Another Monday morning is upon us. Since I know you'd rather read Wolves-related news that you may have missed over the weekend than go to a staff meeting, I'm happy to facilitate. As you may know, I'm a bit obsessed with the mock drafts lately. While I've officially switched camps to the "Hold the Pick, Draft Mayo" camp, I'm also in the "Acquire more 1st rounders with our 2nds and McCants" camp. Thus, the depth of this draft and the variance in mocks around the web delight me.
Updated mock drafts came out for DraftExpress and InsideHoops. RealGM, CollegeHoops and HoopsWorld were all added. You can view aggregated mocks right here at Hoopus.
DraftExpress swapped Rose to #1 with Beasley at #2, resorted #17-#20 (now going Green, Batum, Budinger McGee) and shook up the 2nd round (Omer Asik, Malik Hairston and Gary Forbes all made big jumps). No doubt all in reaction to how things are going down in Orlando.
InsideHoops went the opposite direction of DX and swapped Beasley to #1 with Rose. Also in the update:
- Lopez 3 > 5
- Mayo 7 > 3
- Gordon 5 > 7
- Westbrook 11 > 9
- Jordan 9 > 10
- Randolph 10 > 12
- Alexander 9 > 14
- Augustin 13 > 11
- Arthur 14 > 13
- Green 16 > 17
- McGee 20 > 15
- Hibbert 14 > 21
- Batum 17 > 22
- Speights 18 > 16,
- Koufos 21 > 18
- R. Lopez 23 > 20
- Budinger 22 > 23
- Jawai 27 > 28
- Lawson 28 > 27.
Phew.... you can take a look at the rest of the changes yourself I suppose.
But what about the Wolves? What do the Internet's prognostications leave us with? Sitting at #3, #31 and #34, here are the players people are looking at (number of mock drafts putting each player at #3 in parentheses):
#3: Brook Lopez (7), OJ Mayo (4), Michael Beasley, Eric Gordon
#31: JJ Hickson (2), DJ White, Jason Thompson, Kyle Weaver
#34: Mario Chalmers, Omer Asik, Shan Foster, JJ Hickson
These 2nd round listings wouldn't be complete without noting that the following players who ranked in some 1st round mock drafts fell in others, potentially making them available at #31 or #34.
UPDATE: Apologies for not catching the cut-off part of this post. Here's the list of guys that made it into some of the 1st round mocks, but dropped out of others more than once: Marreese Speights, Ty Lawson, Jason Thompson, Courtney Lee, JJ Hickson, Mario Chalmers, Alexis Ajinca, Wayne Ellington, Bill Walker, Nathan Jawai, Davon Jefferson, Serge Ibaka, Richard Hendrix, DeVon Hardin, Ryan Anderson, DJ White, Ante Tomic, Trent Plaisted, Nikola Pekovic, Joey Dorsey, Omer Asik, JR Giddens, Omri Casspi
Also, Chad Ford updated his mock and I've included that in the spreadsheet.