Polarizing Reports On Shaedon Sharpe’s Pre-Draft Workouts

A month after the Portland Trail Blazers took Shaedon Sharpe with the seventh pick, scuttlebutt has surfaced surrounding the Canadian’s pre-draft workouts.

Bleacher Report’s Jake Fischer was joined by Sports Illustrated’s draft guru Jeremy Woo on the Please Don’t Aggregate This podcast to discuss how the 19-year-old was being perceived in lead up to the June 23 draft.

Both Fischer and Woo said they had no real idea where Sharpe might have been selected prior to the draft, particularly after the 19-year-old had reportedly underperformed in some workouts. Fischer also mentioned there were some reports suggesting Sharpe had “tanked” some of his pre-draft visits.

Fischer: I’d heard a ton about how Sharpe wasn’t working out very impressively around the league from a lot of teams through the lottery.

A common theme of that feedback was something like along the lines of him appearing disinterested. That last week I remember people suggesting that “Oh, maybe this was by design, maybe he kind of tanked some workouts.” But I’m not reporting that’s what happened.

I’m always hesitant to believe that someone tanked a workout. To me, there’s so much uncertainty in this process. If you’re going down two or three spots on the board you’re sacrificing a couple of million dollars in certain circumstances.

Woo: I think Shaedon’s stock was frankly not quite on steady enough footing for him to have potentially done that. I know he worked out for Portland twice, which I think was significant information.

Fischer: Sometimes you can overvalue certain pieces of information too whereas, for me, I heard in that first workout, I believe it was, that Dalen Terry was kind of the best player in that workout. It was valuable knowing that, learning that piece of knowledge helped me feel stronger about Terry being a top 20 guy.

And that he potentially outplayed Shaedon Sharpe in Portland helped me with that confidence but it threw me off the scent on the Blazers because I had heard from someone with knowledge of the situation, that Portland wasn’t impressed with him in that workout.

You can listen to the podcast here with the Portland discussion starting at the eight-minute mark.