Instant Re-draft 2012

In the months leading up to the draft, teams, fans, and media members spend countless hours pouring over scouting reports, college tape, and pretty much anything else they can get their hands on to evaluate draft prospects. Unfortunately, the honest truth is that until you see a player on the court in a real NBA game, you don't know anything. No player's career is writ in the first weeks of their rookie season, but the instant focus that profession competition at the highest level brings is incredible. With that in mind, I'm going to re-draft the top five picks of the 2012 lottery now, about two weeks into the season.

1. Hornets - Anthony Davis (1). Turns out he's leading the league in PER right now. So yeah, he looks like a #1.

2. Bobcats - Michael Kidd-Gilchrist (2). Not very interesting so far, sorry. MKG has been disruptive on the defensive end and has shown some impressive slashing ability in spurts. The Bobcats have already won  nearly half as many games as they did all last season, so they probably wouldn't change a thing.

3. Wizards -Andre Drummond (9). Here we go! Drummond has played limited minutes on a terrible team, but he looks like a man out there. He would have been absolute ideal fit with John Wall going forward.

4. Cavaliers - Bradley Beal (3). He hasn't looked great so far, but he's very young and his long term prospects as a scorer and floor spacer match up well with Irving.

5. Kings - Damien Lillard (6): I was down on Lillard going into the draft, and I'm pleased to admit that I was dead wrong. He looks fantastic, and would have gone third or fourth in this exercise if the teams picking there didn't already have #1 overall picks at point guard. It looks like the Kings scouting department dropped the ball on this one.

At this point, no other rookies drafted in 2012 have jumped off the page. I'll do the rest of the lottery at the All Star break when I've got more to go on.