NBA Draft prospect speaks truth to power at the Combine

Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey heard Thursday’s most honest answer to a question at the NBA Draft combine.

Job interviews can be an intimidating experience. It doesn’t matter what position a person is applying for, either McDonald’s cashier or player on an NBA team. With the applicants desperately trying to impress the hiring manager, some answers can stretch the truth. Some answers can be spot on, however.

Take the one Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey heard Thursday at the NBA Draft combine in Chicago. A prospect was asked: “Did you break any team rules?” The reply: “No, we didn’t really have rules.”

If nothing else, it was honest. Morey called it the day’s best interview answer.

With NBA franchises prepared to invest millions of dollars on youngsters, the teams’ brass work overtime to learn as much about the draft hopefuls as possible. To do so, prospects are generally asked a lot of weird interview questions.

At the 2013 Draft combine, for example,  Victor Oladipo was asked what does “a one-in-one mean to you?” Oladipo asked what the question meant, he was told: “It can mean a whole lot of things.”

Uhhhh …

One of the more popular questions is: “How many basketballs do you think fit in this room?” Shane Larkin shrugged, “how am I supposed to know that?”

Well, one way is to imagine a room is 8-feet by 8-feet and the ceiling 8-feet high. That would make it a cube shape of approximately 100 inches by 100 inches by 100 inches. Since a basketball’s diameter is about 10 inches, an individual could stack 10 layers of 100 basketballs, equaling 1,000 basketballs.

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Good thing I wasn’t asked that question.

Another popular question: “How many pennies in $1 million?” Christian Wood in 2015 answered correctly, but “it took me a while.”

Anything to find that future star, I guess.