Bulls lucky to lose the lottery???

Duke's Williams will make Bulls lucky to have No. 2 pick

For this month, and this month only, the Chicago Bulls are the luckiest losers in all of sports. They are not lucky because they've lost an average of 64 games in each of the past three seasons. We are not talking basketball here, not in the strictest sense. This is about the lottery ball that fell into the position that presented the Bulls with the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft.

Instead of having to contend with the mess that is necessary to get 7-6 Chinese center Yao Ming onto the court and the difficulty of figuring out what to do with him once there, the Bulls get to pick Duke star Jay Williams, the best player in the draft.

Williams, a 6-2 point guard, will quickly develop into one of the elite scoring point guards in the NBA and will give the Bulls a balance and maturity their team desperately needs. It's hard to imagine a 21-year-old offering stability to an NBA team, but the lineup became painfully young with last year's decision to pick up Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler on draft night.

"He's still young, so he's going to get better," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "I expect him to be a very prolific scorer and assist guy. At the end of a game, he'll be responsible, I would think, for close to 40 points a game when you add up his points and assists. He's going to have nights where he'll get 40 himself. He can go to the hole, shoot it long and he'll get fouled."

This is my fifth anniversary in anointing one player as the player to have in the coming draft. The track record to this point isn't bad. Vince Carter was the pick of the 1998 draft, and he's become a star. The choice in 1999 was Baron Davis, who gets better each season. In 2000, it was Kenyon Martin, and he helped the New Jersey Nets to get to the finals in his second season.

Last year's choice was Rodney White, who was banged up much of the year and played with a team, the Detroit Pistons, that won so often it did not enter the business of training a future contributor. He still could turn out fine. Davis wasn't an instant smash, either. I'm willing to wait, because it's not my money that's at stake, only an in-print winning streak.

The process is becoming annually more difficult, though, as more foreign players who do not go through U.S. colleges become attractive to NBA teams. There simply was no opportunity to judge the relative abilities of Pau Gasol last year, as there is not this time with power forward Nene Hilario of Brazil and center Nikoloz Tskitishvili of Georgia. So the proclamation this year is not as clear as it was when we rated Carter the best in 1998. I can say with some enthusiasm that Williams is the best of what the U.S. has to offer. Most often, that is plenty.

Williams will succeed in the NBA because he owns every quality necessary for excellence at his position.

He is more powerful than any quick point guard in the league. He is quicker than any power guard. He has tremendous shooting range and will be nearly as comfortable with the NBA 3-point line as the shorter college distance. He is an adept passer who averaged more than five assists on a team for which he was not the primary point guard.

Williams did demonstrate a tendency to turn over the ball, but the numbers were not extreme in relation to the number of scoring opportunities he generated.

"I'd want the ball in his hands," Krzyzewski said, "because he can really get the ball down the court. In the pro game, it'll be more wide-open. He'll have more opportunity to explode."

The greatest reason Williams will become a star is his ability to execute the pick-and-roll. He showed the ability to squeeze every nuance from it, a counter for every tactic the defense could present. Even though there was some zone defense played under the league's new rules, the pick-and-roll remains an elemental part of the NBA offense. Williams could rival John Stockton's ability to use this technique because, though he is not the same elite passer, he is stronger and a more dangerous deep shooter.

People searching to knock Williams point to his missed free throws at the close of losses against Indiana, Virginia and Florida State.

What is easily forgotten is he scored 26 points against Florida State on a night when the other four regulars shot a combined 12-of-38 from the field. Against Virginia, Williams scored five points in the final 22 seconds to give Duke a chance to avoid an upset. He also missed a late free throw that could have prevented a game against Kentucky from going into overtime, but he scored 38 points to help the Devils rally to win. Williams was a 67.1 percent free-throw shooter during his college career. He should do better, and he will, but that is not a Shaq-type problem.

And, you know, Shaq didn't turn out to be a bad pick.

If I'd started this exercise in 1992, he probably would have been my guy.


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article written by Mike DeCourcy of TSN