Great read on Myles Turner

[Eddie20]

http://basketball.realgm.com/analysis/236934/How-Picking-The-Wrong-Coach-Hurts-Draft-Stock

The meat and potatoes of the article...

Before they started their college careers, Jahlil Okafor, Karl-Anthony Towns and Myles Turner were widely seen as the three best freshmen big men in the country. All three were near 7’0 and all three were blessed with a rare combination of size, skill and athletic ability. In the week of practices leading up to the McDonald’s All-American Game, the 1-on-1 showdowns between the future NBA big men were the talk of the camp. But while Okafor (Duke) and Towns (Kentucky) went to two of the marquee programs in the country, Turner wound up staying close to home and playing for an embattled coach at Texas.

Myles Turner was in the wrong place at the wrong time, an unwitting victim of the slow-motion collapse of Rick Barnes program, one that has been years in the making. For as much success as the Longhorns have had in Barnes' 18-year tenure in Austin, he has had trouble adjusting to the modern game and the growing importance of spread offenses, which you can see in his far more talented team losing two games to Fred Hoiberg’s Iowa State program this season.

Barnes philosophy has always been to recruit as many elite athletes as possible, yell at them within an inch of their lives to get them to play high-level defense and then score going from defense to offense. Spacing the floor and running crisp offensive sets has never been a huge part of his identity as a coach. But while he has one of the biggest and most athletic teams in the country this season, their inability to generate consistent offense in the half-court has been their downfall in conference season, when opposing coaches intimately know all of your strengths and weaknesses.

The amazing thing isn’t that he has been relatively unproductive for such a highly-touted big man but that he has managed to do anything at all at Texas. Unlike Towns and Okafor, Turner almost never gets the space to go 1-on-1 on smaller players on the block. He has been forced to play all the way out to the three-point line to get any shots at all and while his range shows potential (16-56 for the season) it’s not something you necessarily want your 7’0 freshman All-American to be doing.

In an ideal world, Turner would be the only big man on the floor, in a role similar to Jameel McKay at Iowa State. Turner is an stupendously large 18-year old who can anchor a defense, score out of the post and stretch the floor. A coach running a program with a coherent offensive identity would have been able to get more out of Turner than what Barnes has done this season. It’s hard to say what he would have done in Towns and Okafor’s shoes, but an 18-year old LeBron James might not have been able to fix what is ailing the Longhorns. Barring an unlikely run in the NCAA Tournament, it’s looking increasingly that Barnes will be fired at the season.

So what does this mean for Turner? According to the latest mock drafts, he is a fringe lottery prospect, a steep fall from the Top 5 selection he looked like he would be after facing off with Okafor and Towns in Chicago. He’s still a young player with a lot of holes in his game, but it’s important to remember that someone playing for Rick Barnes is going to put up far worse numbers than someone playing for John Calipari or Coach K. The latter two are future Hall of Famers. Barnes is not.

If you were to draw up a situation where you wanted to bury a young big man and depress his statistics, you couldn’t do much worse than what Barnes has done to Turner in his one season in Austin. It’s not the end of the world, as Barnes would literally have to put Turner in a wheelchair to seriously jeopardize his financial future. The point is that a savvy NBA team at the end of the lottery may be able to squeeze a lot of value out of their pick because of the incompetence of Myles Turner’s college coach.

[jonaslopes]

Great read indeed!

We began discussing it here: http://forums.celticsblog.com/index.php?topic=76713.30

I wrote (just to bring the discussion):

I'm still a little afraid of Turner and his body. But at the same time I think he is going to be very good in a few years. His ceiling is higher than WCS's IMO.

[konkmv]

I would like to get stein with a 7 pick.. but if turner falls out of 10 pick i would try to get him too