Jazz Draft Haul Shows Emphasis on Shooting, Size

The Utah Jazz made three selections in Thursday’s NBA Draft. (via utahjazz.com)

When the Utah Jazz’s season ended in April, club CEO Danny Ainge already had a pretty good idea what he’d be shopping for this summer: “Shooting with size,” he said in his end-of-season media availability.

If Utah’s draft haul is any indication, he wasn’t kidding. The Jazz came away from Thursday’s NBA Draft with the draft rights to Taylor Hendricks (drafted ninth), Keyonte George (16th) and Brice Sensabaugh (28th). All three are big at their respective positions and can shoot the basketball.

With picks in the top 10, just outside the lottery, and in the late first round, the Jazz were mentioned constantly as a team with myriad trade possibilities. In the end, wheeling and dealing wasn’t necessary to land a trio of versatile scorers with positional length. 

Hendricks is a 6’8″ big forward with a 7’1″ wingspan. George is big for a ball handling combo guard (6’4″ with a slightly positive wingspan), and Sensabaugh has a lot of strength packed onto his 6’6″ frame, a nice size at shooting guard.

Of the three, Hendricks is the least likely to score a bunch with the ball in his hands, but his allure is mostly a function of his two-way ability. He’s a switchable defender who understands how to use his length and can credibly guard anybody on the floor. While he’s likely not going to patrol the paint as a primary assignment, he makes a lot of great plays as a secondary rim protector. That’s a skill 30 teams could use more of.

On offense, he’ll give the Jazz a pick-and-pop option and can even drain pull-up outside jumpers. He shot 39% from deep as a freshman, and on a pretty decent sample (4.6 3FGA per game).

It’s not hard to imagine a future frontcourt trio of Lauri Markkanen and Walker Kessler. That configuration works in theory because both Hendricks and Markkanen are spry enough to be used as combo forwards, but it also gives the Jazz the ability to stagger their stable of young frontcourt pieces. When they need to go 5-out, they can have one of their skilled bigs set screens and either drift into open threes or hunt mismatches, depending on opponent schemes. At other times, one of Hendricks/Markkanen can space around Kessler’s rim dives, or they can stay supersized and overwhelm opponents with a combined 21.5 feet of wingspan.

The Jazz were also reportedly interested in Jarace Walker for some of those same reasons, but he came off the board one spot earlier at No. 8. Walker profiles as a more versatile defender because of his meaty frame, but honestly, Hendricks appears to have a pretty decent offensive edge because of his outside scoring. (The Jazz likely would have been happy with either guy.)

The guards drafted by Utah both have a reputation for being pure bucket-getters. George is a capable shooter despite converting an underwhelming 34% as a freshman. It’s his repertoire that has draftniks excited about him: he can create his own looks, shoot off the catch, or drive when he’s pressured and use his creativity to finish. He’s agile and crafty when he gets into the teeth of the defense. And anyway, free throw shooting tends to be a better predictor of NBA shooting ability, and his near 80% performance there indicates that he’ll be fine.

He has a wicked little stepback, and he will pass the ball when the help comes. He was often used as a ball-handling two (think Jordan Clarkson) but one wonders if the Jazz see him as a more regular playmaker in NBA terms.

Sensabaugh doesn’t have quite the same wiggle that George has, but he has shown out as a movement shooter and an off-the-bounce threat, two weapons that are pretty valuable at busting opponent schemes. He doesn’t jump over people or beat too many guys off the dribble, and that’s why he was taken outside the lottery. Guys who rely on tough stepbacks and subtle space-creating moves sometimes find it harder to score in the NBA when they’re surrounded by nothing but elite athletes.

Again, you don’t get a guy at 28 unless there are some question marks. He’ll also need to improve his defense and court vision. But he’s the best shooter of the three (40.5%).

If you judge Utah’s draft-night yield against pre-draft projections, it looks like they did OK. In particular, Kevin Pelton’s stat-based projection system thinks the Jazz walked away with the 4th, 10th and 12th best players* in the party, even though they drafted 9th, 16th and 28th. (*Pelton’s projection system doesn’t account for twins Amen and Ausar Thompson, so it might be more accurate to say that he saw the Jazz’s trio as 6th, 12th and 14th best. Still impressive, given Utah’s draft positioning.)

Here’s how they fared according to a couple of other prominent draft sites:

What matters more than whether the Jazz outfoxed the big boards is how the thing actually congeals over time for the Jazz. They now have at least one guy at every position who is in the first or second year of a rookie deal — Kessler, Hendricks, Sensabaugh, Ochai Agbaji, George — plus an All-Star in Markkanen and veterans on reasonable contracts. They also have at least 11 picks in the next six drafts. They can’t roster all those picks, which means at some point they’ll start thinking about what a package of picks could get them in terms of a plug-and-play start to accelerate the timeline.

In the meantime, how good they are probably depends on some of these kiddos. It’s pretty unheard of for a team to put five rookies or second-year guys in their rotation, so we’ll have to see which dudes need to wait their turn. Alternatively, Utah could just decide it’s time to go full-bore on development projects, but if that’s the case then 2023-24 will be a season marked by growing pains.

That’s a nice way of saying: not everybody pans out at the top of their range, and that’s OK. The Jazz let three shooters fall to them instead of surrendering assets in panicky trades, and now it’s time to let the chips fall and see what’s there. Since none of Utah’s draftees arrived via a pending trade, fans can ostensibly get a first look at the trio when summer league play kicks off in Salt Lake City on July 3.