Grizzlies selects Jordan Adams with the No. 22 pick in 2014 NBA Draft
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The Memphis Grizzlies selected UCLA guard Jordan Adams with the No. 22 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft on Thursday night.
Congratulations, Grizzlies fans, you now cheer for an NBA player that you're more athletic than! Okay, that is a gross and ridiculous exaggeration, but to hear the reports on Adams' athleticism during the season, you'd think that were the case.
As it is, however, Adams has dropped more than 20 pounds since the end of the college season. Combine that with fine performance as a sophomore at UCLA - he averaged 17.4 points and shot 48.5 percent from the floor - and there's little doubt that Adams will be able to score at the next level.
Whether the impressive steal rate and weight loss lead to him being an average defender is yet to be seen. In any case, Adams' floor is probably that of a scorer off the bench, something teams can always use.
For the Grizzlies, this seems like a heavy "analytics" pick. Kevin Pelton's metric at ESPN ranked Adams as a top-five pick, and that metric is a derivative of a tool Grizzlies executive John Hollinger used to use when he was at ESPN.
The metrics like Adams, who should fit in as a shooter off the bench on a second unit generally short on offense. How he fits Memphis' grit-and-grind, defense-first system is less clear.