The 2d round was better: Carl Landry has become a very solid NBA player. Marc Gasol is a starting Center, Ramon Sessions is undersized but has skills. And then there’s Dominic McGuire, one of the best young players in the league.

Some others may still develop into players: Josh McRoberts, Kyrylo Fesenko, and Aaron Gray, for example.

2000 — Hedo Turkoglu
2001 — Kirk Haston
2002 — Jiri Welisch
2003 — Troy Bell
2004 — Kirk Snyder
2005 — Joey Graham
2006 — Rodney Carney
2007 — Nick Young
2008 — Brandon Rush
2009 — James Johnson

Other than Turkoglu — who is a good not a great player — everybody before Nick is either gone or just hanging on to a spot in the league. Brandon Rush may turn out ok. The Bulls are already worrying about James Johnson’s work ethic.

Not hard to understand why Ernie isn’t all that focused on the draft, huh?

“Defensive-minded players” — uh… anybody remember Dominic McGuire? Probably the biggest draft steal in the last 5 years outside of Paul Millsap.

Roger Mason — We should have re-signed him *before* inking Gilbert, who might have agreed to take a tiny bit less and keep us under the luxury tax. At the same time, don’t overestimate Roger. He’s an average NBA player at best.

Nick Young — I don’t think anyone had him slotted at 12 in ’07. If he went down, who do you think went up?

Neal I think Ernie may regret drafting Pecherov and V Dub only because, as Tom will point out, better players were drafted after them. Pecherov certainly didn’t cost much and V Dub has cost us nothing.

In any event, he’s scarcely on the radar. Still under a contract with a substantial buy-out clause. We haven’t heard anything about his play in Europe, and I presume we would have if he were doing anything great.

Judging by Ernie’s “non-chalant” approach to the draft, I don’t think it pains him deeply he got very little out of Pech and is still stashing the other Russian until he ferments into drinkable vokda or very salty fish eggs.

If you look at the 2 guys with high expectations from bloggers here (Nick Young and Andray Blatche), both were not scheduled to be in the Wizards’ drafting plans at all. Remember, Nick fell from being projected at around Lottery Pick 12 and fell to Washington’s Pick 16 (and Grunfeld took him because he was best available) and Blatche was a late-middle second rounder (in other words – not a whole lot of expectation; especially from a high school kid without a lot of national media attention) that was really cheap (financially speaking) to the team at the time.

In hindsight, wanting Caron Butler over Larry Hughes now is a no-brainer. But GR does have a point that Larry played his best basketball as a pro in Washington; thus, he was worth more to the Wizards than many other teams. If Larry stayed in Washington, I’m not sure he’ll be able to sustain his high level of play for the full 5 years of his contract. Maybe the biggest deterrent for Ernie to NOT match Cleveland for Hughes was the health issue (although this idea conflicts with Ernie throwing c-notes at Gil).

It is my guess Eddie Jordan liked Hughes a lot because Larry played similarly to how Eddie played basketball at Rutgers. Both guys have a panache for steals. The problem with this relationship was that Eddie allowed Larry to go 3 for 17 shooting multiple times without any reprecussion – and being a “players’ coach” in this sense hurts the team.