Utah Utes forward Kyle Kuzma rising up draft boards
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Kyle Kuzma wasn't sure how things would play out when he announced plans in late March to test the NBA draft. The Utah Utes junior forward was well aware of the doubters and didn't immediately hire an agent to keep open the option to return for his senior year.
A month later, Kuzma has hired an agent and is rising up the pre-draft rankings after a superb NBA combine and strong individual workouts.
"I just got more confident, I'm not going to lie, throughout the whole process," Kuzma said Tuesday. "Working out every day with the NBA ball and just imagining yourself down the road. Once I declared with an agent prior to the combine, people's ears raised up. But I just knew it in my heart it was the right decision for me. Everything's really falling in line right now. It's looking good."
The Flint, Michigan, native had a pre-draft workout with the Utah Jazz on Tuesday and continued to show evaluators an ability to shoot the ball from NBA 3-point range. Kuzma was named first-team All-Pac-12 after a 2016-17 season during which he averaged 16.4 points, 9.3 rebounds. The 6-foot-9, 223-pounder has a versatile game that allows him to handle the ball on the perimeter as a playmaker with good size, but he shot just 32.1 percent from behind the arc last season.
Kuzma turned heads with 20 points and four-for-five shooting on 3-pointers in his lone 5-on-5 scrimmage at the combine.
"I changed my jump shot up a little bit," Kuzma said. "Being more fluid and more comfortable shooting the ball from the NBA 3. I feel like I'm more comfortable shooting from that 3 than from college 3 right now. A lot of people were surprised, but I really wasn't. I put a lot of work into my game every single day."
Kuzma had another quality workout Tuesday, according to Jazz vice president of player personnel Walt Perrin, and continued to shoot the ball well. Perrin said Kuzma was by far the best player at the six-man workout and that he wished he could have brought Kuzma in to face a more talented group.
The versatility of Kuzma's game is a positive even though he falls into a tweener category - a little slight to be a true power forward and not quite quick enough to be a pure small forward. That may not matter in today's NBA.
"We're going more and more toward positionless players," Perrin said. "You look at Golden State ... they don't have guys that play certain positions. They have the best players on their team playing. ... We've gone to nobody posting up, basically, to everybody being able to put the ball on the floor and create shots on the perimeter, penetrate and kick to guys wide open in the corner for threes.
"The guys on the floor have to be able to guard their so-called position. And I think we're looking more and more at that in terms of he can have an advantage on offense, but where is his disadvantage or advantage defensively?"
The Utes were well represented at the workout with forward David Collette joining the group.
The 6-foot-8, 220-pounder hasn't hired an agent and is expected to return to school. Perrin couldn't discuss Collette because of that, and he couldn't talk to the media, but Kuzma said the rising senior showed off a newly refined midrange jump shot. The Utes will rely heavily on Collette as the lone returning starter, who averaged 13.6 points and 5.1 rebounds last season.
Utah will lose its best player to the NBA draft for a third consecutive season as Kuzma follows Jakob Poeltl and Delon Wright. The process has kept Kuzma smiling as he met childhood idol Magic Johnson, watched his stock rise and is on the verge of playing basketball for a living.
"I feel like you've got to be two feet in with everything you do," Kuzma said. "I definitely looked at the pros and cons, but my heart was in getting to this level and trying to prove people wrong again like I've done my entire life."