What if you could go back in time and just change things? What if you could go back and correct some mistakes your favorite team made and change the future? Well, that is what Bleacher Report did with the 2004 NBA Draft as they did a full re-draft.
If you remember correctly, the Philadelphia 76ers selected an Arizona athlete by the name of Andre Iguodala with the ninth overall pick. For the Sixers, this was not exactly a mistake as he turned out to be one of the more versatile players in the draft and he made his mark on Sixers history. However, with the re-draft, Iguodala was selected second overall by the Charlotte Bobcats so that means he is off the board for Philadelphia.
So, the Sixers would move on to select Kevin Martin out of Western Carolina. B/R:
The Sixers are getting a player in Kevin Martin who could hardly be more different from Andre Iguodala, the Swiss army knife they grabbed here in real life.
Martin was a pure scorer who did little else. He was deadly from deep and gifted with foul-drawing craft that toed the line between savvy and infuriating.
Despite “out in front” chest-pass shooting form that included a gather from his left hip, Martin could stripe it from deep. He hit 38.4 percent of his threes over a dozen seasons, and his career 87.0 percent mark from the foul line demonstrates aesthetics don’t matter when the ball goes in.
He’s the top per-game scorer in this class, sitting at 17.4 points per contest, and Martin also leads all 2004 picks with five seasons scoring at least 20 points per game.
Nobody picked in 2004 has a 50-point game but Martin, who went off against the Warriors on April 1, 2009. His pair of 48-point outings give him three of the four highest-scoring individual games recorded by his class.
He didn’t defend, rebound or pass, but Martin is this draft’s best high-volume, high-efficiency scorer by a hefty margin.
The Sixers were coming off a disappointing 2003-04 season that included a lot of drama between Allen Iverson and the two coaches of that team, Randy Ayers and Chris Ford. So, they went with Iguodala in this draft and he made a big impact helping the Sixers get back to the playoffs, but Martin’s high-level scoring would have been a great fit next to Iverson for years to come.
Martin was selected 26th overall by the Sacramento Kings in the actual draft back in 2004 and he went to average 17.4 points in his career topping out at a season average of 24.6 points in 2008-09. He played for the Kings, the Houston Rockets, the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the San Antonio Spurs before retiring in 2016. [lawrence-related id=29221,29204,29207]