The Jazz held their last workouts of the predraft portion of our lives, for this year. That said, the Jazz have been known to fly in a guy under the radar (and beyond the scrutiny of the media) for a hush hush interview after all the official workouts are over and before the night of the draft. I don’t know if any such plans are in the works (I’m not a Jazz insider or anything, no matter how many fruit baskets I send to the team owner). Of course, the Jazz worked out a ton of guys the same weekend I’m out of town, so this stuff is late. Who were these guys? Well, on Sunday, June 19th the Jazz got a look at Texas’ Jordan Hamilton, Tennessee’s Tobias Harris, UCLA’s Tyler Honeycutt, Kansas’ Marcus Morris, Florida State’s Chris Singleton, and inexplicitly, got another look at UIC’s Paul Carter. (Did he just, like hang out in SLC for a week? We saw him on the 15th ) On Monday, June 20th, the Jazz brass got a chance to work through Colorado’s Alec Burks, Washington State’s Klay Thompson, Mississippi’s Zach Graham, Boston University’s John Holland, Arkansas’ Delvon Johnson, and St. Louis’ Willie Reed. That’s a dirty dozen of guys – and it could have been more had two guys scheduled for workouts actually showed up: San Diego State’s Kawhi Leonard and Providence’s Marshon Brooks. Both guys appear to be not interested in the Jazz, or perhaps the Jazz have not shown serious interest in them. I don’t know. Not only am I not a team insider, I’m also not a college basketball, or player agent insider at all. (Seriously Amar, what have you been up to?)
The Majority of these dude may end up being late lotto picks, almost all of them have sniffed the first round in mock drafts. Some guys, though, are here to shore up our NBA D-League team the Utah Flash OOooooh noooooo! we don’t even have a D-League team anymore. Seriously Utah, what the heck is going on?
As always, stats and more after the break….
Chicago Camp Measurements
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Some guys didn’t go to this. Some other guys didn’t do all the drills. A bunch of them didn’t even bother shooting the ball when they were there. Clearly none of these guys are going to be a Top 5 pick risk. Out of all of these guys I’m really interested in Tyler Honeycutt. He’s really fast and looks like a serious athlete. This is something he did work on; however, he’s clearly not a freak of nature. Those would be no-shows Kawhi Leonard and Marshon Brooks who both are under 6’8 yet have wingspans of 7’3 and 7’1 respectively. Chris Singleton also has a 7’1 wingspan and is a pretty awesome athlete as well. Singleton shot okay at the combine (better than "shooter" Klay Thompson) and apparently knows how to play defense. I’m warming up to him.
Marcus Morris really shot himself in the foot on the shooting drills, by the way. (He was trying not to compete with his bro, so he elected to shoot with the guards, and displayed his lack of range from deep)
Traditional Statistics
Again, these are cumulative stats for all the games they played – the guys who played more games got more seasoning, but the guys who seem to be one and done types have greater ‘upside’; whatever that means . . .
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Burks looks like a bigtime scorer, and what is increasingly rare out of the guys who brought in, can actually make his free throws at an 80+% rate. (Only 5 of the 30 odd guys did) He’s not really a three point threat right now, but not everyone is Jimmer, okay. Klay’s college numbers look way better than his poor one-day shooting at the combine as well. A number of the ‘no name guys’ (specifically Delvon Johnson and Willie Reed) are shot blockers. They are short, but they both sent shots back during their college careers. Tyler Honeycutt actually blocked a number of shots as well, which I was unaware of. The same could be said for Tobias Harris and Chris Singleton as well. Usually I’d care more about it, but as we saw the Jazz were pretty big in blocks last season – and this doesn’t seem like an immediate concern that can be filled by a 12th the pick in the draft wing player.
My Take:
Over all I think that with the 12th pick going for a guy with the potential to be an all-around guy is tempting, but invariably been a historically under-successful pick vs. the theory of picking a guys at #12 who is NBA level at one thing, and has a lower ceiling. The guys I’d be happy with at this spot are (in no order): Jimmer Fredette, Chris Singleton, Alec Burks, and my super-duper reach Marshon Brooks (who breaks my rule for looking for a guy with a NBA skill vs. potential to be an All-Around player).
The Draft is going to be exciting, and I can honestly say that I’ve probably put more time into this one than anyone I’ve been through as a blogger. I can’t wait till it’s all over though, I have more interesting posts to write about after all, ha ha.
That all said, what do you think about the guys the Jazz brought in? With the picks that we have, were these the right guys to look at? Was this smokescreen? Why did we bring in Paul Carter twice? These are all questions that I am curious about. Of course, after this draft – and after research on the other years worth of predraft workouts, I’ll try to do a post on that too. (Essentially looking at how many players the jazz a) worked out who were b) available did they c) draft / season and/or per GM)