For example, If Kawhi Leonard had been drafted by a franchise like the Kings or the JaVale McGee era Wizards, I'd be shocked if he were anything but an athletic body at the SG/SF/PF spots. It was ending up on a vet team with the coaching infrastructure in place that allowed him to reach his ceiling.
I keep hearing this Kawhi example, and I don't get it. Kawhi was a great prospect who slipped to the Spurs because the Spurs are smarter than everyone else. For example, James Brocato, now runs the Mavericks analytics group,
had Kawhi ranked 2nd in that draft (also had Jimmy Butler ranked 7th fwiw).
We'll never know, but even bad organizations develop good players; they just rarely have good players in the first place. Kawhi is known to be a hard worker, and nobody thinks he's a knucklehead, so the idea that he was doomed to be just an athletic body strikes me as very strange.
I'm not saying talent development differentials doesn't exist between teams, but a lot of these examples of "so and so could only have succeeded in this one situation" seem like cases of just underrating prospects to me. In a lot of these cases, external measures confirm that the player was always a good prospect (two more examples would be Draymond and Crowder, who Brocato had as lottery picks at the time).