NBA Draft Lottery 2012: Why Landing Top-3 Pick Is Vital for Rebuilding Teams

The 2012 NBA draft is rife with boom-or-bust players, young men who have flashed impressive potential and enormous upside but also come with considerable bust risk.

And that is why for any team hoping to rebuild, the best-case scenario is landing a top-three pick and the right to draft one of three surefire stars to be had in this draft.

Let's identify those players and talk about what makes them so special and so much safer than many of the other players in this draft.

Anthony Davis

To me, Davis is the only player in this draft that has the chance to be a franchise-defining superstar. Yes, he's that good.

Sure, he needs to add some meat to his bones and develop a more polished offensive attack, but he also has the potential to control a game defensively with his shot-blocking and rebounding ability. I mean, he averaged 4.7 blocks per game at Kentucky this past season in his freshman campaign.

That's nuts.

He's also an incredible athlete who has surprising handle for a big man—he was a guard until a crazy growth spurt saw him add seven inches after his junior season in high school—and has shown flashes of very good range with a jump shot, though he'll need to work on that part of his game.

I like to think of his upside as Dwight Howard on the defensive side of the ball and Kevin Garnett on offense. What franchise wouldn't want that?

Thomas Robinson

Robinson is a double-double machine and mature young man who plays with intensity, resiliency and a constant chip on his shoulder. Simply put, he's a winner.

He averaged 17.9 points and 11.8 points for Kansas as a junior, truly coming into his own as a basketball player.

After losing his mother, grandmother and grandfather over the course of a month, Robinson truly dedicated himself to basketball before his junior season and now hopes to gain custody of his nine-year-old sister Jayla once he is in the NBA.

Robinson doesn't enter the game as a kid, he enters as a man with true motivation to succeed and provide for his family. And as he showed in the 2011-12 season, he is as talented as any player in the country and still getting better.

I for one will be rooting for him to succeed, and I don't doubt that he will.

Michael Kidd-Gilchrist

He will never have the pure talent of LeBron James, but Kidd-Gilchrist has his versatility on the wing.

He's an elite athlete with good size that should fill out in his frame. He's an excellent defender, runs the court like a gazelle and is a deadly finisher at the rim. His jump-shot needs work, as does his offensive game in general, but when he wants to he can dominate a game as a scorer.

But he doesn't need to do so. He's an unselfish player and a natural leader on and off the court, and his combination of talent and character makes him an ideal pick for a team in a rebuilding mode.

For teams already possessing a go-to guy—think the Cleveland Cavaliers with Kyrie Irving or the Washington Wizards with John Wall—MKG is the perfect running mate to add.

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