A First Look at the 2006 NBA Draft

See, it would have been nice if we just threw up our mock NBA draft. Surely you can't find that sort of thing anywhere else, right? However, now that the 2005-2006 season has come to an end, the 2006-2007 season officially begins.

Sure enough, not even a full 24 hours after Shaquille O'Neal proclaimed Pat Riley the best coach he's ever had and Dwyane Wade has been crowned the next Michael Jordan, the first trade of the new season happens....Toronto receives Spurs C Rasho Nesterovic and cash, and sends F Eric Williams, F Matt Bonner and a 2nd rounder in '09 to the Spurs.

At face value, it looks like your standard stiff-for-stiff trade, with extra parts thrown in to make the money a little closer to matching. However, this trade has huge ramifications for the 2006 NBA draft. Reportedly, Chris Bosh really wants to the Raptors to draft University of Texas F/C LaMarcus Aldridge. The Raptors are supposedly high on Andrea Bargnani, but also appear willing to trade down. The acquisition of Nesterovic would seem to preclude the Raptors drafting a PF/C type. They surely didn't not assume the next 3 years and $23.5M of Nesterovic's contract to nail him to the pine. They're also a little light at forward now, so assuming Bargnani would play SF, (after all, he's being compared to Dirk Nowitzki, a small forward in a center's body) he would still be a good pick.

The best choice for the Raptors (and the route I think they'll most likely take) is trading down a few spots to save the money, and get a player that fits next to Bosh. I also think it clearly shows Aldridge will not be the Raptors' pick no matter where they wind up. If they drop down a few spots, they could still get either Rudy Gay, Adam Morrison, or Brandon Roy, plus either a player or a future pick for whatever team is just dying to draft first.

For the Spurs, this trade is about finding players who might help the team's quest to be more athletic and who are in the last years of their contracts. Both Williams and Bonner are in the last years of their deals, opening up $6 million at the end of the '07 season. This also signals that the Spurs are likely to re-sign C Nazr Mohammed, or possibly deal him in a sign-and-trade. In short, they cleared up cap room in getting rid of a weighty contract that didn't work out as they would have liked. Yet another reason why the Spurs' front office is the best in the NBA...the two biggest mistakes they've made in the last few years have been signing Malik Rose and Rasho Nesterovic to medium-sized deals. When the players didn't pan out, they shipped 'em elsewhere. Even the Spurs' big mistakes aren't really all that big. I ask you...what's a bigger mistake...signing Malik Rose to a $7M/year deal or signing a headcase like Stephon Marbury to a max deal? You can always get rid of a $7M contract for a mildly overpaid role player. You can't always get rid of a max deal shoot-first point guard. Unless you call Isiah Thomas first. It's worth a shot.

This trade puts a huge question mark on the possibilities for the first handful of picks in the draft. In the interests of not stuffing names into a hat and getting nice and drunk before pulling them out and calling it a mock draft, it'd be a lot wiser to just project the top 10 players or so and where they might land...an exercise in futility that I'll attempt soon.