Draft-y thinking

 The sky is the limit for him.

- Mike Woodson, on Trayce Jackson-Davis

Or ...

Or he's already arrived at the sky.

That's the question here, as Trayce Jackson-Davis finally, finally gets the call. He sat around all night Thursday as the NBA draft droned on and his name was never uttered, getting slowly more steamed as team after team passed on him. At last, as the possibly of not being drafted loomed ever larger, the Golden State Warriors swung a deal for his draft rights with the Washington Wizards, and TJD's phone chirped.

The Warriors it would be, with the 57th selection. For those keeping score at home, that was the next-to-last pick in the draft.

So what took so long?

For that, you have to lift the hood on NBA front offices and rummage around in there awhile, as unappealing as that sounds.

The shorthand answer: High floor, low ceiling.

By which I mean NBA teams draft for potential, not for resume. TJD might have been the best college player in the country last winter whose name wasn't Zach Edey, and he got the best of Edey twice in the annual Indiana-Purdue grudge matches. But he also was a four-year college player (a negative now in NBA thinking, if you can believe that), and that will make him a 23-year-old rookie.

Yeah, I know. Twenty-three ain't exactly wizened. But it's older than dirt in the modern NBA, which has decided the younger the better after years of hanging a You Must Be This Old To Ride This Ride sign on their league.

Age was one reason TJD dropped from a prospective late first round/early second pick; the other was the suspicion he doesn't shoot well enough. Those factors are linked, in a sense, because teams apparently have decided a full four-year college player has taken his game as far as it will go.

High floor, low ceiling, in other words.

The NBA craves the exact opposite, which is why 19-year-old Victor Wembanyama went first and kids you never heard of like Bilal Coulibaly from France (18) and James Nnaji from Nigeria (18) went well before Jackson-Davis. Also TJD's Indiana teammate, Jalen Hood-Schifino, a one-and-done who's 20 and went to the Lakers with the 17th pick.

Hoosier fans, of course, will tell you the Warriors got a steal with TJD, and maybe they did. He's a board-crashing beast who can score, and who finished his career as Indiana's alltime rebounder and shot-blocker and its third alltime scorer. Only Calbert Cheaney and Steve Alford are ahead of him on the list.

Alford, a deadly screen shooter, went on to play just 169 games in the NBA, averaging 4.4 points in five seasons for Dallas and Golden State.  Cheaney  made a much bigger splash, comparatively, but was essentially a journeyman pro who played for five teams across 13 seasons and averaged 9.5 points, 3.2 rebounds and 1.7 assists for his career.

So there you go. Or perhaps not.

Once upon a not-too-distant time, for instance, Golden State got another guy out of the Big Ten. Like Trayce Jackson-Davis, he was also a second-round pick. Like TJD, he was also a rebounding defensive beast whose shooting was suspect. He was almost as old at Jackson-Davis (22),  and he was three inches shorter and 10 pounds lighter. 

His name was Draymond Green, out of Michigan State. Perhaps you've heard of him.

All he's done since, after all, is become a four-time NBA All-Star, a four-time NBA champion, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and an eight-time member of the NBA's All-Defensive Team. So there you go again.

Or not, because Draymond Green is also six kinds of nasty, and nasty works in the Association. And that's definitely not Trayce Jackson-Davis.

And so it's as it always is with NBA draft picks: Stay tuned.