and things could obviously change, but I don’t see Top 10 pick at all right now.

Just one-third of the way into the season, I see a player who should return to school. This is not a knock in any way, shape or form, but so far, he reminds me of Florida’s Patric Young, a bruising 4-year standout at Florida who is playing in Turkey right now. An NBA scout I spoke with sees Alexander as Julian Wright – another Chicago kid, roughly the same size, who was a highly-touted freshman, averaged a modest 8.5 ppg for the Jayhawks as a freshman, then went to the NBA after his sophomore year, was taken 13th overall, and was out of the league in four years. He’s currently playing in Greece.

Oubre has been equally puzzling, playing single-digit minutes in five of nine games. The McDonald’s All-American is struggling in his transition from star to role player. Like Alexander, he came out of high school with lottery talent, but we haven’t seen it yet.

Hey Bill Self, how about not worrying about Mock Drafts on the internet and focusing on your freshman?