Yah, I love the way the Jazz created uncertainty about who they loved at 5. You can say they pretty much froze all the potential action in the top 3-6 because nobody wanted to lose their player to the Jazz, while at the same time it seems like the Jazz got who they wanted to begin with.
Makes me wonder if he wanted the "party" lifestyle.
I think we were going to take Kon at 5 in that case. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but on the live stream last night, Boler said something like “Kon Kneupple would have been the pick or could have been the pick”. I think he meant to say “Ace Bailey” but said Kon’s name and had to pivot and say something different lol. That could easily just be Boler having a Boler brain fart though.
The Jazz public posture from the beginning has been "we are not trading up, we love who we can get at 5". If teams clocked that posture this pretty much sends them in the direction of the jazz must really like one or more of Fears, Knueppel... Tre Johnson maybe. And then the Fears mock bombs in the days before the draft. It creates enough uncertainty for CHO to not want to risk it and enough false sense of security in WAS that we are not taking Ace, especially with the news coming in the last two days that Ace has told teams including the Jazz he doesn't want to be drafted by them. It just felt like it was masterfully played by the Jazz. They used everything they had at their disposal - their own posture, potential smokescreen about Fears... and then they even used Ace and his agents statements to make teams not trade up in front of us. Great job overall...
Not exactly the perfect comparison but Denver also once had both Nurkic and Jokic.
There will be stuff that comes out later that will make some sense of this.
So @Elizah Huge and I have someone (not Tony) who told us that if Ace was gone it would have been Fears. So wasn't a full smokescreen. I think disguising their interest in Ace/Kon worked to their advantage though. Danny really liked Fears supposedly.
