2009 StR Community Draft Board: Pick #10

But it’s hard to read between the fluff lines and find something valuable to take away. All the good things that we hear about Hill in this story are anecdotal, redundant, or somewhat irrelevant. He upped his numbers, but that’s to be expected given that Bayless left a huge scoring void when he jumped to the NBA last season. He’s a good rebounder, but we already know that, and in the tourney game against UofL (again, this is a limited sample size, I admit), a game he should have been up for and ready to compete in, he was a nonfactor, getting outhustled and outplayed by Earl Clark and Terrence Williams, two guys who are ranked lower than him in the current draft class.

Again, none of this is to say he isn’t a good player, but I don’t think that he’s a top 10 guy. In my opinion he just doesn’t have enough proven ability to produce with efficiency and persevere under adversity.

I digress, but humor me as I use Hill as a foil to make the case for DeJuan Blair. You pick Blair over Hill and, you get someone with more attitude, an intense character guy, also a rebounding machine with a developing offensive game, but with better numbers than Hill had at the same age, with experience playing in the most defensively challenging conference in the college game (especially for big men). He had to face up to Thabeet/Adrian twice, Earl Clark, Greg Monroe, and Harangody, saving his best stuff for Thabeet and ’Gody (23/22, 22/23 respectively) while Hill was facing Aboya, Brockman and Pendergraph in the Pac-10; not shabby, but not the same level of competition.

I think, overall, that Hill is one of those guys, similar to Earl Clark, who looks great on paper and in workouts but loses something in game situations. A guy like Blair won’t ever be a star, but you know what you’re getting with him, and the rest of the team around him will be better for it.

and you should be able to read it. It was very tough to read without the correction… sure was