Plus, it's unclear that we would have gone after Joe Johnson if we had drafted Paul. Remember, Joe was brought in here under the auspices that he could play point.
No matter how much people here like to play the revisionist history game (and really, why does this happen every time there's a downtime here?), the facts remain: A. Mike Woodson is not Byron Scott; Scott preaches an up and down the court offensive philosophy, he played with the Showtime Lakers and coached Jason Kidd in his prime. He deserves at least some of the credit for Paul's success, and Mike Woodson is simply not the same type of coach, and the same thing goes regarding Deron Williams and Jerry Sloan. B. We didn't have and we probably still wouldn't have a player like David West to compliment Paul. Yeah, Smith would excel in transition, but he does not have the prototypical power forward game that West has. C. We don't have a shooter like Peja or a center like Chandler.
Could we have acquired all of those things in the 3 seasons that followed the 2005 draft? Sure, but it's not nearly likely, especially given our ownership situation. At best we would have drafted Paul (or Deron) and teamed him with Joe in the backcourt, with Smith and Harrington at the forward spots and Childress off the bench. We would have probably picked Shelden later in the lottery the next year, so that's a wash, and we wouldn't have had a draft pick last year. We would have a fun and exciting team with little depth and no post presence and not much shooting ability. Yeah, we would be a solid playoff team in the East, but all these thoughts that we'd on the same track as New Orleans or Utah seem far-fetched to me.