Last week’s NBA draft has me thinking about the idea of lost generations. With regard to draft classes, the concept is one brought up only in reference to heights of greatness or valleys of mediocrity and failure. In the aftermath of a draft that has been almost universally denounced as void of true star talent (the fact that “Mo Williams” was a potential comparison for number one pick Kyrie Irving speaks volumes) , one has to wonder about the ethics of labeling totally unproven commodities as failures, and what effect being part of this sort of lost generation has on the individuals contained. It is worth revisiting the 2009 draft, which was widely (and, at this point, certainly wrongly) heralded as a dead draft after Blake Griffin. Out of that emerged a group of talents like James Harden, Brandon Jennings, Stephen Curry, and Tyreke Evans, all of whom, though admittedly flawed, display flashes of the potential for greatness. In other words, that “lost generation” was pretty much like every other NBA draft, perhaps because of the proclamation that they were, in fact, lost to begin with.
By contrast, the 2010 draft class, built on marquee college talents such as John Wall and Evan Turner, looks every bit the wasteland that 2009 was promised to be. Outside of Wall and, if you’re feeling very generous, DeMarcus Cousins and Greg Monroe, the 2010 lottery is an albatross around its participants’ neck. Evan Turner and Derrick Favors look positively lost on a basketball court. Gordon Hayward is two throwaway games from being a forgotten man. Those are the highlights of the 2010 draft (again, after the splendid Wall and the inspired but infuriating Cousins, whose turnovers and shot selection would make players at your local Y blush). Yet there was certainly star power being touted by every media outlet in 2010 around this time, certainly in contrast to the open mockery reserved for the 2009 class (which, again, included the 2010-2011 rookie of the year, Blake Griffin). Tyreke Evans and James Harden are still talked about as if they are question marks instead of proven scorers (though Harden redeemed himself after the departure of Jeff Green), and yet wouldn't any team rather have either one of them instead of the bottom 12 of the 2010 lottery?
Furthermore, can we neatly separate these players from their generation? The most frequent critiques of Evans are his predilection to shoot first and his lack of involvement with his teammates on the court. Aren't these exactly the qualities we would expect, and even desire from a player that everyone had given up on before his career began by virtue of his "lost generation", the ultimate "nobody believes in me but me" story? Contrast this with Derrick Favors or Evan Turner, two players who were the embodiment of "putting the team first" or at least lifting their teammates up to their level in college, and both of whom found themselves completely lost in a league that expected them to live up to the potential of their generation, as if success in college, and not actual physical or skill-based attributes, were the harbinger of success in the NBA (Adam Morrison says hi, everybody who believes the opposite). Yet we still talk about Favors and Turner, who displayed none of Evans's or Harden's or Curry's rookie season potential, as though they can be redeemed (if I hear about Favors's "NBA body" one more time...Kevin Durant couldn't bench press 185 pounds ONCE, case closed). Evans and Harden, on the other hand, have their flashes of brilliance tossed aside as if they were empty calories (Curry, the most "empty calorie" of the three, escapes due to his college success, reinforcing the problem with the way we use both generational and individual college success in predicting and assessing NBA performance).
I suppose I'm touchy about this because I'm living in an economy that tells me that I'M the new lost generation, and that if the 2009 or 2011 draft classes, all of whom are likely better at their jobs now than I will be at my own for at least a decade, have no hope, then things must be really bad for the rest of us. That's the problem with generations, though. They make interesting conversation pieces and utterly useless measures of the individual. For all we know, Tristan Thompson could be the next DeMarcus Cousins, and he'll never be given the same benefit of the doubt Cousins received throughout his turnover riddled rookie year. Brandon Knight is almost certainly capable of putting up numbers similar to John Wall on a team like Detroit, but I can't help but feel like we'll view him as a disappointment regardless of the results, because we've already labeled his generation a disappointment, and there's simply no escaping that cling without superhuman performance; good work simply won't do. Isn't that unfair? Would any of us want to be judged that way, or are we already judged that way and simply in denial about the way the world works? I like the 2011 draft class more because they're such a hopeless lot, not in an antihero way, but in a way that I think makes them sympathetic to just about anybody born in the last 30 years. If they fail, it will have been inevitable, and if they succeed in any reasonable way it will never be appreciated; either way they'll be misunderstood by the old guard and their institutions. What could possibly be more understandable to my generation than that?
