Quote:
Pavel Podkolzine
RUSSIA | CENTER
HEIGHT: 7-5 | WEIGHT: 300 | AGE: 19
Insider scouting report
The Jazz sent Pavel to the Mavericks for a future first-round pick. As we reported this morning, the Mavericks are in love with Podkolzine and have been working for weeks to find a way to get him. Donnie Nelson was in Italy at the Reebok Eurocamp and worked out Podkolzine. He told me then that he thought Podkolzine was the third best player in the draft. The fact that the Mavs get to keep Devin Harris and still get Podkolzine is a home run for Dallas. I think this is the perfect place for Pavel to play. Dallas will hire the best big man coach available. If they don't get Shaq, they can at least groom Pavel to be a physical dominating center down the road. It will take a minimum of two years, but this is a great situation for Pavel.
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This following is taken from
Chad Ford's '04 post-draft analysis, and although Chad Ford says here that Donnie said he was the "
third best player in the draft", I distinctly remember Ford saying in a post-draft Insider Q&A session (that I'm trying to find) that Donnie called him possibly the most talented player in the draft, and earlier in the year he cited an unnamed NBA GM who was covetting Pavel, and similarly called him the most talented player in his draft class (at the time I was certain that the unnamed GM was Donnie, because he and Ford have seemed to be thick as thieves for years, and Ford had quoted Donnie talking glowingly about Pavel in the past)...
I would say that it wouldn't surprise me at all if Donnie has downplayed Pavel's potential to the local press, just to buy the big man a little time to develop with lowered expectations, but I have the feeling that Donnie's proven evaluatory genius just may have picked up an enormous steal with the Pavel pick. Keep in mind that a great many scouts were projecting Pavel to be picked in the top 5 of the '03 draft, before the 18 year old Siberian dropped out and the public discovered that he had his pituitary gland problem. But by all accounts, the pituitary gland surgery that Podkolzine underwent last year has been as successful as anybody would wish, and because of that I can't help but imagine that the aggressive, coordinated, sharp-shooting Big Pavel that Donnie rated (at least) as the "third best player in the draft" will end up becoming far, far more of an impact player, far, far sooner, than most of y'all JJ jockeys seem to think...