So if you're picking outside of the lottery in the 1st round drafting a PG or defensive big probably won't net you a good starter as Lowry and Holiday are the only PG's and Rudy is the only defensive big. If you are going to take a big, looking for one that's already pretty developed offensively is the move, although it's an outlier to hit on one of those guys either as Collins, Vuc, and Nurkic were the only 3.
8/14 of those guys that panned out into good players were 6'6"+ wings with 6'10"+ wingspans.
The only non-lottery potential first round picks that fit that mold are Joshua Primo, Joe Wieskamp, JT Thor, Trey Murphy, Ziaire Williams, Roko Prkacin, and Greg Brown
TLDR version: All teams need good wings, but the odds are less than 1/3 that a non-lottery wing selected in the draft will end up as a better player than the players selected nearby him.
I decided to riff on your theme here and ask a quantitative question about drafting wings; namely:
have non-lottery NBA teams been better or worse off drafting these types of wings than other players?
(Sorry, a kind of long post follows)
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is:
a little worse off. (This is not to argue that the Jazz shouldn't prioritize a wing with these characteristics, however.)
I identified every player drafted between 15-45 over the last 8 drafts (248 total players). Of these, 64 players fit in your category of wings 6'6"+ and 6'10"+ wingspans. (I used 6-4+ without shoes as the minimum, since that's what Primo is). I identified every player who could conceivably see some time at SF (including guards who people felt could/or have scaled up on occasion, and PFs with enough shooting/handling/defending skill to play at the SF if necessary; I omitted players who clearly spend virtually all of their time at guard or PFs whose versatility lies primarily in guarding centers).
I then compared their NBA career to players drafted near them (within two spots higher and two spots lower) on three catch-all metrics easily accessible on B-Ref: career win-shares, box plus-minus, and VORP (If anyone wants to make the argument that these are biased against wings, I'm all ears). By subtracting the value for each metric for each of these wings from the corresponding averages for the four players drafted around him, we can see whether these wings ended up better than the other players selected nearby in the draft.
So, for example, Giannis has up with 57.45 more win shares than the average of the four players drafted around him in the draft. On the other end of the spectrum for these types of wings, Livio Jean-Charles (remember him?) didn't play in the NBA, while the four players around him averaged 22.05 win shares.
Unfortunately, of these 64 wings drafted, only 21 players have had better careers than the players drafted surrounding them by the win shares metric (only 18 by VORP, and 22 by bpm); so we might argue that teams are better off having the wing rather than other closely drafted players in fewer than 1/3 of the cases).
If you go by averages rather than raw numbers, all metrics clearly show that the wings perform a little less well than the other players drafted nearby. On average, the wing has more than .6 fewer career win shares, for example, compared to the non-wing.
(Interestingly, the picture looks far worse for wings whose wingspan is 6-8 to 6-9.75 -- there were 26 of them drafted over the last 8 years and less than a quarter of them ended up better than the players drafted surrounding them; this doesn't include the relatively few players like Desmond Bane and Dillon Brooks, whose wingspans both are shy of 6-8.)
By the way, centers/bigs were overwhelmingly represented at the top of the list of players whose careers have exceeded their surrounding draftees. Along with Giannis (who I classified as a wing), Gobert and Jokic by far surpass everyone else. Capela, Harrell, Jarrett Allen, Larry Nance Jr, Richaun Holmes, Ivica Zubac, Mason Plumlee, Muscala, Nurkic, Mitchell Robinson are all in the top 21 of these 248 draftees according to this metric (take it with a grain of salt, since only two players on each side of the draft position are the comparison point).
Among wings, here are those at the top of the list (again based on career win shares in comparison to the four players drafted surrounding them):
Giannis
Kyle Anderson
Siakam
John Collins (I almost labeled him a big, but decided to include him as a wing)
Josh Richardson
Alan Crabbe
Pat Connaughton
Kyle Kuzma
