Two days before Wednesday's NBA draft, Kevin O'Connor sounded like he didn't have a clue as to what the Jazz would do with their No. 24 overall pick.
Perhaps that's because . . . he really doesn't know.
"I think it's really flexible and pliable right now," said O'Connor, the Jazz's vice president of basketball operations. "You know, some of these kids could go all the way from 15 to 24. . . . I mean, they can go anywhere."
Ditto for the Jazz, who are considering any one of several different directions for their opening-round selection.
They can go big, in a draft with plenty of that. They can go backcourt, preferably the point. They can go the foreign route, using the pick on a player who won't join the NBA until later. They go up in the draft via a trade, though that may be somewhat of a pipe dream. Or they can go out of the first round altogether, which seems to be an option the franchise is seriously considering.
"We've got to do what's best for this organization — now, as well as in the future," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who was at the Delta Center Monday to watch six prospective draftees work out.
"We'll go through all those things," Sloan added, "and discuss the different things as we go along, and hopefully do what's best, in the long run, for us."
That the Jazz — already looking at having a full roster of 12 players under contract in the coming season — are thinking more long-term than short suggests that trying to trade out of the first round is a legitimate possibility.
"Do you pick a guy just for the sake of picking him, then have to cut a player? That's not a good business decision," Sloan said. "All these things come into play when you start thinking about what we've always tried to do — what's best for the organization, what's best for (owner) Larry Miller and everybody involved?
"From a selfish standpoint, it would be real, real easy to just say, 'Well, this is what we've got to do; I don't give a c--- about the organization.' But that's not been the way that we've tried to operate. We've always tried to do what we think is best, in the long run, for everybody involved."
If the Jazz do wind up picking a player, it could be one of the six they worked Monday: point guards Kenny Satterfield of Cincinnati and Tony Parker, the 19-year-old from France; or big men Ruben Boumtje Boumtje (Georgetown), Jason Collins (Stanford), Alvin Jones (Georgia Tech) and Ousmane Cisse.
At least three of the big guys tote injury baggage, including a torn anterior cruciate knee ligament recently sustained by high-schooler Cisse.
The two guards, though, really seemed to impress Jazz brass.
"Oh, he's so quick," O'Connor said of Parker. "Both he and Kenny Satterfield — the two of them — they make the big guys look slow. And those big guys aren't that slow."
"I like both of them," Jazz assistant coach Gordon Chiesa said of Satterfield and Parker. "They'll make an NBA team, definitely."
If no one's there that the Jazz adore at 24, though, it seems there's no sense in using the pick — if it can be avoided. O'Connor, though, has no way of knowing who will or will not be available when it's Utah's turn to choose.
"There are a lot of teams with multiple picks (in the first round)," he said. "And the difficulty is . . . Houston has three picks, and their last one is (23). Orlando has two picks, and their last one is 22. Boston has three picks; their last one is 21.
"Normally . . . you can predict a little. But with the (teams) with that many multiples, you don't know what they're gonna do."
The slew of clubs with more than one pick ahead of the Jazz also makes it enticing to attempt trading up, but that's much easier said than done.
"The first option is always to trade up," O'Connor said. "If you don't hurt your team, you always try to get a better draft pick, because you'd like to think that you've done your homework and you know what you're doing, and you think you can get a pretty good player if you trade up."
The second option, in Utah's case this year, could be to trade down, or out. That, though, seems to be just one of many ways the Jazz may turn.
"There's a lot of alternatives," O'Connor said, "to what we could do."
So many choices. So little time. So few clues.
E-MAIL: tbuckley@desnews.com