June 25, 2002
Gabriel Pre-Draft Comments
On the draft in general:
I think it’s a draft that we would compare to the others past in that it's going to have a fair share of Europeans, as many as four or five taken in the first round. It will not be nearly as youthful. The fact that four underclassmen, four high school players, went in the top 8 last year, we are not going to see that. That seemed to have been an aberration of last year’s draft. But, it looks like Stoudemire will play a role in the first round but he is one of the wild cards as far as how high he will go. He is probably along with Qyntel Woods, the JUCO college player. The Draft in general has some good depth and we feel confident we will get a player that can play in the league with the 18th pick.
One what the team needs:
I think we have to address our size, our power forward and center position, to bring some help there. Particularly with the question mark still looms out there, will continue to loom through the draft, on Horace’s decision and Patrick Ewing’s decision. But, through the draft isn’t the only way we are going to get that done. We need to make sure with the 18th pick because its so far down in the draft that you find a player that can play for you or at a minimum has adds value to your franchise. And therefore you cant get too clever with picking your need only you must take the best player available with an eye to your needs.
On the rookies:
Well a lot will be determined by how they do this summer. Both Hunter and Sasser are on strict regimens of working out. They have been to shooting camps together already. They will play for two weeks in our free agent camp. And we have big plans for both of them. Hunter sat and watched as we tried to get the most from Patrick but his day will come and it’s going to be next season. Sasser is in the same boat. He still has the size we wanted from the point guard position. He again was a victim of a numbers within our own roster. But as our roster starts to really narrow itself down as our free agents come up, those guys will play a prominent role as our plan unfolds.
I call these drafts undeveloped drafts or late developing drafts because of the European play, because of the youthfulness of the drafts. There used to be saying that the Bigs took two to three years to develop before you knew what you had. I think its true now that most of the players in the draft, you cant really judge them until they have had two or three season in the league.
I think we have the spots on our team to add two players in the draft but we are quite comfortable if the right player is there at 18 making our selection at 18, we do not have a second round pick, we will look to acquire one for the purposes of our roster but we are also looking at second round picks for opportunities to potentially draft big again and send a player back to Europe if there are European players available. We worked out Anderson who has a contract over there but who is still in the draft and has already signed back in Italy, that would be a very clean transaction for us. So that is a possibility as well. But teams also have the same thoughts as minds that we do, and I don’t know anyone who is easily giving up a second round pick.
Well it’s a second round pick, which we don’t even have right now. With 18 we do not plan on drafting and sending back to Europe. That is not the plan. Teams have shown that’s a valuable thing to do and I think you will see a lot of it. I think you might even see it late in the first round where you have teams very close to tax, 20 to 28, that also don’t have much room on their roster, so its convenient for them to draft those European players and send them overseas they do not get the tax hit and are able to let them develop until their roster opens up.
On moving up in the draft:
Its difficult to move up and I got to tell you we are not overly anxious to move up in as much as we feel that there is only the ability to go up a handful of spots. No one is looking to help the Orlando Magic get any better in this draft and no one is going to hand you a late lottery pick. We also believe that the player we get at 18 is and could be the same player that would be there at 11 or 12 if we were to move up anyway.
Well I think that’s natural. Mike has had two tremendous seasons for a young player. If he were in this draft there is no doubt in our minds that he wouldn’t be rookie of the year again amongst these guys so its only natural if a player of a lower salary but of a high high value that there is going to be a lot of interest.
Sometimes when you don’t achieve your goals of play-off rounds it’s easy to look at even your strengths and say those are your weaknesses. The fact that maybe we shot too much or we had to many three-point shooters, or our game was too guard oriented. But you know you got to stick to your guns and in this case we think we can just add to that style of play with some strength inside with better rebounding and shot blocking. But that is going to be the style of play of a lot of teams in our conference and those are the only ones we need to beat. We don’t need to worry about the fact that a team out west plays with a dominant center, we need to realize what steps we need to take with our own team to get to the next level in the play-offs.
(Udonis Haslem) He had a very nice Chicago pre-draft camp. He falls into that mold of 6-7, 6-8 power forwards collegiately don’t always translate into power forwards on the pro level. It may now a little bit more now than it did a few years ago, but you got to look at Lon Baxter at Maryland, compare him to a player like him, Clancy, who has been hurt is a player similar to that. Those guys are tough projections for personnel people because they are tweeners. They have got to find the right spot on the right team to have a chance, to really be the player an NBA team needs them to be.
You know what with this particular draft, as with other drafts, General Mangers become all time best liars. They button up and we are at that time where we need to button up. We have worked some guys out and there has been some talk of them, there will be other players that we hope will drop to us. A Borchard, a Wagner, Qyntel Woods, they would make for a wonderful decision for us at 18. But because they have been spoken about in the late lottery, we need to concentrate pretty much on the guys we had in. The guards and the power forwards and just see which one is the best fit for us and which one will actually be there.
In this draft and this personnel mode that we are in most teams are talking about getting players back that can help them now more than they are talking about future picks. That’s purely because of the parody in the conference. Everyone thinks they can make that one transaction and get that one player that puts them over the top. There is less interest in the first today but if were to make a small jog up in the draft we are as equipped as any team in the league to put some collection of picks or first round picks, and we have spoken to a couple of teams about taking our Sacramento pick or our own pick off us next year in order to move up a few spots.
Well I have spoken to the Houston people, they have put in countless hours and literally weeks on working on the diplomacy aspect of making that selection. Its unparalleled. It will open new doors for all of us, maybe there laying the ground-work for all of us, in making selections of players that have other commitments to their countries. But I think the main question for their coaches is how ready is Yao Ming going to be to play. How long is it going to take him to fit in and that’s probably the biggest question on their minds.
Only a foreign player would factor in their thinking more than previous years. We don’t shy away from them for any reason of them not being ready or prepared. Its just a matter of the right player being the right fit. Where it does play in our minds more heavily is in the second round. If there is a player we can select and not have to take his salary on and take that player on this year and send him back overseas. The last time we did it was a player of Dutch descent was Geert Hammink, who we sent to Milan, I went over to see twice over there. Geert came back a year later and still wasn’t ready but did go on to have a pretty good European career. He played for six or seven years.
On the chances of trading Mike Miller:
Very minimal, we have no interest in losing Mike Miller, as a player. As I said I think he would go in the lottery if he was in this draft again. And if you know that why would you make the transaction but because of his salary and because he had two fantastic years, it was only natural that our phones would ring pretty hard on people trying to get Mike.
I think that all six or seven players in the top seven picks are there because they have the chance to be a star. They have a great upside, you know when you talk about drafting point guards high, as we are talking about Jay Williams going, he must be a tremendous player to go second in the draft. I am sure there are just as many people including the Houston people that look at a Mike Dunleavy and say there is a youngster who has had tremendous coaching, has put on more weight, has the size, he may have the best overall basketball skills of any player I have every seen in a long time in the draft when it comes to shooting, being bigger than 6-9, being able to pass the ball, being a coaches, ex NBA players son, he has maybe the best package. But you only need to drop to the next pick who is Gooden at Kansas who I think may be the most ready to step on the floor and put a uniform on and give you 20 and 10 right off the bat. Maybe a better Danny Manning type player.
I think everybody identifies with both Ely and Haislips skill sets. They come with one or two skills that would qualify them to be middle first round picks then you almost get into the scenario where you look at deficiency and you try to see which one has the least and has the best upside. You work almost backwards on it, Haislip being a little more early on thought of as a power forward, more of small forward now. He may go down as the most athletic in the entire draft. Ely really knows what his bread and butter is as an offensive player. I think he might be the second or third best low post player and he still can go in the late teens even with that skill set. He is a tremendous shot blocker but not much of a rebounder and he does not have a lot of size which would make teams that need a lot of bulk second guess on him as a pure power forward.
There is a little luck in the entire draft but I think its safer to say that you have to have better fortune and some luck on your side when you are selecting right out of the lottery on the teams on down. The nice thing about the 18th selection is there isn’t the pressures of drafting what would be for us the lottery household name and there is not the pressure of taking the guys who just barely missed the lottery, that 14 to 16 range. It seems that teams have been at liberty to pick the guy that they like the most regardless of their needs or who they are supposed to take. And often it is a senior that’s been over looked. And there are some players in this draft that will be in that area that are seniors that I think teams will grab at the end of the first round.
They would probably make that list of players that outweigh the needs to just take the talent and on top of the talent take the asset.
We are not at liberty to take multiple picks as we were because we are very close to the tax threshold and because of that if we did make multiple selections there is a greater chance that we just take a first and a second if we thought our players for some reason could drop to being two second round picks we wouldn’t rule out trading the first and picking two high second selections either. That is different next year but this year with taxes the way it is not many players coming off the roster contractionaly we also must keep an eye on our own free agents, Garrity and Hudson, and make sure they are part of the mix too. Its quite the challenge from years past to say the least.
That exception money would count even though its dollars that are available to you even though you are over the cap you know the 4.5 those dollars would still count against your tax numbers so its very limited in that regard this year and we would make our free agency dollars have to come from that pool that would represent Garrity, Hudson, and draft also.
I think that the Magic history is good. I don’t know that its great. Some of it for us dropped off when we got good. The draft is set up for parody so when you are winning games you draft low and therefore the teams that aren’t in the play-offs with you get to draft higher and it should even out. Because we got so good so fast we found ourselves at the bottom of the draft board pretty quickly after we had the good fortune of the lottery. But what we have done which probably hasn’t gotten much attention because its hard to figure out is what we have done with the picks in the past. Last year by example, and I don’t have all the details on it but one of our trades, trading a team a second I guess it was in the Denver transaction that they got the second from us vs. waiting for the future first. They took a second round pick, well that pick is now represented by the 18th pick that we have now. Last year we traded a second and the Magic didn’t get anything for it but in reality we would have had to have given Denver our least favorable pick which we only had one this year, which is 18, which would mean we would have had to lose it. And we have tried to turn some of our players, like to the Harpring, like the Keyon Clarks into great players. In order for us to lose a Shaquille without compensation in 1996 to acquiring almost a player similar echelon in T-Mac in five short years it took us moving picks around to get ourselves in position for cap room to do that. Sometimes where the players are on your roster or how many points they score doesn’t give a true picture of the picks because we have had to make good picks to have moved them on to teams that wanted them. So you must pick the value in order again to move on and get other things.
We have three additional ones over the next few years and we have Sacramento’s that’s lottery protection next year. We have the Clippers, it’s protected through 17, 14, 12, and then 0 protection over the next three years. We get Washington starting in 2004, that goes 15, 10, 3, 0 in its protection and then we have all of our own.
We have dissected trying to figure out what those other teams did, and teams have done pretty good jobs the last few years at 18. The one thing it has led us to is to when it doesn’t fit to not take the player you need but to take the best player available. On the flip side of that coin whoever you take there if they don’t get time then his value diminishes quickly for you and anybody else. So we are going to try and combine those two philosophies, we are going to try and take the best player available but its instrumental that I spend time with Doc and the coaches and see when we select this guy, where does he fit into the rotation, can he minutes ahead of Andrew, can he get minutes behind Darrell, can he get time at the small forward, and that will help us when making our decision.
I am sure there are some, I know there are some, none that come to mind. There are guys that you wish you could have held on to that you have moved on that you wish you had back but then again its tough to get back but then again its tough to give back the memories and we have had a consistent team. We have continued to be aggressive and competitive so we know there is going to be great selections and some misses, and you just try to learn from him.
I have everybody do it for me, I do it to a point. I think that the one thing we pride ourselves on is that when we go up in that war room, we come out more than 9 times out of 10. I have worked with Matty, Brian, Chuck, Richie, and now Doc. We come out of that room as one and what decisions we make there are the ones we have to live with and with the great ones we share all the good times that that brings too.
