Why drafting a 19-year-old Latvian who some fans already hate was a smart move for the Knicks
The players available generally fell into two categories:
1. High-upside guys who have a lot of raw talent but will take years to develop (Kristaps Porzingis, Mario Hezonja, Emmanuel Mudiay)
2. Low-ceiling guys who are unlikely to be All-Stars but can have an impact right away (Justise Winslow, Willie Cauley-Stein)
If you're okay with picking a guy who might not have much of an impact in 2015-16, then you might as well pick from the crop of high-upside guys and try to find a superstar. And if you're going to pick a high-upside guy, you might as well pick the player with the highest upside of all.
Porzingis is a 19-year-old forward from Latvia who has been playing for Sevilla in Spain's ACB, which is widely regarded as the second-best league in the world. His combination of size and skills is rare. There just aren't a lot of 7-foot-1 forwards who can shoot, handle the ball, and protect the rim.
He's also very much a project. He's skinny and no one really knows how he's going to get by defensively. While there's plenty of evidence that suggests he's not like the Euro busts of past drafts, converting raw potential into on-court production is a tricky process, and he's still a huge risk.
"We thought the risk-rewards were the greatest with this guy perhaps in the whole lottery," team president Phil Jackson said after the draft.
Given the lack of success from foreign-born lottery picks over the last decade (since 2003 there have been 16 foreign-born lottery picks and none have become All-Stars), Knicks fans were understandably angry at the pick:
When we talk about "high upside" what we're really referring to is the number of limitations on how good a player can conceivably become. A 6-foot-6 guy is never going to become a rim protector. A guy with a broken jumper is never going to be able to stretch the defense. A lumbering center is never going to be able to guard multiple positions.
While the guarantees that Porzingis will become a great player are nonexistent, the limitations on how good of a player he can be are minimal. If he can come close to his potential, he will create a lot of clapping fans:
It would have been easy for Phil Jackson to take a guy like Justise Winslow. No little Knicks fans would have been crying on their selfie sticks if Jackson had opted for a well-known college player who could play 30 minutes a game in 2015-16.
Drafting Porzingis represents the kind of long-term thinking that has been absent from the Knicks for a long time. It's unpopular now, but it was the best option available to him at No. 4.