Scouting the Draft: A Q&A With David Griffin

As the draft nears, Senior Vice President of Basketball Operations David Griffin and the front office, who have been flying around the world scouting prospects for the last year, will begin to narrow down Phoenix's list of prospects. With one first-round pick (No. 14) and two selections in the second round (No. 48 and No. 57), the Suns have an opportunity to secure some valuable young talent. Suns.com was able to catch up with Griffin to talk about the draft process.

Suns.com: The group workout made its debut last season and now it’s become the new trend around the league. How did you have a hand in making that idea a reality?

David Griffin: In terms of process, the Clippers, the Warriors and us kind of authored a group workout concept last year. We certainly weren’t the first team to come up with it, but we were the first teams to do it in the collaborative way that we did.

We had eight teams vote on participants. The workout was open to all teams and we had 17 teams show up, including the league operations people. The event went very well. The Clippers’ Neil Oshey and the Warriors’ Marlon Harrison did a great job organizing the event and Neil and I were the ones that secured players.

The Golden St. people, Pete D’Alessandro, who is no longer there, did a lot of the work in terms of setting up travel and arrangements and what not. But it became somewhat of a model of what teams are using this year.

So you are going to see several group workouts this year. I believe there are five of them on the schedule right now. That was mostly wrought out of the success we had with that. And subsequent to that event, there has been so much economic turmoil that teams that may not really be intrigued by the concept in general terms are certainly intrigued by the idea of telling their CEO that they saved the team money.

Suns.com: Where are the group workouts going to be this season? How do you go about assembling a workout?

Griffin: New Jersey, Minnesota, Houston, Golden State. I don’t want it to be perceived that I came up with the workout concept. What we did that was unique was create a multi-team process to arrive at the players that were involved, so that you knew for certain that those eight voting teams were going to participate.

In some cases you can go about the process of building your group workout but if you’re the one building it and you build it relative to your picks, a good part of the league won’t be interested. But what was unique about what we’ve done was that we’ve done it in such a collaborative manner that we’ve got almost every pick in the first round represented by our group.

It probably helped us get players that were better than what we would’ve gotten otherwise. Last year’s group workout in Golden State had nine first round picks and eight seconds. Jason Thompson worked out there and went 12th and Brandon Rush went 11th. So I think you’ll see the same thing out of this season’s group workouts.

Suns.com: Since the other teams voted, did any of the players you vote for not make the cut?

Griffin: Yes. Several. And that’s good. Because if it was all about what the Phoenix Suns wanted, there’d be no reason for teams that we’d like to share cost with to see it as a positive and agents to view it as a positive. I was really happy that there were so many fresh names brought to the equation.

The nine teams that voted this year voted for a total of 48 names to fill 24 spots. So 48 kids received at least one vote. There may be some gamesmanship involved in people’s votes from time-to-time but it’s still a very good thing for us to be putting on an event that was that wide-ranging in terms of interest.

Suns.com: Do you believe there is a way to tip your hand by pulling for a certain player to be involved?

Griffin: I suppose you could make a mistake by being overly zealous in pursuit of a player, but that hasn’t happened and it won’t happen. At the time that we sent out the list for the teams to vote on, it included every potential kid that would be in the draft. As the teams began to vote on who they wanted to participate, we knew who the underclassmen that declared were, but we weren’t focusing strictly on that group of people because the underclassmen list went out right before the master list was due.

We probably had 85 names on that master list from which the teams had to choose 24 names. Just choosing 24 players, we (the Suns) came up with 48 unique names. So I think that the list was a good place to start.

Frankly, there were names were not on the list that we subsequently added to the list and sent out to teams asking, “Would you prefer to have this person vs. someone you voted for?” And there are people that were on the first list that are now in. I think we have seven players that were a consensus through the nine teams.

Suns.com: How do you go about narrowing down what prospects you are really interested in?

Griffin: I think the one thing that becomes more important is just to have a really good feel for who you’re generally interested in and who you only want to see to cover your ass. We call it “CYA.”

There’s a large degree of that. A lot of people will vote to see someone of that nature in a group workout because they don’t want to spend the money to bring him in individually. So it does give it a sort of catch-all concept. I think it has been used for that at times.

Suns.com: What is a trend that you’ve been noticing amongst prospects in the pre-Draft process now?

Griffin: I think the biggest change is that we get a lot of kids in a group workout that still pull out from the draft. Because of that, we get to know kids that do go back to school and it does change our approach to scouting the following season.

Maybe before that group workout we weren’t as keenly aware of an individual player that we are now. So it may add somebody to our group. I can’t stay that it has really helped us weed anybody out, but it definitely helps you broaden your horizons a little bit.

Suns.com: What are some other changes the front office has made towards scouting recently?

Griffin: One of the things that we did is that we kind of redistributed workout money to utilize some regional scouts that we haven’t ordinarily used to give us better coverage in the East and Northeast. We’ve kind of reallocated funds because of this. We do a little bit more with technology because of it and we do a little more with video and regional scouting because of it.

Suns.com: Are you still going to run individual workouts in Phoenix this season?

Griffin: We will do workouts here in Phoenix individually. I think what we will probably do relative to that is focus on our first pick and the players that we may have interest in and even those predicted to go ahead of us. That way we’ll have a pretty clear understanding of whether we should pursue an opportunity up or down in the draft.

So those players that are really significant to us, in addition to seeing them in a group setting, we are going to want to see them here. Whereas we’ve had 50 players come through here in the past two years, I would suspect that we’re in the 15 to 18 range when it’s all said and done because we’ve identified those prospects through other group workouts and opportunities as people we generally care about.

Suns.com: Are teams moving to group workouts because of the current economic climate? Is that why teams are seeing less players?

Griffin: You can also cut your nose off to spite in your face a little bit here in the cost-cutting situation. One example is seeing kids that are likely to go back to school. That can be very helpful because you can decide if you do or if you don’t want to take a trip back East to watch a kid next season.

That information base that you build from working out a kid is worth a lot more than a plane ticket most of the time. You don’t want to cut corners too much in scouting. That’s not really an area that makes sense to cut costs in terribly. Sometimes money spent is money well-spent.

Suns.com: What do you think of this draft class?

Griffin: I think most people have done a pretty thorough job of examining this in terms of the talking heads from a basketball standpoint. I think most of the writers have a pretty good feel for this. It’s probably not a pretty top-heavy group. I don’t know that there’s a traditional franchise building block there at the top of the draft. But we think it’s very deep.

We have two second round picks at No. 48 and No. 57 and I think those are picks that we’re really optimistic that we’ll get real value with this year. There were 25 kids who didn’t attend Portsmouth this year that were invited. The vast majority of those kids made a terrible decision not to play because I can come up with 83 kids right now that we think are draftable.

And given that you can’t play five-on-five anymore in Chicago (pre-Draft camp), a lot of those kids that passed on Portsmouth are going to realize that they should have taken the opportunity to play. There will at least be one or two of those kids that go undrafted because they thought they were too good for Portsmouth. If we can be consistent with our process as a league, people will get hip to the fact that if they really want to participate in this draft they need to be available to work out.

Suns.com: Due to the elimination of five-on-five at Chicago and the elimination of Orlando’s pre-Draft camp, how have you gone about scouting for those second round picks without those draft camps?

Griffin: You have to rely a lot on your scouting. At the end of the day we’re spending an awful lot of money all year to go travel around.

For us to say that we’re in any way hampered by the lack of players taking part in Chicago’s pre-Draft camp in a five-on-five format almost smacks of excuse-making. We’ve put a lot of time into these kids and I feel like once we get to know them as people and know whether or not they are the type of the character that can be a part of where we want to go as a unit, then we’ll be fine.

You have to rely on what you do scouting-wise. I don’t think the changes in any way affect us in a negative way. I think, if anything, they make us leaner and more prepared for making a selection when it comes time. We’ve had to rely on our process more.

Suns.com: What do you get from the individual workouts that you don’t get from scouting?

Griffin: I think ultimately what it does is that it sets you up to prove or disprove what you think coming in and in order for you to disprove it you are going to have to support what you see in that workout with other corroborating evidence. If there’s something that you find in a workout that concerns you, it may alter the tact that you take while doing background checks or gaining other information about a kid.

I may call a junior high school coach or a junior high school teacher because something was a red flag in a workout. I wouldn’t do that otherwise. You go further back on guys that bring up a red flag or you try to figure out what I’m missing on this player.

Is he as good as he showed me today or am I being fooled by the fact that he works out really well? And that’s one of the things you have to guard against and I can’t say how successful we have or have not been.

We’ve been really blessed that we’ve drafted Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire. Workouts were a huge part of that. Leandro’s (Barbosa) visit here was a huge part of it. We’ve made some really good selections with kids that we’ve worked out. I can’t envision us ever selecting a pick in the first round if it was a player that we didn’t work out because we want to know who they are as people. It’s much less about what they can achieve in a pick-and-roll playing three-on-three than it is “are they Suns-caliber?”