At his peak, JDLR will likely be the league's premier scorer and perimeter defender. He has solid athleticism for a 6'5" guy. The closest projection off the top of my head (for obvious reasons) is a McCollum in scoring and athleticism but that can defend WAY better. And rebound. And handle and pass well. Okay, maybe that comparison was a little forced.
So why do I think this future superstar is so interesting? Julio De La Rosa may be the rawest talent to ever enter this league, if we define raw as being far from one's potential. Just eyeballing his potential bars on TeamViewer, his potential attribute scores look about like this.
That looks pretty good. Really good, considering he is a shooting guard. The sum of those attributes is a respectable 1069. His current attribute sum after two training camps is 706. For all of you keeping score at home, that is a little concerning. Even if he averaged 50 points gained per training camp, which he won't (he put up 45 last year), he would reach 1000 in 6 years, at the age of 27. A score of 1000 at that age isn't all that impressive, considering the expectations for this guy.
I think the bigger issue is that he is 60 points away from his potential in all of the shooting attributes. That means to achieve the impossible feat we're discussing, he'd have to increase in every scoring attribute by 10 points a year (He did 5,4,4 last TC). That really isn't going to happen. If he averages 5 points per TC in these scoring attributes through age 30, he will max out at 89, which is great, except that he is purple potential so he's supposed to be better than that and you'd only get it for one year. Here is what a more realistic progress looks like.
He hits the RFA market at about 840, that's not terrible. To put it in perspective, that is about 20 points lower than Lavar Ball. He hits UFA at about 975. That is about CJ McCollum status. The issue that I see is, again, the scoring attributes. He doesn't really even look like a potential elite scorer until age 27 and that is being optimistic. The good news is that he should be a good defender at that point.
The final problem with JLDR is actually his purple potential. As Scott reminded me, he can't be trained. So my takeaway from the exercise is this: without being able to spend on paid player training, JLDR might never reach his potential and will only be elite for a couple of years, max. In other words, it would be nice if Conroy could spend 15 to 20 points a year to turbo charge this guy's offensive attribute growth.
