names<\/a> out there for the Las Vegas squad, but we obviously won’t know what’s truly in the running before an ownership group wins the bid.<\/p>\nIn the meantime, we can just go with Vegas and explain the thinking behind its draft strategy.<\/p>\n
As mentioned above, to the extent possible, we wanted a little more experience on this team. And assuming Ja Morant would be able to stay healthy (and out of trouble in Las Vegas), this is a group that could at least be competitive from the jump.<\/p>\n
Wendell Carter Jr., Luka Garza and Jock Landale have all shown some shooting upside at various points in their careers, so playing any of them at center would allow this team to run some five-out lineups with Morant slashing down the middle of the floor. Forwards and guards like Royce O’Neale, Nicolas Batum, Baylor Scheierman and Quentin Grimes could be the flanking shooters for those groups.<\/p>\n
And although there is a fair number of veterans here, this draft didn’t completely ignore upside. Twenty-one-year-old GG Jackson has had a number of big scoring games as a multipositional forward. And 21-year-old Cam Whitmore (who’s out for the season but under contract for 2026-27) looked like a potentially dynamic wing during his first two years with the Houston Rockets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Guards: Ja Morant, Quentin Grimes, Craig Porter Jr., Jordan Goodwin, Gary Payton II Forwards: Royce O’Neale, GG Jackson,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-546951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}