The 2020 NBA Draft is but one of many challenges the league and teams like the Boston Celtics face in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but Boston may be one of several teams trying out a novel idea to gauge prospects, reports Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Wasserman.
With the resumption of the 2019-20 NBA season finally getting traction for a July 31st restart in Orlando, Florida at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex in Walt Disney World, teams need to prepare their players to be in the best condition possible by the end of July.
At the same time, front offices continue gathering data on players they have interest in selecting for a draft that not only has no concrete date, but may end up being without a combine or even physically-present event due to the restrictions COVID-19 has placed on our lives.
In early April, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski related that the NBA had banned in-person interviews or workouts with potential draft prospects due to the virus, instead limited to a total of four hours of virtual interviews with a prospect.
No guidelines were discussed as to what those interviews were composed of.
But, Wasserman notes that Boston, along with the Charlotte Hornets, Golden State Warriors, Minnesota Timberwolves and Toronto Raptors have been using some sort of “IQ test” which involves “shapes, numbers, memory, [and] matching” over Zoom calls.
To what end or what exactly such an approach entails remains unclear, but this may not be the last we here about unorthodox means of assessing draft prospects filtering out to the NBA media.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, after all.
