With the 2016 NBA Draft a few days away, we breakdown and rank the top 10 point guard prospects
Every year, the position of point guard becomes harder and harder to define. Conventional wisdom says that a point guard should be the floor general, dictating and directing the offense, distributing and facilitating as the flow of the game deems it necessary. Guys like Jason Kidd and Steve Nash are two of the standard bearers for this traditional view.
The modern NBA, however, has started to divert from this line of thinking over the last decade or so. Up-tempo, constantly-attacking sets started to ask the point guard to be every bit as potent of scorers as they are facilitators. The thrones of John Stockton and Magic Johnson were hijacked by the likes of Russell Westbrook and Stephen Curry.
The line between point guard and shooting guard has become blurry, making the position harder than ever to define.
Nonetheless, I find myself embarking upon the unenviable journey of attempting to sort through the 2016 draft class of point guards and ranking the top 10 prospects. I tried, to the best of my ability, to avoid any sort of pre-conceived bias and avoid other pundits’/draft sites’ composite rankings. The following rankings are based purely upon my own view of each individual player’s game tape.
I used no hard-fast criteria for what made one player better than another. As stated above, each point guard is going to approach the game in their own unique way, so I tried to just evaluate how well each player’s respective skill set would translate to the NBA as a whole.
One thing I did account for, however, was upside. Obviously some players are going to be major projects but if I see star potential, I did account for that.
So, with all of that said, let’s get into it with this draft’s top 10 point guard prospects.
Next: No. 10