Utah Jazz: Team drafts big Buckeye
Koufos: Utah pleased to pick Ohio St. center
"I can't answer that one — why he dropped to us," O'Connor said.
But he did, and Utah was more than happy to scoop up the free-falling Koufos, nabbing the 7-foot, 265-pound Ohio State center with its No. 23 overall selection in the first round of Thursday's NBA Draft.
"We're very, very, very excited about the player we got," O'Connor said, "because we got a big player that's skilled enough to defend."
But the Jazz's general manager readily admitted that the 19-year-old — he doesn't turn 20 until next February — is not the shot-blocking center that Utah and so many other teams in the league covet.
In fact, shooting is his forte — and Koufos' best-case NBA comparison from both NBADraft.net and DraftExpress.com is to 2007 Jazz All-Star center Mehmet Okur.
"Look," O'Connor said, "if there was a defensive stopper in the middle, we would have drafted him.
"Is he a shot-blocker? No. But is he somebody who's big enough to take up space and maybe be a disruptor a little bit? That's our goal with him."
"We don't have to put a body on him," the Jazz GM said. "He already has one."
But is his game NBA-ready?
Even Koufos, who has a supposedly silky shot with range to at least 18 feet, doesn't seem sure.
"We'll just see how things go," he said via teleconference from his hometown of Canton, Ohio.
As for the Okur comparison, O'Connor didn't shoot it down.
"He's got some of the same skills as Memo," he said. "I think he can pass the ball a little bit, he can shoot it a little bit, and he seems to know how to get open."
And, O'Connor added, "He's actually a little bit bigger than Memo."
The Jazz also took two European players in the second round, 7-foot-2 Croatian center Ante Tomic at No. 44 overall, and 6-9 Serbian forward Tadija Dragicevic.
Neither, however, will be brought to Utah for another year or two or more.
But Koufos — who holds dual Greek-United States citizenship, and played brilliantly last summer for Greece's 18-and-under national team — is Ohio-born and raised.
A red-blooded McDonald's All-American.
And while he could make plenty of Euros playing in Greece, he has no plans to sign over there.
"NBA is the main priority for me," said Koufos, who averaged 14.4 points, 6.7 rebounds and 1.8 blocks in 37 games for the NIT-champion Buckeyes.
Koufos was pegged as a potential late lottery pick by some draft-centric Internet sites, and O'Connor thought New Jersey might have taken him at No. 10.
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