So the Jazz celebrated their overachieving year by getting swept out of the playoffs and will possibly find themselves without a first round pick on draft night. While there are many people to blame for the crushing defeats (the coach and players, mostly), the burden of improving Utah's roster for next year largely falls on the shoulders of general manager Kevin O'Connor. He's been running the Jazz for 13 years now (a rather long time for GMs), and the question remains — is Kevin O'Connor a good GM? Such a simple question requires a complex answer, which I will attempt to do in 13 parts. Today, Part 2: O'Connor's second season with the Jazz and his first draft.
Season 2: 2000-01
Because of a previous trade, the Jazz had two first round picks in the 2000 draft, their own (No. 26) and Miami's (No. 23). Somehow, O'Connor was able to trade the 26th pick to Denver for their 2001 first round pick. It feels like I'm missing some details here, like if the pick was protected and if the Jazz had to give up "cash considerations." In any case, this was a pretty good trade. Utah didn't need the pick and Denver's had a good chance of being pretty high.
(Quick disclaimer: I know it is completely unfair to look back at drafts and say, "They should have picked him." Anything and everything has happened in the draft and the highest-regarded scouts and GMs can barely get it right. I don't want to come off as being too critical here, but I am going to try to return to the thought process of the time to understand why certain players were drafted when they were. Then, just for hypothetical fun, I'll look at the possibilities of what could have happened instead.)
The 2000 draft is widely considered the worst draft in the lottery era. Kenyon Martin was the first pick, with Stromile Swift at No. 2, and Darius Miles No. 3. Only three players in the whole draft made it to an All-Star game, and only one was named to an All-NBA team (Michael Redd to the 2004 Third Team). Looking through this draft, there are just a lot of players who make you say, "ughh." Not all of them were bad, just the best of them only wound up being fairly decent role players.
For the Jazz, their top priority was filling the hole left by Jeff Hornacek after he retired. However, O'Connor felt they could get a veteran free agent to immediately step in to those minutes, allowing Utah to take a gamble with the 23rd pick. The roster was mostly the same from the previous 55-win season, so it felt fairly reasonable to bring in a project and allow him to develop over a couple of years. So with the 23rd pick in the 2000 NBA Draft, the Utah Jazz selected DeShawn Stevenson, an athletic shooting guard straight from high school.
As a 13-year-old Jazz fan, I was very excited with this pick. As much as I loved watching Stockton and Malone methodically beating opponents, I craved for a player who could do what Vince Carter could do — someone who could leap, soar, and dunk. DeShawn could do that, but little else during his career with the Jazz. He did go to the dunk contest one year, but he lost (mainly because his attempted dunk over Bryon Russell didn't work out). He'd occasionally have some nice in-game moments (usually alley-oops), but he never developed into the player the Jazz wanted him to. And his biggest problem, perhaps, was that he simply didn't fit in with the Jazz roster. This was a very veteran team with only a couple of token rookies who played very little. This was also a conservative team that matched its conservative fan base, that didn't appreciate it when players got into trouble with the law. The night he was drafted, DeShawn got into a fight that had to be stopped by the police. I also believe he had a few other brushes with law while in Utah and may have been accused of having sexual relations with a minor or something like that. Anyway, this draft pick never did really work out for the Jazz. Later, DeShawn grew a beard and a mohawk, got a tattoo of a $5 bill on his throat, and re-invented himself into a tough defender/enforcer guy. He played some pretty good defense on LeBron James last year and even won a championship ring. (Isn't it interesting how DeShawn got a ring and Stockton and Malone didn't?) Sadly, he never really played any defense with the Jazz. While it was refreshing to see Utah take such a gamble on a draft pick, O'Connor probably could have done better.
The four immediate picks after Stevenson were disappointing foreign centers — Dalibor Bagaric, Jake Tsakalidis, Mamadou N'Diaye and Primoz Brezec. I don't think any one of them would have helped solve Utah's Ostertag woes, so O'Connor was smart for passing up on all of them. The last two picks in the first round were point guard Erick Barkley and Mormon power forward Mark Madsen. Neither really amounted to anything (Madsen is best known for dancing on the Lakers bench), but I think Madsen would have been an interesting pick for the Jazz. He probably could have filled an Adam Keefe role and may have won over the crowd with his energy, hustle, heart and religion. Oh well. A couple of interesting picks in the second round were Marko Jaric, Eddie House, Eduardo Najero, Hanno Mottola from the Utes, and Brian Cardinal.
But the biggest oversight of the draft was Michael Redd, who Milwaukee scooped up with the 43rd pick. I've been looking for a long time, but I really can't find an adequate explanation for why every team in the NBA passed up on Redd at least once. Perhaps they felt he wasn't athletic enough, perhaps they foresaw his career-altering injuries eight years in the future. Perhaps they were concerned with how his scoring went down in each of his seasons at Ohio State. (In his freshman year, he averaged 21.9 ppg, 19.5 his sophomore year, and 17.3 as a junior.) Regardless, at his peak, Redd averaged 25 points per game and was an All-Star and Olympian. To make matters worse, he scored a career-high 57 points against the Jazz. He is also a devout Christian. The first thing he did after signing his max deal with the Bucks was build a church in his hometown. I think he would have fit in Utah quite nicely. So let's compare. On one hand, we have the athletic, unproven, trouble-making guard straight out of high school; on the other, we have the sharp-shooting, religious Ohio State junior. When you're looking to replace your franchise's best shooting guard ever, I would have gone with the safer bet of Michael Redd.
With the 50th pick, the Jazz drafted Idaho senior Kaniel Dickens, who never did play for Utah. There wasn't anyone of interest picked after him, so no loss there.
After the draft, O'Connor brought in the veteran 2-guard he wanted, John Starks. Starks was a legend with the Knicks during the '90s, but by the time he came to Utah, those days were long gone. Entering his 12th season, Starks could no longer dunk over opponents or shut them down with stifling defense. His streaky shooting was also a far cry from Hornacek's consistency. In Starks' first year with the Jazz, he averaged 9 points per game, while shooting less than 40 percent from the field. In his second year, he was hampered by testicular cancer (if I remember correctly) and was rendered virtually useless. While O'Connor can't be completely blamed for the fall of Starks, I can't help but wonder if he could have found someone younger who could have done better.
Speaking of ancient legends, O'Connor's next move was to replace Armen Gilliam with Danny Manning, best known for being a former No. 1 overall pick. Manning suffered a terrible injury during his season in the NBA, and apparently never quite was the same after that. He did, however, manage to have a fairly decent career, even averaging 20 points a game for a while with the Clippers. In 2000, he played his 13th season with the Jazz, and managed to play in all 82 games, scoring 7 ppg, but collecting a surprisingly low 2.6 rebounds per game. I suppose it was a rather trendy thing at this time for aging NBA forwards to come to Utah to back up Karl Malone for a season. Manning was OK, but it was always depressing whenever he came onto the court because the announcers would talk forever about how good he used to be and how he never lived up to his potential.
O'Connor mostly built this roster around the goal to continue to surround Stockton and Malone with experienced players. The premise, I assume, was that veteran players would provide an experienced competitive edge in the playoffs. But in 2000, O'Connor also began to slowly plan for the future while trying to stick the old veteran plan. The first sign of this was drafting Stevenson, the second, was his participation in the first-ever four team trade. It was enormously complex, so I'll just focus on what the Jazz gave up and got back. The Jazz gave up Howard Eisley, Adam Keefe and Denver's 2001 pick for Donyell Marshall and Bruno Sundov. It was sad to see Jazz mainstays Eisley and Keefe leave, but Eisley's usefulness had just about ended and Keefe should have retired two years earlier. Denver's pick ended up being No. 11, which Boston kind of wasted on Kedrick Brown. Sundov was waived by the Jazz almost before the trade was finalized, so the only prize for Utah was Donyell Marshall. My 13-year-old self loved Marshall, mainly for his cool cornrows, but also because he could score, rebound, block shots and shoot the occasional 3. He only played two years with the Jazz, averaging about 14 points and 7 rebounds each year, and I'm not really sure why he left Utah. Maybe it was because the Jazz could never really figure out what to do with him. He was too good to just back up Malone, but if you wanted to play him alongside the Mailman, then you'd have to bench Bryon Russell, who was still in his prime. Sloan later tried playing Russell at the 2 and Marshall at the 3, but that never really seemed to work quite the way it should have. Maybe it would have been better had Marshall been more adept from 3-point range. He only shot about 30 percent from 3 with Utah, but later upped his percentage to 40 and spent his last few years doing nothing but shoot 3s. He even once tied an NBA record with 12 3-pointers in a game. But without that refined skill, his Utah days were defined by a forward to big to be small and too small to be big. I appreciate O'Connor's boldness in acquiring Marshall, but he did very little to shake up the Jazz roster short term or long term.
With the exception of Marshall, the 2000-01 Jazz roster looked very similar to the previous year's. Karl Malone still led the way with 23.2 ppg, 8.3 rpg, and 4.5 apg. John Stockton put up 11.5 ppg, 8.7 apg, and 1.6 spg. Bryon Russell averaged 12 points per game, while Olden Polynice and Greg Ostertag continued their two-bad-centers-equal-one-good-center approach by combining for 9.8 ppg, 9.8 rpg, and 2.8 bpg. Although Polynice did set a personal best free throw percentage of .262. Young guys Quincy Lewis and Scott Padgett stayed on in severely limited roles, while filling out the roster were two nostalgic former Jazzmen — David Benoit and John Crotty. I don't remember either of their stints with the Jazz in the early '90s, but I do remember John Crotty in his later years. Maybe it was mostly because of his super-goofy shot, but also because I think he tried a little harder than most other players.
With such a similar roster, the Jazz finished with a very similar record, 53-29. But unlike the previous season, Utah did not advance to the second round, being shocked by a young Dallas team, despite owning home court advantage. Led by Michael Finley, Juwan Howard, Steve Nash, and Dirk Nowtizki (whom I referred to as Dirty Dirk at the time), the Mavs stunned the Jazz in Game 5 with a one-point win in the Delta Center. I seem to remember Calvin Booth hitting a huge shot and Karl Malone missing a rather routine jumper that could have won the game. This loss was particularly devastating to me because it was the first time I realized Stockton and Malone were mortal. They wouldn't be able to keep cranking out 50-win seasons forever, and eventually the would retire and the Jazz would inevitably end their impressive playoff streak. I didn't want to admit it at the time, but I did realize it, and I think everybody else did, too. How did Kevin O'Connor respond to this saddening realization? Find out in Part 3 of "Is Kevin O'Connor a good GM?"!
No comments:
Post a Comment