When Andre Drummond, once thought to be in contention for the No. 1 overall pick in the 2012 NBA Draft, slowly saw his stock tumble during his lone season at UCONN, it was chalked up to inconsistency on the court, what appeared to be an inconsistent effort, and a physically gifted player that just wasn’t NBA-ready from a basketball perspective.
So when the teams near the top of the Lottery all passed on him on Draft night, I don’t think too many people were surprised, and I only remember a select few Raptors fans saying that Toronto should have drafted the big man on “potential” alone.
Fast forward a few months, Drummond puts up 12 points and seven rebounds against the Raptors in his pre-season debut, and suddenly paranoid fans are lighting up twitter about the latest “one who got away.” Then he goes for 19 and 10 against the Bucks in his third pre-season game, and fan reaction would have you believe that the Raptors passed on the next Dwight Howard.
They didn’t, by the way, but my still not being sold on Drummond really has nothing to do with this post. Heck, for the purpose of this blog post, we can assume that he’s got the potential to be a healthier, stronger, and more dominant version of Andrew Bynum (still not Dwight Howard though), and it still won’t change the fact that drafting Drummond for the reason some reactionary fans now wish he would have been drafted, would have been unreasonable.
That’s because no matter how high Drummond’s ceiling may be, he was never going to touch that ceiling in Toronto, at least not with Jonas Valanciunas around.
