Jerome Jordan

Jerome Jordan (44th pick, 2010)

- Jordan's first professional season has been spent with Serbian team Hemofarm, and has been rather sporadic. He's battled some alarming inconsistency, and has fouled an awful lot (although in his defense, Hemofarm do instruct their players to do this. Excessively.) Jordan can nonetheless still make baskets, averaging 11.0 points in 19 minutes per game in Serbian league play, 7.8 in 15 in the Adriatic League, and 6.7 in 13 in the Eurocup. Yet his rebounding rates have not been good, recording 149 rebounds on the year compared to 116 fouls. For his interior and mid-range shotmaking talents to matter more, Jordan needs to play a bit tougher.

Chances of making the NBA expressed as an arbitrary percentage: 12%

Jerome Jordan

The Knicks bought Jordan's draft rights from the Bucks, and I like that move. Jordan can make shots, and there is forever a dearth on 7 footers who can do that. With their other moves - acquiring Amare Stoudemire, Ronny Turiaf, Anthony Randolph and Timofey Mozgov - the Knicks now have size, rebounding, shotblocking, shooting, scoring and pick-'n'-rolling out of their big men. If they round off that big man rotation with Jordan, Earl Barron, or both, then they'll have built themselves a pretty damn nice front court, with a matchup for every occasion. Never thought that would be said about a D'Antoni team.

Pick 44 and 45: The next two picks were missed due to a commercial break. I don't know what you saw in America during that break, but here in England, we watched a montage of Australian people fighting. True story.

At 44, Milwaukee picked Jerome Jordan of Tulsa, who has a similar body type to Dan Gadzuric but who plays in the opposite fashion. Milwaukee later trades this pick to the New York Knicks, who don't seem to care that their centre rotation for next season, as things stand, reads Jerome Jordan and Earl Barron. There's scoring, size and shooting there, but they might need some size and physical play in there somewhere. Speaking of physical play, the Timberwolves addressed a need there by drafting Brazilian big man Paulao Prestes, who has all the athletic ability of a stubborn bunion, but who can flat out rebound the ball. Fran Frascilla praises Prestes relentlessly - specifically his feet, for some reason - but avoids waxing too lyrical about the people that drafted him. He would, of course, but he already did it when the Timberwolves caught Pneumonia.