Wizards select Vesely, Singleton in first round
Fortune may have kissed the Wizards in the 2011 NBA Draft — in the same way the girlfriend of their first pick laid one on him Thursday night when his name was called.
In claiming athletic Czech swingman Jan Vesely with the sixth overall pick, the Wizards took a player who they had scouted for two years and who could have been a first-round pick in 2010 had he gone into the draft. But when Washington went on the clock with the 18th pick and Florida State forward Chris Singleton remained as the final player in the green room at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., he became equally irresistible to a team desperate for the defense and rebounding he can provide.
Wizards owner Ted Leonsis told a draft party crowd at Verizon Center he felt the picks had put the Wizards ahead of schedule in the execution of their long-term strategy.
“Both of the young men we picked are hypercompetitive, which is important because that’s the way John [Wall] is,” Leonsis said.
The Wizards used their third pick of the night, 34th overall, to select Butler guard Shelvin Mack, who helped lead the Bulldogs to consecutive NCAA final appearances.
In the first NBA Draft in which four international players who hadn’t played college basketball were selected as lottery picks, the 21-year-old Vesely is regarded as the most polished. He’s a 6-foot-11 small forward who led Partizan Belgrade to the 2010 Euroleague final four and to the title this year in the Adriatic League, in which he averaged 10.3 points and 4.3 rebounds.
“Get ready for the 1st triple oop in nba history,” Wizards center JaVale McGee said on Twitter. “Wall to McGee to Vesley [sic].”
“We think he can come in right away and be a guy that can be a rotation guy and play for us because he’s a freak athlete,” Wizards coach Flip Saunders said. “Maybe the greatest skill that he has — outside of kissing — is how hard he plays. He plays unbelievably hard, so he’s got a high motor, and that goes along with how we played at the end of the year when we had success.”
Defensively, Saunders couldn’t resist comparing Vesely to Kevin Garnett in “defensively how hard he plays … the amount of space he can take up.”
Singleton, 21, averaged 13.1 points and 6.8 rebounds as a junior for the Seminoles. He seemed to move into the lottery mix during predraft workouts before his beneficial slide to Washington.
Vesely’s passion for the game — he has an affinity for dunking the ball and told an ESPN reporter that Blake Griffin was “the American Jan Vesely” — could match the passion he and his girlfriend felt when the pick was announced.
“I was very excited, and I think she was very excited, too,” Vesely said.
