#BeyWatch: No games, no problem

There are no games to watch for the foreseeable future, but the draftniks don’t sleep and neither do we.

It’s quarantine-week-three and that milestone appears to have inspired our loudest favorite NBA Draft prognosticators to come out of their hibernations to remind us just how ridiculous the #SaddiqStay crowd really was.

All together, NBC Sports’ Rob Dauster, CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish, and 247 Sports’ Sam Marsdale have put out brand new mock drafts since Friday, all of which make Bey a very rich man come Fall 2020 (presuming sports are back up and running by then). Note that while Dauster’s list does not attribute teams to picks, it is a “Mock Draft” so we’re going to extrapolate as such.

Brian Fluharty-USA TODAY Sports

Dauster is the highest of the three analysts this time around on when Bey will hear his name called by Adam Silver, ranking him at 10th overall. He explains this choice by saying, “Bey is the third guy that I would want to be higher than anyone on, because I think that he has a chance to be one of the best players to come out of this 2020 NBA Mock Draft.”

Pretty good! Not so good is that as of now, the tenth pick would land Bey with the Phoenix Suns, which is not exactly the model franchise with which to start a career. At the same time, Mikal Bridges also landed with the Suns (eventually) with the 10th pick, and despite the Suns not having a lot of team success his career has gotten off to a pretty good start. Plus, who knows, maybe Bey represents that last super-role player they need around Devin Booker to start winning some more games.

Parrish is next highest on Bey, plotting him as the 13th pick to the Portland Trailblazers. That’s a little less rookie money, sure, but Portland could represent a near perfect landing spot for a 20 year old wing. Portland has a great track-record of developing young players, there are way worse ways to enter the league than spotting up next to Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, and this is a team that absolutely needs young, relatively cheap, role playing wings.

That leaves Marsdale to bring up the rear, although he still has Bey going in the teens. While he has Bey pinned at 19th to the Milwaukee Bucks, he drops the caveat that readers should not “be surprised if he ends up a lottery pick.”

If Bey does go to the Bucks, I think we can all agree that’s another pretty ideal landing point, and maybe my first pick if I had my choice of all 30 teams. Of course, we’ve seen how Donte DiVincenzo has been given room to develop and thrived next to Giannis Antetokounmpo. Bey is another player who can space the floor and defend multiple positions well (even more so than The Big Ragu), and if given the chance he should mesh in their system just as DiVincenzo has.

Given the coronavirus pandemic, this might represent the last real batch of mock drafts we see for a while, but we’ll keep an eye out if more do pop up.