The college season is nearing its conclusion and the next event for the best college players' life is the NBA Draft.
NBA teams have been salivating over the skills of Ben Simmons since his last year in high school, and no one seemed to mind that he is not an impressive shooter. Until he needed to carry LSU and he failed.
Although, it looks more like the team failed him, because Simmons was as spectacular as advertised. Hoops Habit described him as "clearly a dominant all-around player with a skill set that looks like LeBron James meets Blake Griffin."
Those are great comparisons, but will he actually bring victories in the pros when he could not do so in college? Simmons is being projected as a player who can turn a franchise around, which may not be fair even for someone as talented as he is.
This draft seems reminiscent of other 2-player drafts like 2007, when the top team Portland needed to choose between Greg Oden and Kevin Durant, while the no.2 team will take who's left. The two teams most likely to make that decision are the Philadelphia 76ers and LA Lakers. Who will the teams pick if they were on the faced with the decision?
The Sixers is the team that has the highest chance to go no.1 based on their current league-worst record and they have already gone back and forth between the two players. Previous speculation said that the team would take the best player available regardless of need, and that would be Simmons.
However, a recent analysis from Kyle Neubeck of Liberty Ballers, SB Nation's Sixers blog, argued that Ingram is a safer choice.
He noted that Simmons is more of a playmaker even though he has power forward size. That is his greatest strength but also his drawback. He needs the ball to be successful, and the defense could take advantage.
"The more you take him out of a playmaker role, you drift further and further from his theoretical ceiling," Newbeck stated. "And yet, if you hand the keys to an offense to a playmaker who teams can simply dare to shoot from the perimeter, you tempt fate."
Ingram, on the other hand is a model "three and D" player-the type of player every team in today's NBA covets.
Ingram is described as "a special talent in his own right, and there is no team he'd walk into tomorrow that couldn't accommodate him." He is better than 41% from three point range and has a 7'3" wingspan that gives him the potential to be a lockdown defender.
The Sixers, despite the picture painted by their team blogger, is still unpredictable at this point. Their roster is far from set and even their best players from the current season, Okafor and Noel, are not assured to return. They are unlikely to draft for need, as that is not even clear at this point.
In the Hoops Habit article, Simmons is described as the "obvious choice" for the Lakers, but Simmons has already ingrained himself in Laker lore and also called out D'Angelo Russell-his high school teammate who is also blossoming of late.
"The team doesn't need a world beater in this year's draft; they just need a wing who's a solid 3-and-D player at the least," HH's Carter Johnson mentioned of the Lakers. Ingram is a sure thing, but Simmons is a gamble, and if he develops his shooting, then he will reach levels that Ingram, and maybe even the Lakers' core of Clarkson, Russell or Randle would never achieve. Will the Lakers roles the dice on him?