OKC Thunder: Goals for Donte Grantham and Richard Solomon to impress in camp
By Noah Schulte
Biggest points of emphasis:
- Feel for the game
- Defense
- Offensive role
Where Solomon will play in 2018-19:
- G-League or Overseas
Of the two players on this list, Solomon seems to me like the least likely to make it with the OKC Thunder organization for a variety of different reasons. The biggest one arguably being that the Thunder don’t really have a spot for a player like him. He’s a freakish athlete for his size and he has just enough feel on both sides to at least stay on the court and not tank a team’s performance, but he doesn’t offer much outside of that.
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With his size, he should be putting on far better defensive performances than he is, but he doesn’t quite have the basketball IQ to actually make that happen. It’s not an uncommon occurrence for him to get lost of the ball and let in easy buckets because he couldn’t recover in time.
Nor is it out of the ordinary for him to go hunting for blocks to an extreme degree and get beaten by simple passing in the paint. He could theoretically improve upon that with a lot more intensive coaching, but the odds he finds that on the OKC Blue are low.
His only saving grace might be his offensive efficiency–though that isn’t necessarily a compliment. For whatever reason, he always seems to be in the right position on that end and gets a lot of buckets around the rim by simply waiting for the ball and dunking on whomever is in front of him. The problem is, that is basically his only true skill on that end.
Solomon has small moments where he can dish the ball out to someone in the open court or put on a nice post move here and there, but he does neither of those with enough consistency that they’re legitimate weapons. If by some surprise, he develops some aspects of his game and become more than a net neutral, he’ll be worth taking a shot on for the Thunder. But if not, I don’t see a reason that they should invest money and a roster spot in him when there are far better options.