Catchup: The Udoh Pick

We Worriers are not big college basketball fans. Any sport that requires you to get to know an entirely new set of elite players every season is for suckers, and at the risk of Marxing out on the subject, it's hard to get jazzed about a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry whose performers don't get a dime. Is the first weekend of March Madness fun? Sure. Does that one weekend a great sport make? Not from where we're sittin'. College hoops, no offense, but we're just not that into you.

Another thing we're not into: talent evaluation by online amateurs. Projecting an NBA prospect's potential from afar isn't as patently ridiculous as doing the same for a prospective NFLer or MLBer, but it's still pretty damn ridiculous. It's not that a fan can't speculate about John Wall's ability to play the point or DeMarcus Cousins's personality; it's that far too many people claim certainty on these subjects, when they have no idea what they're talking about. The transition into the world's strongest basketball league is a complicated one, and no, VonteegoDownToKokomo44, you don't know what's going to happen. Give them indignant capital letters a rest.

With all that said, let's do a by-God EXPERT ANALYSIS of the Warriors' latest draft pick!!!

Ekpedeme Friday Udoh is a 6' 10", 240-pound power forward from Baylor and, before that, Michigan. He is a native Oklahoman, the son of a radiologist and a nurse, both Nigerian immigrants. He has a freakish 7' 4 1/2" wingspan, one he uses to great effect; he led the Big 12 in blocks last season, earning himself the nickname "Nightmare" (which, sadly, doesn't seem to be catching on). And as this clip shows, he's a personable guy and a helluva dresser. The big smile, the crazy length, the mix of potential and bloopers... this guy's the newer, bigger Mickael Pietrus.

The selection of Ekpe Udoh with the sixth overall pick has been more or less panned by the Warriors fanbase and by NBA pundits at large. The condemnations can be summed up in three distinct arguments:

1) Udoh, at age 23, is too old.

2) The Warriors already have two promising young power forwards.

3) No scout, coach or analyst thought he was the best player available.

The first argument is pretty weak: while younger draftees are somewhat more likely to be more productive NBA players, they're not necessarily more productive over the lives of their rookie contracts. But the second argument is a pretty strong one, and the third one is outright damning. We Worriers are not "best player available" absolutists, but if you take a guy at a position you've already filled, you'd damn well better believe he's the cream of the remaining crop. Nobody outside of the Warriors organization saw Udoh that way on Draft Night. And how did the Dubs braintrust explain their thinking? Thusly:

Warriors general manager Larry Riley said that aside from all of the talents of Ekpe Udoh, he was impressed by the fact that the Baylor power forward showed up in a suit and expressed his desire to play for Golden State.

Take note, NBA hopefuls: if you dress like a grownup and don't actively express disinterest in playing basketball, the Warriors will draft you.

This was a bad pick. But there's a difference between "bad" and "Patrick O'Bryant". Most observers think Udoh will be a capable NBA defender pretty much from jump street... a big that can body a dude up is nothing to sneeze at, particularly for this team. There's at least a possibility that Udoh's more troubling college numbers (a 49.1 FG%, a high turnover rate) stemmed from his having to take an unnaturally large role in the otherwise punchless Baylor offense. The guy can hit a jumper, and he even had a pretty good assist rate. He had more issues with efficiency and consistency than you'd like to see in a 23-year-old, but an outright stiff he ain't. There's no reason to think he won't be a viable NBA rotation player.

And while you'd hope to get more than that out of the sixth pick of a draft, not all drafts are created equal... at first glance, there doesn't seem to be a high-upside guy taken after Udoh that will come back to haunt the Warriors. Would Greg Monroe have been a better pick? Almost certainly. Is he a future All-Star, a guy who could've materially changed the future of this franchise? Almost certainly not. The Warriors probably passed up a couple B-minuses for a C-plus. That's frustrating, but it ain't much in the scheme of things.

In fact, the selection of Udoh wasn't even the biggest draft mistake the Warriors made this season. That would be the 7-5 finish to a lost season, a three-week stretch of fun but pointless basketball that cost the team a draft slot. The lost prize here wasn't Greg Monroe... it was DeMarcus Cousins, a genuinely intriguing young talent that the Dubs could've kept or (more likely) traded for value. And the Cohan/Rowell/Riley/Nellie regime's final act of true incompetence was to piss that asset away, by bringing back Monta Ellis to sell a couple more tickets, by coaching to win at the worst possible time. The '09-'10 Warriors not only sucked, they sucked at sucking. The presence of Ekpe Udoh on the roster is a testament to that.

But with time, he may come to stand for more than just past incompetence. He's a defense-first guy and a true professional... both of those things are more than welcome. And while I wouldn't slot him ahead of Randolph or Wright, the Mikki Moore saga should've taught us that an extra capable big man is a nice thing to have. Ekpe Udoh only makes a confused Warriors roster even more so, but he is a useful addition nonetheless. And in November, when the madness of draft punditry has faded, Dubs fans may come to like the big fella.