First post (Brandon Paul)

Greetings, strangers.  With the contributions of my associates, this blog is meant to help inform and entertain the general public about NBA basketball, general sports, random rants and need-to-know information from the opinions of those who count.  Think of it like a basketball-themed equivalent of Top Gear or Car Talk; we expect our readers to have no previous knowledge or interest in cars (basketball), but considering it's the only thing on in the hotel and it's three a.m., you're just going to have to read (watch) it.  I hope I didn't lose you already.  Let me drag you back in with a personal anecdote.

We're three old friends, myself:

And my basketball friends.  I like Snyder's Pretzels™, the trebuchet font, long walks on the beach, regular walks on the beach and embarrassing my friends.  Don't worry, that's all there is about me.  I'm moving on to real content in just a second, I promise.

Anyway, my favorite movies are anything with Tom Green, and my favorite band is White Rhino.

I don't know if you guys are going to agree with me, and I don't know if I agree with myself, but I'm going to pick a few sleepers for 2013's NBA draft.  Another thing you should know about us is that we're all Bucks fans; Connor is the pessimistic one; I consider myself the realistic one; and Jon is just happy when basketball is on TV.

The unique position we're in in this digital age allows me to contact the players who I'm going to be blogging about.  Draftexpress.com, if you have not seen it, is by far the best resource ever available for NBA Scouting.  The accounts are highly detailed and numerical, so if you're not a basketball nut like myself you're probably going to get bored trying to make heads or tails of anything.  While I admittedly will probably be getting the majority of my content from there, I'm going to make enough outrageous claims and wild assertions to inevitably haunt me in the near future and fight with my friends about.

In the interest of making outrageous claims, I'm going to call my outrageous claims "Sure Bets."  Though I'm sure you'll all immediately become familiar with my patented "Sure Bets" system, I'm going to break it down for you the first time around.  It goes like this:

No wait, I won't break it down.  I'll just show it to you in practice.  Prepare to be amazed.





Our target, receiving the inaugural "Justin's Sure Bets", is Brandon Paul, a third-year guard from Illinois.  While, admittedly, I never saw this guy play in the regular season (or maybe I did!  But I wasn't paying attention to him specifically), here are some strong points right away that you guys will have difficulty refuting:

1.  He's not related to Chris Paul, but kind of looks like Chris Paul.  That's gotta be....
           

<---- Wait a second, he was in jail already?  That's gotta explain why he's in the second round.

2.  The majority of NBA players have four-syllable names (you can quote me on this, I'll go through and count at some point.  Maybe tomorrow, we'll see), so that doesn't bode well for him either.  He could add his middle name, but considering I couldn't find that online and it could be two or even three syllables, this doesn't bode well for him either, either. (Note to self, at some point do a feature on the history of NBA players with three or more names (ie:  Jose Juan Barea, Juan Carlos Navarro, Chris Douglas-Roberts... ouch, this isn't looking good)


3.
   Looking at his career stats, taken from wikipedia, one can't help but notice that as he progressed in his      academic career, he also received more minutes from coach:

His subpar field-goal percentage could be attributed (not to make any excuses) to the loss of big man Meyers Leonard, and Illinois' subsequent reliance on him to take many more shots than he'd want to be taking (if he's smart, he'd understand taking more shots usually means you're taking WORSE shots.)

4. We can see from this picture of him with Illinois Head Coach Jon Groce that they were close, some                               may say so close that it makes you wonder what they're so close for.  He's not even talking in his ear.

It's always good to be taller than your coach.
Hopefully this carries on to the NBA, or NBDL
(Sorry Pat Ewing)

Why's Groce got his hand back there?  Maybe the problem was Groce, all along.








After-all, check out this guy's athleticism (ignore the charge):

When it comes down to it, let's just say I'm going off of my gut on this one.  These types of guys are a dime a dozen in the NBA; but you can't argue with the fact that there are a lot of them in the NBA.

I picked a particularly boring player to analyze for this inaugural post, believe me, I'm over here doing plenty of research and heavy reading, just not finding anything particularly interesting.  However, considering all of this research HAS made me the foremost expert on Brandon Paul, I'm going to go with my gut and say this kid is going to be good.  Let's wait until the combine next week and find out how right I am, guys.

-Justin