Walk into any of the weight rooms in Carmichael, and you can find people who can bench 185 pounds without struggle. Heck, you can find some rail-thin guys who can bench 200.
However, you’re not likely to find any NBA lottery picks walking around those white-tiled hallways (assuming Coach Lowe’s boys are in the athlete’s weight room at Weisiger-Brown).
At the recent NBA pre-draft combine in Orlando, every top player who attempted the bench press was able to lift the standard 185 pounds at least twice. Every player, that is, except Kevin Durant. Durant failed to lift the weight even once.
The bench press was not the only area in which the projected No. 2 pick was less than stellar.
After being graded in other areas, including physical measurements, vertical leap, agility and a three-quarter court sprint, Durant finished as the combine’s 78th-most athletic player — the worst ranking for any player who participated in all the drills, according to ESPN.com’s Chad Ford.
According to these results, Durant should be packing his bags for Europe, but we all know his ticket is still punched for Seattle as the draft’s No. 2 man behind Ohio State-s Greg Oden.
If Seattle’s new general manager Sam Prest decides otherwise, the Sonics will need all the Seattle rain they can get to put out the flames that fans will surely put at Prest’s feet.
Meanwhile, the best athlete in the combine bunch, according to some analysts, was D. J. Strawberry from Maryland. Most mock drafts don’t even have Strawberry being drafted at all, a few have him in the second round.
Maybe these results show a weakness in a combine whose highest-scoring player has only an outside chance of even getting picked, and whose lowest scoring man has been compared to an NBA MVP, Kevin Garnett, and was the first freshman ever to win AP national player of the year.
Or, maybe this is a sign that NBA scouts are simply not as fixated on raw numbers as their NFL counterparts.
In 2006, N.C. State’s Mario Williams shot up to the No. 1 pick based almost solely on his freakish combine stats (and Reggie Bush’s signability concerns). At the same time, Matt Leinart dropped to the middle of the first round after a wow-less combine expose.
A similar thing happened this season when Brady Quinn plummeted from sure-fire top-10 draftee all the way to pick No. 22.
In the NBA draft this year, Jared Jordan, a point guard from Marist who has led the NCAA in assists for the past two years, is receiving hard looks from NBA teams despite his marginal quickness and the fact that he played at such a small school.
It’s good to see the NBA is putting more stock in actual on-the-court performance than sheer athleticism. The league has long been thought to have the best athletes in the world.
In recent years critics have said the NBA has too many athletes and not enough skilled ballplayers.
Durant has proven he has the skill to be a top level player, regardless of what anyone might say about his strength numbers and overall athleticism. The NBA may be starting a trend toward the all-around player and shying away, slightly, from the all-around athlete.
Come June 28, Prest will almost certainly go with the all-around player and take Durant. Then again, Carmichael might have a guy with really impressive ratings he just can’t pass up.
