I guess ADD doesn't keep you from jumping very, very high.

I don’t know about you, but where I come from almost everyone in my school was diagnosed with ADD. I’m not even exaggerating either. You don’t like school? Bam, you’ve got ADD. You have trouble focusing on homework when basketball games are on TV? Here, take some Ritalin, you’ve got problems. You doze off in class because your teacher is more boring than watching figure skating? Well you must have ADD too!

So I find it odd that Hassan Whiteside’s agent said his recent diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder was one of the reasons he fell in the draft. (NBA Fanhouse)

In what may have been the most surprising slide of the NBA Draft, Whiteside was shockingly there for Sacramento’s taking at No. 33 for a number of reasons.

He is a raw talent, albeit a potentially dynamic one. He played in Conference USA, although he dominated the lower-level competition and was named the conference’s top freshman and Defensive Player of the Year after leading the NCAA in blocked shots.

Yet his agent, Andre Buck, confirmed what a league scout told FanHouse, that questions about the 21-year-old’s maturity and his struggles with Attention Deficit Disorder appear to have scared some teams into passing on him.

Buck said Whiteside’s ADD was diagnosed during his one season at Marshall, where he began to take medication to help with his focus but stopped doing so midway through the season.

“He’s going to have to figure out how he’s going to address it, whether it’s medication that’s prescribed that helps him be better and that he’ll probably take to get better,” Buck said by phone. “At Marshall … he was on medication he didn’t like and didn’t think was good for him. He stopped taking it.

“If he takes it and he’s better, people are going to be mad they didn’t take him earlier (in the draft). If he uses this as fuel, he could be really good, and teams will be sorry they didn’t take him.”

Am I the only one who finds this story a little hard to believe? I mean, ADD isn’t too debilitating, right? Sure, it keeps you from focusing a little bit but I’m pretty sure half the people I know had it. And, out of the hundreds of people I know who have ADD, I don’t think it hurt anyone else’s draft stock.