Neither Gradey Dick nor Jalen Wilson ended up in their most predictable draft-night destinations, but then the NBA Draft rarely goes off exactly as expected.
And by all accounts, including Kansas coach Bill Self’s, the two players will slot in quite nicely on their new teams. Dick, among the draft’s best shooters from long range, shores up a key weakness of the Toronto Raptors, the NBA’s third-worst three-point-shooting team last season.
“They’re gonna need him to be a producer for them,” Self told reporters on Zoom, leaving the Barclays Center after midnight Eastern Time, “so he’ll have to take a very professional approach to it, which I know he will, and I actually think it’s a great fit for him.”
Dick concurred in his own post-draft interview with the Toronto media, noting he had loved the environment when he arrived in Canada for one of his last workouts: “I couldn’t think of a better place for me to get drafted to. Just the city and the people combined is amazing.”
Wilson, meanwhile, will get the chance to eke out a role on a pre-made playoff squad, the Brooklyn Nets — whose head coach is former KU point guard Jacque Vaughn.
“That’s what I told Jalen’s family,” Self said. “I said, ‘We got a Jayhawk that’s the head coach,’ so hopefully — that won’t mean anything as far as making the team or anything, but certainly it could mean something as far as just getting kind of a little bit of an inside track on what he needs to do.”
Dick got knocked for his defense by a variety of analysts in the pre-draft process, but Self thinks he can continue to develop it on the same trajectory he did over the course of his lone season with the Jayhawks.
“He’s got great length and he can slide,” Self said. “I don’t think that’s what he does best — yet. But I do think (he’s) a very adequate defender, and played to his athleticism and to his length. He did a much better job as the season went on for us, but what he really does is he makes shots. That’s what he does.”
On the whole, Self said, it was “a really good night for anybody that supports our program.” (It could have been better, he cracked, with a small change to Dick’s red-carpet, red-sequined outfit: “I was disappointed in him that he didn’t have the matching pants.”) It demonstrated, he went on, two different paths to the pros, as Dick put in one record-breaking year with flashes of immense potential, while Wilson built himself up after a season-ending injury and “a very mediocre COVID year” to help KU to a championship and then lead the 2022-23 team.
“I’m extremely proud of both of them,” Self said, “proud of the grind and the competitiveness and the discipline over time to be able to put themselves in this position, so it was a good night.”
