Yesterday brought the release of the Orlando draft camp measurements, showing how tall, long, fat, strong, fast, and springy all the top prospects are. (A sortable database of measurements for every year can be found here.) DraftExpress’ Jonathan Givony provides a nice analysis of this year’s results and a run-down of the history of draft measurements. And at Sports Northwest Magazine, Seth Kolloen uses the measurements to make some good points about race and scouting.

As others have noted before, the measurements can be deceiving: for example, 2007 slam dunk king Andre Iguodala’s vertical jump was only one inch better than J.J. Redick’s and more than six inches worse than Brandon Roy’s. Which leads me to wonder, what’s with this new trend of the top verticals being held by guys who never dunk the ball? In 2006, Brandon Roy’s vertical was measured at 40.5 inches and Jordan Farmar’s at 42 inches. This year, O.J. Mayo hit 40 inches. While they’re certainly athletic, these guys never seem like high-flyers in games. But according to their verticals, they should all be within inches of head-butting the rim at the peak of their jumps.

Photo of Joe Alexander from DraftExpress. Can you picture Brandon Roy doing this?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Roundball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.