Q. When you look back on the draft record – we don’t have to go through it line by line – Flynn, Wes, all that, what’s your opinion of it?
A. Let’s not do it line by line but year by year, OK?
2009, I’m hired on May 22, 2009. There are four GMs or assistant GMs who have been scouting the entire year and one of their complaints to me was that despite all their scouting work in the past, in the end nobody would listen to them and my predecessor would take who he wanted to take.
When I look back on that draft, the fact that we pulled out Ricky and we pulled out Wayne Ellington, who since has become Dante Cunningham, I can think of a lot of worse things. In drafts, you can make a mistake or you can make a mistake you’ll never recover from. One can argue that the Trail Blazers in certain ways didn’t recover from the Jordan draft (in 1984). Our decision to take Jonny Flynn is not a decision we couldn’t recover from.
So we needed a point guard on the team, we knew Ricky couldn’t come. That was the whole point behind the trade (Mike Miller and Randy Foye to Washington for the fifth pick used to take Rubio), to give us flexibility to draft Ricky with our second pick if he was there. And so the scouts had Flynn as the No. 1 point guard. And I had just emerged from several meetings where all they were saying to me was nobody ever listens to us and I like Jonny too, so please don’t mistake that. I could see a lot of the appeal and so to that extent, that’s the reason that pick was made. And the reason we deferred the other pick (18th overall, which they traded to Denver and took Ty Lawson for the Nuggets in exchange for a 2010 first rounder). The reason we deferred is we didn’t have a coach yet and I was starting to feel uncomfortable with making a lot of decisions with so little so much more work to do with who would be coaching these guys.