Derrick Rose got picked first in the NBA draft, and while he's certainly good, Michael Beasley is a clearly superior player. It shows up best in the shooting numbers. Beasley shot 37.9% from three-point range, while Rose shot 33.7%. For a forward whose weak teammates make him the primary focus of opposing defenses to shoot a better percentage than a guard on the second-best team in America -- well, that's like being John Edwards and helping Barack Obama more in Missouri VP polls than home-state Senator Claire McCaskill does. (Beasley had a better FT% and FG% as well, and Edwards overcame better-known opponents in the Missouri polls than McCaskill did.) I've heard that rebounding numbers are the statistic that best translates from NCAA to NBA performance. Beasley led the NCAA with 12.5 rebounds per game.
Beasley wasn't the first pick largely because of worries about whether he'd get into trouble off the field. In his younger days, he kept making trouble at different high schools and having to leave. But as far as I know, it wasn't the violent kind of trouble. One day Beasley was sent to the principal's office for signing objects with a permanent marker. After a stern lecture on how that behavior was unacceptable, Beasley signed the principal's pickup truck and got kicked out of school.
Clearly, you can't go around doing things like that. But I find his merry prankishness sort of endearing, and as long as he doesn't actually do anything really harmful, I can see myself rooting for him in the future.
