What It Looks Like To Draft A Pick

A glorious documentary up on YouTube follows the Toronto Raptors as they selected Jonas Valanciunas fifth overall in 2011.

Here’s a good thing to do with the next 45 minutes of your time. This documentary, which appears to be produced by a Canadian television station, chronicles the 2011 Toronto Raptors draft, from lottery to post-mortem press conference:

Bryan Colangelo, fired from his role as General Manager last spring to make way for noted transaction genius Masai Ujiri, has the reputation of being far too enamored with uninspired international players (Andrea Bargnani, Linas Kleiza, and Hedo Turkoglu) and uninspired domestic ones as well (Rudy Gay, Landry Fields). He is, by popular consensus, an object of ridicule.

Even though the Raptors swapped their record around between Colangelo’s final season and Ujiri’s first — going from 34-48 to 48-34 — a significant portions of the Raptors’ fourth-seed nucleus was in fact put in place by Colangelo. It was Colangelo who signed Amir Johnson as a free agent. It was Colangelo who netted this summer’s hot free agent, Kyle Lowry, in a trade with Daryl Morey and the Houston Rockets. But where Colangelo really excelled was the draft, where he selected DeMar DeRozan, Terrance Ross, and, yes, Jonas Valanciunas.

As obvious as it sometimes appears which selection each team should make, what we don’t and can’t understand from the outside is what it actually feels like to be in the midst of a war room when the draft clock is ticking. It’s helpful to remember that, for every trade that actually goes through, there are dozens of possibilities that are discussed but never consummated (See how Colangelo listens to trade offers for his fifth pick, and also proposes offers to enter into the second round). Knowing which of the 95 percent of offers to reject, and the 5 percent to accept, is an invaluable skill that each general manager must have a firm grasp of, and immediately.

One of the things that’s so fascinating about the NBA is that each and every transaction has a ripple effect that significantly effects all of the other 29 teams. When the Cleveland Cavaliers took Tristan Thompson fourth overall, it made all the difference in the world to the members of the Raptors’ war room, relieved and excited that their first choice, Valanciunas, was at last available to them. When the San Antonio Spurs took Cory Joseph with the 29th overall pick, on paper it didn’t have anything to do with the Raptors. In actuality, it had everything to do with the Raptors: Colangelo only wanted a second-round pick for the sake of drafting Joseph, and with Joseph off the board, it seems that he ceased making calls for the evening.

What’s so interesting about this pick, and what the people in front of and behind the camera couldn’t have known as it was being made, is that this is a portrait of what a supremely excellent draft pick looks like. For all that Colangelo and the documentarians knew in the moment, he could have just drafted the next Nikoloz Tskitishvili. Valanciunas would actually remain stashed in Europe for a full year after the draft. In Jonas’ two subsequent NBA seasons, he has become and immediate and vital contributor to a playoff team, and he remains only 22 years old. It was a brilliant pick that will help and help the Raptors for years after Colangelo’s departure. As Colangelo says in the documentary about Jonas, a then-raw prospect:

You know, there’s the old theory of instant gratification. You want that player to be in the mix right away, but in reality it takes time for these young players to acclimate. But to know you’ve got a good young talent coming into the fold, someone you can work with and hand over to your coaches and to try to integrate into that process, there’s a certain level of excitement about that. Because it’s newness. 

Three years later, in this week’s draft, and Ujiri’s first draft pick as a Raptor (his 2013 picks were traded away) was Bruno Cabolco, a Brazilian teenager who boggled minds by being taken in the first round after all the mock drafts in the world didn’t detect his talent. While Ujiri is a much quieter talker than Colangelo, he talks about his pick with the same combination of patience and excitement:

To arrive at the pick of Cabolco was a year-long, staff-wide effort that included a flurry of plane rides down to South America to see him in person. Even if Cabolco never pans out, remember that it took a monumental effort from an organization filled with smart people just to get to the place where Adam Silver called Cabolco’s name at the podium. During this week’s draft, you could have filmed 29 other documentaries that were just as enthralling as this one.