Phil Jackson says he advised the Los Angeles Lakers to take Kristaps Porzingis with the No. 2 overall pick in the NBA Draft last year, but his former team didn’t listen. Now, Jackson is rubbing their noses in it.
In a special on the Jeff Hornacek hiring that will air on MSG Network Wednesday night, Jackson took a light-hearted jab at the Buss family.
“We knew that [Porzingis] had a lot of talent,” Jackson said, per Marc Berman of the New York Post. “We saw that even in the workout with him shooting, and I had some fun with one of the Buss guys and I told him after [our] workout, ‘You guys are going to be sorry if you don’t pick up Porzingis with the second pick.’ They didn’t, we did.”
Even if Jackson did say that, you can’t blame the Lakers for thinking he was trying to pull some Zen Master stuff on them and get them to draft a player he didn’t want — even if his fiancee is Lakers president Jeanie Buss.
“Watching him in the summer league, we thought he was really competitive, that’s what we wanted to see in the tapes study we did,” Jackson said of Porzingis. “But when we saw that he had the stamina to play 28-to-32 minutes, well, we thought maybe he was going to be a 20-to-22 minute guy because of his strength and his lack of size or weight. But we knew how competitive, and what an athletic talent he was, really to be able to have that stamina.”
Some of Jackson’s first comments about Porzingis (read them here) made it seem like he was skeptical about the 7-foot-3 forward making an immediate NBA impact. It didn’t take long for Porzingis to become one of the most popular players in the league while averaging 14.3 points and 7.3 rebounds per game.
D’Angelo Russell was the safer pick at the time, and he still might wind up being a better pro. But given what happened with Russell and the infamous Nick Young video, you have to wonder if the Lakers wish they took Jackson’s advice.
