I said around the beginning of the season that Duncan is unquestionably the 2nd best Michigan player in the NBA. I’m having doubts that he isn’t the best player now.
You can get a little jaded, but that guy is assasinatin’ it. Tied the Heat record.
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If Poole works on his game and attacks his weakness is the way Duncan has, he’ll be just fine.
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Robinson also ended up with one of the best player development franchises in the NBA, while that has been a pretty distinct weakness of the Warriors for 5-6 years (if they had been able to turn out anything like the “free talent” the Heat have, they’d be in a much better place, in general their draft-picks haven’t worked out since Draymond).
Watching the highlights, you can see how much Butler and Winslow force the ball to Robinson if he has a modicum of space - they also seem to really love the hand-off from Bam to him while Bam sets the screen.
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He was +26 but please do not cite single game +/-, especially in the NBA.
Kevon Looney is a nice outcome for the end of the first round, but there’s no doubt that GSW trails Miami in player development, and that might help. Still, both these guys spent multiple years in Ann Arbor, and one of them quite clearly showed himself to be coachable and enthusiastic about working on his game.
I don’t know if you intended it, but I tend to think that nobody makes the NBA without enthusiasm for basketball and hard work towards that end, because it’s way to difficult not too have that. Poole has been quite bad as an NBA player, but I hesitate to chalk it up to “enthusiasm” or “coachability”.
Again, you can go back to summer league after the draft last year to see Spoelstra himself telling the media that Robinson - a rookie undrafted kid, needed to feel more comfortable letting the ball fly. The Heat have a long record with this stuff, from a guy like Bam Adebayo - whose biggest knock was a “lack of basketball IQ” - handing out 4 assists a game as a center, and “lack of a go-to offensive move” hitting nearly 60% of shots, to getting the 2nd best player in the draft class (Herro, pending Zion) at #13, to turning Justise Winslow into a PG, to turning Robinson and Kendrick Nunn into real NBA players. This is the best situation for a guy like Robinson, and its awesome that he landed in a place that was committed to his development.
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Maybe. But Poole was here two years, and at the end of Robinson’s second year we were sometimes tearing our hair out that he would never get it on D. Robinson’s still–what–two years older than Poole? Their wikipedia entries actually have Robinson born in 94 and Poole in 99, but that can’t be right. . . These faintly damning character assessments about how hard people work while we sit here playing keyboard commando, always iffy.
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Those birth years are right - remember Robinson was in college 5 years, Poole 2. Poole was also a June birthday, so he’s young for his class.
To your point, if my math is correct, when Robinson was Poole’s age today, he was sitting his RS year in Ann Arbor.
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Derrick Coleman and Shawn Kemp both lasted 15 years in the league. AI didn’t like to practice;Sheed played his way into shape. Etc., etc. Clearly you need a mix of talent, enthusiasm and dedication but not everyone’s levels of each are going to be the same. Not all players respond the same to coaching.
I was all in for this post til you said Tyler Herro is the 2nd best player in the draft class???
Otherwise I agree totally
Beilein said it. There was the popular BQ view-from-the-sidelines piece from the Illinois away game. There was the eye test in three losses vs. MSU. There was Poole’s own answers to questions about his approach. These arrows all point in the same direction. Nobody’s saying its settled science, but you can then compare all these data points to similar ones for other players, and get a sense of things.
I don’t agree that this is a comment on his character. Plenty of fine and ethical people have independent streaks. Being more or less coachable is not the same as being a good person or a bad one.
One thing I do agree with is your point about maturation. There’s plenty of time for him to mature. Everyone at their own pace.
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If you were voting for ROTY right now, who do you have higher? I have Ja Morant. If you want to argue Paschall or PJ Washington, I’d say its close enough I wouldn’t fight too much.
Well for one that’s a different question then saying he’s the 2nd best player. I also realized after the fact that you meant 2nd behind Ja, excluding Zion. Having said that, others I would put above for this season only:
Nunn, Paschall, Washington, Clarke, Morant
I’d expect Zion to jump in there, and a couple others could move up. And that’s not counting the players that are in awful situations now that are playing roles they aren’t ready for for terrible teams.
I respect your opinion, but don’t think we have enough data for uncoachable. Kid has worked with a lot of coaches by now–heck, we have videos of him up at 5 a.m. working with private trainers the summer before he arrived on campus. I think that by the time someone has become that accomplished they have probably worked their butt off, and accepted a lot of criticism/direction. If there were big character red flags I doubt the Warriors would have taken the risk they did. Let’s see if the idea that he struggles to accept coaching really ends up attaching itself to the kid, who really remains very much a kid.
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Pretty amazing that we are a quarter of the way into this new season and this is still the debate that people want to have.
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I don’t hear anybody talking about character-based red flags, and I brought up coachability as something that’s a matter of degree. The ability to learn from coaches is not an either/or.
But I certainly agree that there’s upside here and quite likely it’ll come as part of a maturation process. Saying that is simply a choice to prefer a glass-half-full characterization of the same facts everybody can see.
I get the feeling the Poole debate isn’t going away any time soon, unfortunately. It’ll probably live on beyond the point where anybody really WANTS to participate.
You are certainly doing your part to keep it alive 
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Could be that being an NBA player is really tough.
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