I have yet to meet the Lig die-hard who is not smitten by the muse Potential. She's a dream and an ideologoy all at once. For my own public confession see: Confession.
But Potential is getting old. Plucked and attached from dandy to dandy, gratingly talked about but little discussed, Potential has become a titillating and tortured fascination. I'm not sure that Potential can ever be tamed, but I could use a fresh dose of nuance to help define my muse.
We usually associate Potential with young 7-footers, diaper dunkers, and other assorted adolescents. But what separates the good teams from the great is their GMs' abilities to identify players with Mid-Career Upside (MCU). Tonight's Pistons-Raps game was a perfect example of what I would call the Dumars Doctrine.* From Chauncey to the Body, from Corliss to Mike James, and now to Jarvis Hayes, Dumars has made a second career out of identifying and acquiring players who excelled as veterans.
[Now, to be specific, I wouldn't put Sheed in this group because although he has thrived in Detroit his play has been closer to career rebirth than mid-career development. Some more in this group that could be easily mistaken for having high MCU are the crafty veterans like Horry, Finley, and Cassell. Rip was definitely never an MCU guy; he was traded for Stackhouse. And while Tayshaun and Maxiell were draft day sleepers (soon to add Stuckey and Afflalo to that group,) they bloomed into legitimate gamers by the end of their first two years in the Lig.]
MCU comes in a few different forms. Here's three major MCU classifications I see:
- The Euro: Part of what sometimes gets lost in the
discussion of the euroinvasion is that many Euros (I'm including Argentinians) come into the Lig as veterans. Too often they're associated with 20-year olds who haven't yet played the game at any professional level. Whether drafted or signed, Euros with MCU enter the Lig as the equivalent to a second to fourth year pro.
Some examples: Manu, Jorge Garbajosa, Hermann, and the
12th-man legend Jasikevicius 
- The Lame: Pretty self-explanatory. Drafted high or low, these guys got injured early on and now have potential to become gamers.
Some examples: Emeka Okafor, Shaun Livingston
- The Late Bloomer: Chauncey is the definition of a late bloomer.
Some other examples: Tyson Chandler, Hedo, Andre Miller's
gonna be the next star of this group as soon as he's traded
To be clear, I don't want to get rid of draft-day upsideology. I want to differentiate between some of the guises of Potential. And of course there are misses with mid-career development assessment. The Lakers bet Kwame's MCU was worth Tough Juice. Caught in the maddening gaze of Potential, they were sadly seduced.
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*Although for me, the storyline of the night was how solidly the
Raptors played. While it's been pretty much clarified in the last two
weeks that--barring injury or scandal--the Celts and the Pistons are
gonna meet in the ECF, the Raps demonstrated that they may be the leading contender for making a playoff run in the East and taking key steps toward contending status.
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