Earlier this month, I had a chance to witness live the battle between two recent first overall picks in the NBA Draft.
Left: Paolo Banchero, Orlando Magic, 1st Overall in 2022
Right: Cade Cunningham, Detroit Pistons, 1st Overall in 2021
The Magic beat the Pistons 123-91.
Banchero scored 24 points, with four defensive rebounds, two assists, and two steals in just over 30 minutes of play. He sat most of the fourth quarter as Orlando played out the blowout victory with their bench.
Detroit fell to 2-20, on a run of losing 19 straight games at the time. Cunningham scored 21 points, with three rebounds, six assists, and a steal. At the end of the night, Cunningham could have simply walked off the court with a decent overall performance.
He didn’t. He stopped, and turned. He stood and watched the laughing Orlando post-game crew run past him, celebrating the victory of the Magic – who improved to 15-7 in their second year with Banchero. Cunningham watched a human being in a furry suit waving a giant neon green flag in the middle of an arena of strangers who were with their children, all celebrating Cunningham’s latest defeat, as he was doing what he does best in his young life. Maybe he was watching referee number seven, who held down the court all night on the baseline next to the Pistons bench, where she was fielding the usual competitive complaints. At the end of the night, Cunningham played his role, and it didn’t matter to the end result. His team lost. He didn’t just walk off the court.
He took in the scene.
Watching Banchero, there are nano-focus moments that don’t show up in the box score or on TV. He’s always in position, but he’s also directing anyone who is out of place. He stands tall on the court, silent and confident as a leader with his movements, but effective with his choices of energy bursts. We watch professional sports as examples of what we all need to do to survive and thrive in this fast-paced world. The stars have it. It’s a thoughtless efficiency. It’s a confidence in what you’re doing, along with a confidence that you’re where you need to be in relation to everyone else being where they are — whether they know their place or not. It’s an endless, day-after-day pursuit of trying to be the best, and trying to help everyone around you to get to their best, when no one in the world truly knows what being the best really means. At the end of the day, you have zero control over anything but your own energy.
Banchero won the matchup against Cunningham and the Pistons, but it wasn’t just him. Franz Wagner, selected eighth overall in that 2021 draft led by Cunningham, scored 27 points with two defensive rebounds and three assists. Goga Bitadze, the center taken 18th overall in the 2019 draft, had four blocks under the basket and was just outright vicious defensively. He scored 13 points with two assists and had eight rebounds — four on each end of the court.
Orlando looks like a growing team. They’re being built properly, in the sense that they’ve added what they need to quickly reverse their position from the bottom of the standings. Detroit, meanwhile, drafted guards with their first round picks in 2020, 2021, and 2022. When I saw them, their number five overall pick in 2022, Jaden Ivey, was sitting for their number seven overall pick in 2020, Killian Harris. They didn’t have a player who matched what Wagner gave the Magic, as a productive, recent first rounder in addition to Banchero. The Pistons definitely didn’t have the same intense presence under the basket defensively as Bitadze, allowing Wagner to focus his size and energy in the offensive zone — pivoting, maneuvering, and forcefully carving up the Pistons on the inside all night.
I feel bad for Cunningham at the end of the night. He was front and center in the NBA draft a year before Banchero. Orlando built a rounded team who could dominate inside and score outside, while Detroit used all of their early picks on the same type of player, pushing their game exclusively to the outside perimeter. Cunningham got his points, but Orlando destroyed Detroit on both ends when there was direct, physical, one-on-one competition.
Banchero and Cunningham both did what made them first overall picks. Orlando won the game as the better built team.
THE LORE OF A FIRST OVERALL PICK
The Pittsburgh Pirates drafted Henry Davis as a catcher with the first overall pick in the 2021 MLB draft.
Major League Baseball’s draft is far, far, far different from the National Basketball Association draft. There might be too few “fars” in that sentence. Both leagues now feature lottery systems for the top of their draft, to dissuade teams from tanking for the best player. The Pirates won the lottery last year, and received another first overall pick in 2023. They drafted RHP Paul Skenes with that pick. An NBA player jumps immediately from the first round to the pros, while Skenes and Davis both require development time in the minors to even reach the big leagues.
Casual fans who shows up to PNC Park in the future will have a better chance of knowing about Davis and Skenes. They will have seen them on TV on draft day, followed by those two featured excessively on every outlet imaginable, and when the time comes, people will show up by the thousands to see them perform, doing what they do best. And there will be expectations of immediate results, due to their draft status. Regardless of baseball, basketball, or any other professional sport, it takes time for a young potential star to reach his upside in the pros. Davis just got his first experience in the big leagues in 2023, and only now does he really know what to start adjusting against. Skenes should get his first experience in 2024, but if you’re expecting top of the rotation stuff in his first few seasons, you’re setting the bar unrealistically high.
That won’t matter to the family that spends hundreds of dollars in tickets, food, parking, and merchandise for a single night inside a potential positive energy environment. The fans who turn to the game for an immediate escape, no matter the reason for watching, will be wanting the payoff for that first overall investment immediately.
The Pirates have built around prospects for a long time, and they’ve yet to show the ability to successfully get most of those players to their upsides. Even when you factor in the time it takes for a baseball player to develop.
What is upside? What is potential? What are we all ultimately evaluated on as human beings, in all aspects of life?
Sports provide us with a live simulation to answer those questions.
We all get 168 hours in a week, no matter the person.
Paul Skenes spent his life in college with a plan of focusing his baseball energy on pitching one night per week — the same night every week. That’s an easy schedule to plan an energy-flow around.
Henry Davis has been used to focusing his baseball energy as a daily process for a long time. Not only that, but historically he’s been a catcher, so his in-game energy also goes toward focusing on every pitch on defense, and helping to keep pitchers in the right mindset.
The development plan for Skenes is simple, yet never easy. In college, he pitched once a week, on weekends. In pro ball, he will pitch every five days, never really knowing in advance when he’ll pitch in front of the energy of a Tuesday crowd, or a weekend fireworks crowd, or an early-season weekend game that doesn’t really have the summer weekend energy because it’s cold and raining. As a pitcher, Skenes brings the energy to the park, and his biggest challenge is structuring his life to the pro schedule in order to channel his productive energy into his next start. He’s got to go from the structured amateur environment, to the revolving schedule of the professional lifestyle that requires you to be your best self every single time you step on the playing field — which almost requires living outside of time. Skenes will also need to work on cleaning up his fastball command a bit, but that’s secondary to getting comfortable with the schedule.
Davis, meanwhile, is a player who you could show up to see every single night the Pirates are at PNC Park. He’s a guy who could impact the game with his energy each and every time you buy a ticket. That’s a lot of pressure for a young player, especially in baseball, where defense is usually assumed and home runs are usually desired.
I think when it comes to baseball prospects, we love the lore.
Davis crushing home runs from the wings of the field is exciting, but there’s a certain draw for humans who stand in the middle of the stage and perform amidst the madness surrounding them. We subconsciously know the mental impact of defense, even if we don’t always value the positive result properly.
The challenge in the game of baseball for a hitter is that it’s two separate games. To have overall success, a hitter needs to strike a balance between those games in order to hit. Those games often aren’t aligned, which makes the decision to bring a player to the majors a multifaceted one. Driving his overall value, Davis has an advanced bat, which could be ready to crush MLB home runs in 2024, while also reaching base at a sustainable rate to stay in the majors. That statement isn’t going to be true for Davis at every position on the field.
If Davis is catching, there is an amount of mental energy he uses in every game, which depletes from the available focus he has on offense. If he’s the designated hitter, he only has to focus on offense. Every position in between requires a sacrifice of offensive focus for defensive energy.
Every question surrounding Davis is whether he will catch. When the Pirates were rebuilding, they spent a lot of their rebuild capital on catchers. The Joe Musgrove trade brought back Endy Rodriguez. They traded for Carter Bins and Abrahan Gutierrez that summer. And there was Davis, drafted first overall as a catcher.
To his credit, Rodriguez ascended faster than Davis, and probably faster than most expected. Rodriguez sacrificed his offense in the majors in 2023 for the mental focus needed behind the plate. His defensive value as a rookie was valuable, even if fans showing up in the stands don’t fully appreciate that aspect of the game. Unfortunately, Rodriguez went down for the 2024 season with a UCL injury, which does open playing time behind the plate.
Skenes will open the 2024 season in the minors. Davis will be in the majors, and now has a better opportunity to work into the catching position.
From this point forward, the Pirates have Davis under control through at least the 2029 season. If you go to a game in 2024 and Henry Davis sends you home on The “T”, discussing that deciding home run he hit, it’s going to make you want to return for more games in 2024. The more Davis does that, the more you return in 2025-2029.
The more time Davis spends working on improving his catching, the less energy he will have to focus on his hitting. His offense has yet to adjust to MLB pitching, though he has shown the ability to hit for power. If he’s a full-time catcher, that offensive improvement would be difficult. On the flip side, if he only focuses on hitting, he will eventually need to learn to split his focus between offense and defense.
WINNING IN 2024 VS WINNING WITH DAVIS AND SKENES
The Pirates have two goals, and they’re not exactly on the same timeline.
First, they’re trying to win in 2024, improving upon their 76-win total last year. If they win in 2024, that team will include Davis from the start, and should include Skenes by the end of the year. It’s a great narrative that the team would be winning for the first time in years with two former first overall picks. The reality is that they’d be winning with those picks, not because of those picks.
Davis and Skenes have the chance to lead this Pirates organization to victory in future years. They don’t need Davis to be a power hitting, regular catcher in 2024. It would be nice if he developed into an option that could allow the team to depart in the future from the Austin Hedges and Ali Sanchez defensive-first starters. Likewise, the development of Skenes this year isn’t to get a top of the rotation arm for the second half of 2024, but to eventually get to a point where the Pirates won’t have to trade away prospects to have that possibility.
The challenge for the Pirates this year is they’ll have to find a way to win without relying on Davis and Skenes. That requires a well-rounded team, and fortunately it looks like the Pirates have the makings of that, without being finished this offseason. The other part of that challenge is they’ll have to find a way to win with Davis and Skenes in future seasons.
Achieving this short-term/long-term challenge will require that the Pirates balance the long-term development needs of Davis and Skenes with the short-term goals of crossing the winning threshold. That means the Pirates should take the opportunity to use Davis behind the plate more often in 2024, but they shouldn’t look to him as a starter until future years. They should look to develop Skenes into the majors in 2024, but they shouldn’t look to him as an important depth piece for this season.
Allowing Davis and Skenes to ease into the majors on well-rounded teams will only increase the chances of the Pirates having a Magic-like turnaround with Davis and Skenes in the future. That’s better than being MLB’s version of the Pistons, who have extended their losing streak to 24 games, riding their recent high draft picks on their way to another high draft pick.
