Larry Drew

Larry Drew II - The Heat continue their interest in Drew, who joined them for both summer league and training camp last season. He spent his first professional season in the D-League, where he was given the keys to the Sioux Falls Skyforce offense (or at least was when DeAndre Liggins let him) and returned averages of 11.0 points and 6.7 assists in 34 minutes a game, alongside only 2.5 turnovers. Drew is certainly willing to pass, and can pass, and wants to pass. But he's small, no threat in the paint, and his defense is fairly unthreatening. What Drew has does is consolidate the uptick in his three point stroke he demonstrated at UCLA, hitting 38.8% of them on a reasonable number of attempts with the Skyforce. This has to continue to be the case, as he cannot collapse a defense well if he's obviously not going to score.

Larry Drew II

Drew can handle the ball and is a very willing passer. But he is small, very small, too slender to get into the lane without being knocked about (thereby making it very difficult to penetrate and kick/drop off), and certainly too slender to prevent anyone doing the same to him. Moreover, he can neither consistently create nor make any kind of shot. He is not an NBA calibre player. And yes this was all once said about Ish Smith once.

Rare does a team improve so much within the course of one season. Underrated at the beginning of the year, North Carolina proved to be a pretty good team, and then exploded when Roy Williams finally saw fit to bench the underwhelming Larry Drew in favour of greatly superior freshman, Kendall Marsall. Drew wasn't helping the team; he couldn't create his own shot, shoot, impede anybody defensively due to his lack of size, and made a huge number of mistakes with the ball for an upperclassman point guard. It's a shame that he decided to get his dad to tell Williams that he was transferring, rather than sticking around to backup Marshall. But it doesn't really hurt the team.

Despite being young, and after missing the tournament last season (breaking a jillion panellist hearts in the process), UNC quickly proved their talent. They are deep, athletic and talent, with perimeter play, guard play and wing play. Once they made the long overdue swap of Marshall and Drew, they joined the nation's elite teams. This is not so much a character assassination of Larry Drew as much as it is a love letter to Kendall Marshall.