Sports Today: Luke Kennard looks like good fit for Detroit Pistons in NBA draft

RELATED: Who is Luke Kennard?

Detroit is one year removed from making the playoffs (albeit a brief postseason appearance that ended with a sweep by the Cavaliers). The Pistons finished 10th in the terrible Eastern Conference last season, three games behind eighth-seeded Chicago.

Under the leadership of proven winner Stan Van Gundy, they were eighth in the league in defensive rating but 24th in offense.

Kinda makes taking a tall, talented shooter make a lot of sense, eh?

So this looks like about as positive of a position a player taken in the lottery can hope to be.

The Pistons can really use what Kennard brings to the table, but they don’t necessarily have to lean too heavily on him right away.

They won’t be contending for a championship in the immediate future, but there is a lot of upward mobility possible in the terrible East…

Nobody from Dayton or Ohio State was drafted, which did not come as a surprise.

Former Flyer Charles Cooke signed with the Minnesota Timberwolves, who pulled off the biggest move of last night when they traded for Chicago Bulls star Jimmy Butler.

READ MORE: T-Wolves pick up UD senior

The T-Wolves are coming off a disappointing season but are still an intriguing team full of young stars, including former Kentucky standout Karl-Anthony Towns and Kansas standout Andrew Wiggins.

It’s too bad they are in the Western Conference or this move might be even more intriguing…

RELATED: Who are the 5 best Dayton-born NBA players of all time?

I didn’t watch much of the draft because I don’t have a favorite team and it’s hard to get excited about guys we know so little about from their brief time in college (not to mention the completely, um, foreign identities of the players drafted from overseas).

The large number of freshmen who were drafted based almost entirely on potential rather than production furthers the point I made yesterday: The NBA would be better off dropping its current system in favor of something more like the NHL's.

Right now bad teams are getting the rights to draft high-potential prospects but having trouble turning them into actual players, probably in no small part because they are bad teams and the prospects don’t know how to play.

Last year only five first-round picks had a positive Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) according to Basketball-Reference.com.

Buddy Hield of Oklahoma was the only rookie first-round pick to average double figures in scoring. By the way, he spent four years in college.

So did Virginia’s Malcolm Brogdan — the only other player drafted last year to average double figures in scoring.

Both of them averaged just over 10 points per game.

Even with top pick Ben Simmons out all season with an injury, this seems pretty poor. And this year the new class will be younger than the last.

An early mock draft for 2018 includes 12 freshmen as well as Vincent Edwards, a Middletown High School grad who will be a senior at Purdue this fall.

Meanwhile, the NHL draft begins tonight in Chicago. 

Hockey prospects from North America can be drafted at the age of 18 and go straight to the NHL.

Nine players drafted last year saw time in the NHL, including five who played 28 games or more.

The top two picks, Auston Matthews of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Patrik Laine of the Winnipeg Jets, scored more than 60 points, including a combined 76 goals.

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They were ready for the NHL and proved as much, but prospects not ready for the top level of competition can also go to the minors or juniors or college, and teams don’t relinquish their rights if they do any of these things.

There’s far more flexibility for both team and player to make a move when the time.

Doesn’t that seem better for everybody?...

At any rate, the Columbus Blue Jackets are not scheduled to pick in the first round after trading away their pick, but there is at least one prospects with local ties who could hear his name called this weekend.

Carson Meyer, a forward from Miami University, is ranked No. 151 among North American skaters on NHL.com.

The 19-year-old central Ohio native had 26 points in 32 games for the RedHawks last season.