This may come as a surprise to you, but I love basketball. And even back when I hated the NBA, I still watched the NBA draft religiously. Now that the league has improved and we have a local interest, my obsession has only increased.
The sad thing is that as the demand for NBA information has increased, the local media's knowledge has not kept up. With the exception of The Oklahoman's Darnell Mayberry, we get very little informed opinion or speculation about the draft in this market. Most of the talk is centered around guys who played in the Big XII or else made the cover of Sports Illustrated. So, to fix this, I recruited some of Oklahoma City's best internet basketball writers to collaborate on a mock draft.
Since I think Mayberry has my email address blocked, he was not involved, but these guys were:
- Royce Young of DailyThunder.com: Royce is probably the top blogger when it comes to Thunder related information. He has a partnership with ESPN's TrueHoop network, and is one blog I check religiously.
- Max Trueblood of OKCThunderFans.com: When Patrick and I got out of writing exclusively about the Oklahoma City Hornets at HornetsCentral.com, we sold the site and it eventually became OKCThunderFans. On their message boards, the resident expert is Max who has extensive knowledge about all NBA teams.
- Clark Matthews of TheLostOgle.com: Clark writes a weekly, too long, column called "Peace, Love and Thunderstanding" which is read by at least four people. He is easily the smartest, handsomest, and most popular person I know.
Anyway, I wanted to see how informed three ginormous Thunder fans could be when it came to prognosticating the NBA Draft, and the results are as follows: