Utah Jazz should cross pond to find next superstar

Much has been made of what the Jazz should do with the No. 9 pick in this year's NBA Draft, with good reason. It's their second-highest pick in 27 years; they don't want to lay a Luther Wright-size egg.

Should they select Georgetown forward Greg Monroe, Kansas center Cole Aldrich or North Carolina forward Ed Davis? No way! Their only real choice is to take 7-foot Lithuanian Donatas Motiejunas.

When it comes to the Jazz, they can never have too many Europeans.

If you sense Utah is a place where Euros hang out, you're correct. The roster is starting to look like a European Union summit. In the 1990s, a Boston sports writer labeled Utah "the place where big white guys go to die."

That's even partially true. Utah has had a touch of the Old World for years. The current roster includes Mehmet Okur (Turkey), Kyrylo Fesenko (Ukraine), Kosta Koufos (dual American/Greek citizenship) and Andrei Kirilenko (Russia). Toss in Goran Suton (Bosnia Herzegovina), who was released in the pre-season, and you have a full lineup.

A rather slow one, but still.

Fairly regularly, the Jazz have had a disproportionate number of mostly large, mostly pale men in tow. Way back in the Pleistocene Era, the team manned the paint with players like Rich Kelley, Billy (The Whopper) Paultz and "Gentle Ben" Poquette. They weren't Euros, but they were predecessors.

Mark Eaton, Erick Leckner and Greg Ostertag followed.

The Jazz's first European player never logged a minute in a regular season game. Seven-foot-four Alan Bannister, whom the team invited to training camp in October 1990, was slow, had bad hands and couldn't jump. He hung around just long enough (three weeks) to require knee surgery, then went on the injured list.

Last anyone heard from him, he was back home in England, conducting basketball clinics.

Several years ago, a British newspaper article said Bannister "has played all around the world, including for the American NBA team the Utah Jazz, where he played against the likes of Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing."

That's news to me, but probably baffling to Jordan and Ewing. The year Bannister was in Utah, the Jazz did play Chicago twice in the pre-season, so maybe that's what he was referencing. But they never did play Ewing and the Knicks that pre-season.

A number of other European players followed without making much of an impact: Gordan Giricek, Raul Lopez, John Amaechi and Sasha Pavlovic.