It’s taking me a little longer than expected to hammer through a monster mailbag and a salary cap primer (blame a pretty vicious week-plus head cold), and so in place of those (for now), we’re going to try to crowdsource an opinion on what the Raptors should do with the No. 9 pick. We’ll talk about the No. 27 pick tomorrow.
I know that the preference of most is to trade the ninth pick, which is totally fair. In all likelihood, if the Raptors are to move the pick, it will happen some time in July or August, for salary cap matching purposes. So for the purposes of this exercise, assume the Raptors are keeping the pick (but obviously feel free to discuss trade scenarios in the comments).
It’s tough to “crowdsource” a straight ranking without everyone doing a mock draft, so this is really going to be more of a discussion with a poll that won’t work. For a player to be considered eligible for the poll, they have to have slid past No. 5 in the latest Draft Express and Chad Ford mock drafts (and I’ll caution everyone again to stick to those two, as they have statistically out-performed all others over the last several years), and they couldn’t last past No. 15 in both. Essentially, “6 to 15” is the range we’ll look at, though it’s cool if you’d prefer to reach for someone outside of that group.
(And yes, at least two of these names, by definition, won’t be there, but a lot can change between now and June 23, so we’re casting a wider net to see who people prefer/are hoping to slide/because it would be boring to look at the candidates ranked ninth only.)
Not eligible (appears in top five): Ben Simmons, Brandon Ingram, Kris Dunn, Marquese Chriss (sigh), Jamal Murray, Dragan Bender
Eligible pool (outside top five, inside top 15): Buddy Hield, Jaylen Brown, Jakob Poeltl, Henry Ellenson, Skal Labissiere, Wade Baldwin IV, Deyonta Davis, Demetrius Jackson, Timothe Luwawu, Dejounte Murray, Furkan Korkmaz
Not eligible (doesn’t appear in top 15): Everyone else
So, assuming all of that eligible pool were to slide to No. 9 (unlikely, but for the purposes of this exercise), who would you want? Explain why in the comments.
And just because, here’s an additional poll with Brown and Hield out, and a few other options outside the top-15 added in.