Hours will pass between the 5 p.m. start of tonight’s NBA draft and the Nuggets’ scheduled pick at No. 49. It could be a long, boring night. Then again, maybe not.
Denver could stand pat while analysts dissect the supposed upside and projectability of 48 other players, but Mark Warkentien slipped from basketball to baseball to make his prediction.
“You’re at the plate and you’ve got an 0-2 count,” the team’s director of player personnel said Tuesday. “You’re probably not going to see a home run swing here. You may choke up a little and you’re trying to get the ball in play. You’re more trying to get to first than to solve the long-term issues of the Denver Nuggets.”
In running his first draft in Denver after years contributing to decisions in Seattle, Portland and Cleveland, Warkentien said he feels no pressure to make the kind of splash that might remove the “interim” from his role as the team’s top decision-maker. Nor would he discuss specific trades, though it’s no secret the team sorely needs shooting.
But talk around the NBA in recent days suggests tonight probably will not be Kenyon Martin’s last as a Nugget. It also appears unlikely that Denver would sacrifice one of its two first-rounders from next year’s draft, which is expected to be deeper, to jump into the first round tonight.
Still, Warkentien said, “Everything’s being explored as aggressively as possible.”
He added that if the team does stick with No. 49, it will be happy to get a usable player, regardless of position.
Three players drafted since 2000 at that spot have stuck at least in the league’s periphery – Jason Hart, James Jones and Andray Blatche.
But Warkentien uncovered a telling statistic. In the past 14 seasons, players drafted 49th have played a combined total of 922 minutes as rookies. That’s two fewer minutes than role player DerMarr Johnson played with the Nuggets by himself last season.
With about 10 high school players who are off to college instead of in the draft because the NBA tightened its eligibility requirements, this draft is thinner than average, Warkentien said. He also said that league opinion views this year’s pool of foreign players as shallow.
“But you don’t have to take the whole group. You only have to be right on one guy,” he said.
NBA teams look outside the first round more than most fans might realize. A look at season-ending rosters finds 165 of 415 players either entered the league in the second round or were undrafted. That’s nearly 40 percent of the league, or an average of 5.5 per team.
Coach George Karl has a reputation for often ignoring rookies, but that does not mean he sees no value in late picks.
“Michael Redd was a second-round pick, and I had fun with Michael,” he said of the Milwaukee guard who went on to become an all-star. “That was one of my better experiences. I think second-round picks are actually more fun than first-round picks. You’ve got a lot more options. You don’t risk a lot of money or your cap space or (luxury) tax space. And every draft has always shown there’s always one or two guys that slide through and fall through the cracks.”
Though the stakes appear relatively low for Denver today, expectations are much higher in Toronto, where the Raptors own the top pick.
Seemingly every rumor possible has surfaced since the Raptors landed that pick. They could trade down or hold on to it and draft Italian Andrea Bargnani, a 6-foot-10 match-up nightmare, or Texas big man LaMarcus Aldridge, whose name has been listed anywhere from first to 10th in draft predictions.
Louisiana State power forward Tyrus Thomas, Connecticut small forward Rudy Gay and Gonzaga swingman Adam Morrison also could hear their names be called first, depending on who ends up with the top selection.
Staff writer Adam Thompson can be reached at 303-820-5447 or athompson@denverpost.com.
