"We've checked with people who've coached him in junior high, we checked with people who coached him in high school," he added. "You know, if you watched his team play last year — to blame a freshman for not winning the Big 10, that's kind of a tough shot."

In Snyder, Utah gets a 6-foot-6 swingman who was the Western Athletic Conference Player of the Year.

He sounded thrilled about the chance to toil for Sloan.

"He seems like a nice guy, but when the ball is thrown up he seems like a different person," said Snyder, a native of Los Angeles. "That's honestly what you want to be around, because when the ball is thrown up you have to be competitive and want to be the best."

O'Connor said Snyder could be used much like another former Jazz swingman, current New York Knick Shandon Anderson.

The knock here came in the form of hearty boos from a Delta Center crowd apparently hoping for someone besides Snyder, perhaps either Russian shooting guard Sergey Monya, who wound up going No. 23 to Portland, or someone who can play center.

Other options were a slew of high school players the Jazz passed on, including Josh Smith, J.R. Smith and Dorell Wright. Utah also went with Humphries over another high school star, Mississippi power forward Al Jefferson, who went No. 15 to Boston.

"I think if (we felt) one of the high school players . . . were better at that point, we would have looked at taking them," O'Connor said. "But we didn't feel they were.

"Nobody's going to agree," he added, "with every pick that we make."

As for Monya, O'Connor said there was only one reason Utah did not take him: "Kirk Snyder."

But O'Connor did agree center still is a position of need.

"We just felt we were in a position to be able to use the free-agent market to solidify the center position," he said, "rather than take somebody that we'd consider a little bit of a project."

That "project" O'Connor referenced might be 7-foot-5 Siberian giant Pavel Podkolzine, who is rather big but also rather raw.

Utah did later use its No. 21 pick on Podkolzine, but it did so planning all along to trade him to Dallas for a future first-round draft choice that should wind up being the Mavericks' 2005 pick.

The Jazz began thinking Wednesday night about trading their No. 21, and finally decided to do it after making their selections at 14 and 16.

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E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com