SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 Austin Ainge didn’t want to risk waiting.<\/p>\n
The new Jazz president of basketball operations had watched Walter Clayton Jr. grow from merely an athletic guard at Iona to a point guard leading Florida to a national championship.<\/p>\n
Ainge wanted Clayton’s next stop to be in Utah.<\/p>\n
So he took matters into his own hands, swinging a deal to move up from No. 21 to No. 18 to get the sharpshooting guard from Florida.<\/p>\n
The Jazz traded the 21st pick and 43rd pick, along with two future second-rounders, according to multiple reports, to move up three spots and get Clayton Jr.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old guard averaged 18.3 points and 4.2 assists, and shot 38.6% from 3-point range on 7.8 attempts per game.<\/p>\n
And he raised his game when the lights were brightest, averaging 22.3 points during the NCAA Tournament to lead Florida to the national championship. His 34-point game in the national semifinals helped earn him the most outstanding player of the Final Four.<\/p>\n
Clayton didn’t visit Utah in the pre-draft process \u2014 like No. 5 pick Ace Bailey \u2014 but said he knew there was some interest from the Jazz.<\/p>\n
“I knew it was a possibility,” Clayton said. “We had some conversations after I got drafted tonight. They like my skill set. They think I can bring something great for the team.”<\/p>\n
Ainge called Clayton “tough,” “smart,” and “an amazing shooter.”<\/p>\n
And, at 22, he may be ready to help immediately.<\/p>\n
“I might be one of the older guys coming in,” Clayton said about joining Utah’s young roster, “but definitely a great young group, a lot of talent and I think the talent will mesh well.”<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 Austin Ainge didn’t want to risk waiting. The new Jazz president of basketball operations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,2655,2654,74,2657,423,2656,71,6,67,1217,24407,2659,66,2658,2652,422,427,3972,2653],"class_list":{"0":"post-125682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-utah-jazz","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-cars","10":"tag-classifieds","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-jazz","14":"tag-jobs","15":"tag-local","16":"tag-nba","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-radio","19":"tag-recreation","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-utah-jazz","26":"tag-utahjazz","27":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114748572704615973","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}