Transcript
Ryan Rosillo (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Summer is almost here. The days are getting longer and warmer, which means it's time to update your outdoor space and make it feel more like yours. I remember the days of looking at catalogs and wondering, could my outdoor space look like that? And I'll admit there's a few times where I was like, this fire pit looks better in Malibu than it does in West Hartford. And when it showed up, I was like, yeah, but things are different now because I'm using Wayfair. I just ordered myself a pair of patio floor lights. They're actually solar, if you want to know the truth. So I looked at them on Wayfair. I was like, will my place look this good? And I'm telling you, they come in fast. Free delivery, safe package. Well, I take the packaging off. I try not to tear through it because the delicate light escape mechanism on it. And I set them up and I went, I can't believe I was living life without these. I started looking at lanterns going, is it bad to have too many lanterns out here by the fire pit and grill? Because call me a lantern guy. I don't know if I want it to be my nickname, but I'm a lantern guy from now on. And Wayfair set it up. The options are endless. I keep looking at it. It's becoming a problem. But Wayfair was that easy and had that many options for me and for you. If you want to improve your outdoor patio area, there's something for every style in every home. So no matter your space or budget, Wayfair makes it easy to tackle your summer home goals with endless inspiration for every space and budget, including the outdoors. So don't wait until summer's in full swing. Shop a huge selection of outdoor furniture online this summer. Get outside of wayfair. Head to wayfair.com right now. That's W A Y F a a I r.com wayfair. Every style, every home. We're talking NBA draft and we're talking the entire podcast except for life advice, which gets a little risque for us. So that's a warning for you guys with kids. All right, so here's what we're going to do. We're talking the stuff. I can't believe that happened. Like the Pelicans trade. Maybe I should believe it. Phoenix. What's going on there? The Nets of Volume Night. Just like Cam Thomas, my favorite pick. That made me like it even better. And then my guy Yang, also known as Yang, going to Portland. Number 16 overall. We mentioned him at the combine. Did I think this would happen? No, I didn't. But it did. We're going to talk with Jay Billis. We're going to go through his favorite picks, the reasoning behind some being on the desk and his best available for the start of round two tonight, and of course, life advice. Enjoy. You're listening to the Ryan Rosillo podcast presented by FanDuel. The NBA Finals might be over, but you can still get in on the action with America's number one sportsbook. It's never too early to look ahead to next season with tons of futures and player specials all off season long. And if you want to keep betting on all the other excitement this summer, FanDuel has it all. From the MLB to soccer, Golf and the WNBA. Download the FanDuel app today to make every moment more the ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and help lines available and listen to the end of the episode for additional details. Must be 21 and older and present in select states or 18 plus and present in DC, Kentucky or Wyoming. Gambling problem. Call 100 GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com the NBA's first round was last night. Let's talk a little NBA draft. The Pelicans. What the fuck? They traded the number 23 pick this year to move up 13 spots for the Hawks pick, right? So they had 23. They wanted Derek Queen. There was rumors that they could maybe even land a scenario where they're going to take Queen number seven. Although teams usually when they have two first round draft picks that like to tell you if they're close enough to each other, you go, you know, we were thinking about taking this guy with the other pick. Maybe that would have happened, maybe not. It was rumored it was going around. Not sure if you like Derrick Queen. I totally get it. I'll admit I had a very hard time trying to figure out like what I thought he was actually going to be. I think the highs are really high. He's a big guy who can do a lot of stuff other big guys can't do. He's really creative, he's good on the ball. He's got these drives he can't really shoot. The lows are really low. I don't know if it's a conditioning thing. I don't think it's an understanding basketball thing at all because I think there's some instinctive stuff with him that's really good. You could also talk about Basketball fit and saying, yeah, but don't they have like, somebody like Zion who, if you take him off the ball, what are you doing? So now Queen's off the ball. Or Queen, you know, he wasn't going to play a ton this year, so who cares? Don't. Don't worry about it. All right, fine. All those things, fine. I'm open minded to it. But what you cannot do when you're running a franchise is move up 10 spots from 23 to 13. Now you want to talk about moving up from 12 to 2? Yeah, but that doesn't really even happen in the NBA, so let's rule that out. Let's deal with what we know. The Pelicans moved up from 23 to 13 and in the process gave the Hawks an unprotected pick in 2026. It's either the Milwaukee or the New Orleans pick because of the swaps. So this is, I think, insane. You know, they got warm. They warmed up with the new crew down there where it was like, all right, you know what? C.J. mcCollum's expiring. Maybe they're over C.J. let's bring in Jordan Poole, who isn't expiring because we're going to pay him 34 million two years from now. You want to tell me you're going to get Warriors Jordan pool back? Fine, I'll allow it. I can understand, like, the internal discussions, but that now looks scary. Or thinking that the Pelicans new management group has decided that, like, we're just, we're going for this now, new sheriff in town type of approach. And I think it's horrifying. You cannot. And now look, the reality is, like, what if Queen's really good? What if the Pelicans are in the playing and the pick ends up not being that big of a deal? Okay, fine. Like, there's a likely scenario where those things could happen. But what you've asked yourself, if you're sitting there going, hey, should we, like, what if things don't work out for us next year? What if Zion or when Zion gets hurt again next year, what if we're in the stacked West? What if we're like, one of the six or seven worst records in the NBA? What if there's a chance that our pick has, like, a decent odds to be the number one pick unprotected in 2026? Is there a chance we're moving the number one pick to move up from 23 to 13? Is there a scenario where that could happen? If the answer's yes. Then you don't execute that scenario. I can't believe it. I know at times I'll talk about. And I would think people would just want, like, further depth on this just because there's a lot of teams that I talk to and I'll say, like, hey, you know, I. I talked to this and. And whatever. I. I think it adds a little, again, depth, some flavoring to an observation. I didn't need to ask any other teams about this. Text all night and continue this morning. This is one of those things where you wonder, is there something I don't understand about this? When I first heard it was announced, I had to keep re. I was like that, wait, the 20. They're 20 unprotected. Like, what? And here we are. All right, let's keep it moving. The nets, they had five picks in the first round, and they took all five. Number eight. Number 19. Number 22. Number 26. And number 27. First time a team has ever made five selections in the first round of the NBA draft. So when they took Jaegor Demin from BYU, eighth, which was on the higher end for him. And I'll admit, when I first watched Demon, I loved him. And then I kept watching him. San Versini, who he had on. When I brought up that point to him, he was like, dude, at one point, I had him number two in the draft. All right, so there's some early stuff with him. You're like, man, he is so big. The vision that he has, and it's not just the pick and roll, the two options, it's. He actually can see other stuff other guys don't see. But it wasn't just the bad shooting numbers. It was how he would get into his shot. Now, apparently I've been told during workouts that Demons shot it much better. Uh, granted, he doesn't have the option to switch into a contested shot like I saw so many times from this past year. So they go with Demin. Now. The problem is, is Yakosonas was still on the board at 19. And because they took Demon, they probably can't take yakosonas, who goes 20th. The Heat, who. That was really on the low end of things for him. I love the pick for Yakosonas. I think he's just a really smart basketball player. If it doesn't work out, it's going to be because he's not athletic enough and he never develops more of a shot. But I think what he's done is he's already adapted his game at least on the drives to figure out a way to finish. I'm not calling him Steve Nash, but there's things that Nash developed because he just knew I have to come up with different angles in different steps and just an entirely different approach if I ever want to finish in the restricted area. And some small guys figure it out, other guys don't. There's some stuff from Yakush Jonas that I've noticed with him. I was like, oh, that kind of looks a little bit like that kind of stuff. So maybe he doesn't need that premier elite athleticism at the point guard position to make sure that he gets open because he did it in a really. There was. There's plays I had to keep going back to be like, how did he get that? Oh, he got his space because he set this up this way. Impressive stuff like it. But because I guess Demin goes to the Nets, they take Traore, who has three or four different pronunciations of his last name, who looks a bit like a cult being born, where you're like, wow, is that majestic? Oh, no, it just ran into a tree. I don't have any issue with the pick there. We could talk about fit and then Seraph going later on the guard from Israel. You know, I don't, I don't know if we're going to sit here and be like, no, they were supposed to get a center of power forward, a small forward, a shooting guard and a point guard. That was not going to be the case for the Nets when they drafted all five guys. So I think there's an argument to be made about the Nets where, why would you take all five picks? My guess would be they were getting lowballed on all sorts of offers because other teams are like, there's no way they want to take all five of these guys in the same draft class. And so we've had this happen a bit before where there were like three or four teams that felt like they controlled half the first round picks and it's like, yeah, but if you have. There's a point where you get to such a surplus of picks and people think they're just going to pick them off at some discounted rate. Maybe they didn't like the rates they were being offered. Likely they weren't going to get a first rounder for those late first rounders anyway. But they did something that doesn't make a ton of sense. And granted you could look at the roster and say, well, they don't really have anybody they're invested in other than Claxton obviously Cam Johnson, whatever they decided to do with Cam Thomas, they do have cap hold still on LaMarcus Aldridge and Wilson Chandler. They're small, but they still have the cap holds. They need guys on the roster. I don't know that this is the way to do it. One argument is no one's this lucky that all five rookies are all just going to kind of fit together. The counter to that would be because no one's this lucky. Why not just use all the picks? Hoping you hit on two or three of these guys at the very least are rotation players in the NBA. Phoenix back in the lottery by getting their pick back from Houston. So they take Malawatch out of duke at number 10. A lot of people thought he could go to Toronto. Who took Colin Murray Boyles, by the way, Boyles. When he was drafted. There's a video of him saying, fuck. I think people are taking that to be anti Raptors. I would be the first to want to jump in on that. I actually don't think I could be totally wrong about this. I think it was just his emotions of like, man, I just got drafted. That's how I saw it live. Maybe I'm wrong, but that video is making the rounds. So, yes, me defending Toronto, Phoenix, I like the pick from Aliwatch just because I think despite him being a project, how fast he's come along, how you could see how, how excited he was. That kind of identified different things defensively. Like, I really like talking to Shire about that when we had him on. So I like the pick. It did make me question why they do the Mark Williams deal later on. But they did it. They traded number 29 to Charlotte. And a 29 first, which is top five, protected in the least favorable of the Cleveland, Utah, Minnesota selections four years from now. So I could be talked into it a little bit where it's like, well, Mark Williams, you already need insurance. It's like, okay, but then why are you giving up the picks for him? And maybe if you're Phoenix, you're like, dude, it's 29. Who cares? But there's probably a bigger thing at play here with Phoenix where it feels like the minute they have access to something else they can trade, they're just going to try to trade it to try to fix the present. It would probably be smart at some point if they got together and said, okay, past a certain date, we have to stop doing this. I just don't know if they're going to stop. And we could use the analogy of throwing more bad Money at bad money or good money at bad money is really the way I should say it. That's what it's felt like now for a couple of years. So I don't know if this is still going to be the plan, but eventually they're going to have to figure out a way to be long term unstuck. I like the Sorber pick. I love it when Oklahoma City does it. The center from Georgetown, by the way. Georgetown's first first round picks since 2013. A single tear I could see on David Wingate's face. So Sorber had the injury. I don't know if that factored into any of this. When Presti takes somebody, I just assume if I like him then I'm right and if I don't like him, then I'm wrong. I did wonder if Carter Bryant, who went 14 to the spurs, the Arizona freshman, big kid 3 and D and he absolutely can shoot it. But when I talked about Bryant, I was like, man, once he has to make a decision that's a non shot, it's really kind of tough. I don't know if he grows out of that or not, but it wasn't very good. I wondered if OKC would have taken him because it felt like on the lower end of things for Bryant and because he can shoot and because he could defend. But I was like, he's kind of the anti OKC model of trusting a guy with the ball in his hands when he has to make some kind of decision. So he doesn't fit the model. Wonder if he had been available if they would have done that. Obviously they didn't have the option to they take Sorber, 15, Utah, Ace Bailey the first. I don't want to call it a shock. I had mapped out why I thought it was a real possibility because of Angel's background, how he approaches a draft, what Utah desperately needs, how teams will go. We know this is a massive risk for this player, but if it hits right and we might have ourselves a star. Where the rest of these guys were projecting as, you know, good starters but never star level. And so they took him even though he didn't want to go there. So I guess it didn't work out for Ace Bailey and finally Yang Gang. That's right, Yang Hansen, the biggest leaper in the entire draft. Now those of you that follow me on Threads know that when I was at the combine and I was sitting baseline and I saw him with a catch on the right baseline, extended past the block and just spun, dunked it and won Then was just feeling it was yelling at other guys to pass him the ball back. But he doesn't speak English, so he was just making noises. I guess he crushed it in interviews. No, I'm serious. People really liked his personality despite the language barrier. And then if you see the highlights of him that are making the rounds, he loves that baseline spin move. I mean, some of these double spin pivot things that he's doing. So I remember just at least I didn't know anything about him. And I saw that move and I was like, oh, that he'll get drafted. He will get drafted. He's this big and can move this way. He will get drafted. Did I think he goes 16th? No. Did anyone else? No. But I am all in on Klingyang. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. If there's one thing I love about my Apple Card right now, it's how good it is for my wallet. No joke. I can earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase in any category when I use my Apple card with Apple Pay, Food, sports, travel, the list goes on. And this card is designed to help you pay off your balance faster with smart payment suggestions. When's the last time your credit card did that for you? Take control of your finances. Apply for the Apple card in the wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com Excited to get him. Busy guy. We got Jay Bilis at ESPN the morning after the draft. So thanks for coming back for another quick visit, man. Good to see you.
