The next big thing?

There are plenty of huge international prospects Ñ will Portland gamble?

By Kerry Eggers

The Portland Tribune, Jun 4, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

There are big men aplenty among candidates for the first round of the June 24 NBA draft Ñ most of them playing their ball outside the United States. And there are just as many questions concerning these pivotal pieces of an NBA team’s future.

Who will stay in the draft and who will pull out? Which post men will be able to deliver, and at what point in their careers? What teams will gamble on teenagers who have played only sparingly for their international teams?

“It’s going to be a very difficult draft, due in no small part to the number of big players involved,” says an executive from a West Coast NBA team, who asks to remain unidentified. “There are young guys, foreign guys and a lack of proven talent. It’s going to be very complicated.”

Portland drafts at No. 13 and No. 23 in the first round, which means the Trail Blazers have a chance to get at least one, and perhaps two, players of significance.

“There will be about a dozen players in this draft who will have at least pretty good NBA careers,” predicts Mark Warkentien, Portland’s director of player personnel. “They never go in order. There has never been a draft where there wasn’t a (good) player available at No. 13.”

There is a division of opinion on whether this will be a good draft for big men.

“Most of them are not ready to play,” says Portland General Manager John Nash. “There are some smaller foreign players who can help an NBA team immediately, but most of the big guys will not go in the top 10. They may not be in the next 10, either, but could be in the third 10.”

That could mean Portland will wind up with a post player with its second first-round selection, but not with its first. On the other hand, if the Blazers are looking for a big man in the near future, they might be wise to go for one early this year.

“We did an inventory of next year’s potential draft, and there certainly isn’t a huge crop of big guys who will come out,” Warkentien says. “I don’t see an Emeka Okafor (Connecticut’s 6-9 junior power forward) in next year’s college crop, for instance. If you’re a shopper for bigs in the short term, this might be your market.”

Who are these guys?

The market is incredibly speculative, more so than ever. The West Coast NBA executive points to Pavel Podkolzine, a 19-year-old Russian Ñ listed anywhere from 7-3 to 7-4 and 260 to 305 pounds Ñ as an example.

Podkolzine is projected in a pair of mock drafts as the player who will be taken by Portland with the 13th pick. Other experts think he could go in the top five. But he was not a major factor for his Italian pro team this season.

“What did he average Ñ 10, 12 minutes a game?” asks the unidentified executive, who watched Podkolzine play this season. “He was maybe the eighth man on his team. He is intriguing. He runs the court well for a big guy, though his lateral speed is suspect. You see him warm up and he looks like he has some shooting range, but until you see him in a game É if you are going to gamble on him with a lottery pick, I don’t know. I would be a little nervous.”

As Nash suggests, most of the big men in this year’s draft aren’t NBA-ready. To project how the European prospects might fare in the NBA, Warkentien did a study of white big men in the league over the last decade. Out of 100 players, 45 wound up averaging at least 20 minutes in a “quality” season. The average age of those who qualified was 24 1/2.

“If those players are coming into the league at 18 or 19, the numbers say it will be five years or so before they really contribute,” Warkentien says. “Some of them may beat that, but most of them won’t.”

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