Points of emphasis: a critical shortage of pass-first guards is why Deron Williams, Chris Paul and Raymond Felton didn't last long on draft night

Pressure situations

Certainly, all three arrived on teams that need them. Paul's Hornets won just 18 games last year. His predecessor was Baron Davis, who spent most of the season clamoring for a trade; he sat out with injuries before he finally was dealt to the Warriors. New Orleans' center, Jamaal Magloire, has given indications that he wants to be traded. Paul has yet to play a game for the team but already is its most important player--any point guard who plays for coach Byron Scott must bear the weight of comparisons to Jason Kidd, Scott's floor leader when he installed a Princeton-style offense in New Jersey.

When it comes to bearing the weight of comparison, though, Williams has Paul beaten. Any Jazz point guard is immediately in the shadow of John Stockton, who played for Utah for 19 years and made 10 All-Star appearances. The Jazz has a talented roster, including forwards Andrei Kirilenko and Carlos Boozer, along with Matt Harpring, Mehmet Okur and Gordan Giricek. The perception is that all the Jazz needs is a point guard, and the team believed so confidently that Williams is the right guy, it traded two first-round picks to move from No. 6 to No. 3 to get him.

"A lot of people have high expectations," Williams says. "I'm just going to do the best I can, learn from coach (Jerry) Sloan, help my teammates win however I can."

Felton faces the most pressure of the three, taking over more than the ballhandling role for an expansion franchise. Charlotte is about 150 miles from where he helped lead North Carolina to a national championship and the same distance from his hometown in South Carolina.

As commissioner David Stern shook Felton's hand, he mentioned to Felton that his presence should help sell tickets in Charlotte, which ranked 29th in attendance last year and will move into a new building this season. It's hard enough to be a rookie point guard, but Felton's career started with the commissioner heaping ticket sales responsibilities on his shoulders. Then, just after the draft, the Bobcats--who also selected North Carolina's Sean May--began a marketing campaign encouraging fans to "Get closer to the national champs."

But Felton became accustomed to heaps of pressure, even before he took on the role of Tar Heels star. His father describes Felton's hometown as, "nothing but 1,500 people, some dirt and trees." If you don't like dirt and trees, Ray Sr. says, you spend your time playing sports. Felton certainly did and became one of the great youth athletes in state history. He was playing AAU basketball when he was 9. When he was 10, he struck out 22 batters in a state championship game. He led tiny Latta High--a 1A school, the state's smallest division--to two state basketball championships and averaged 31 points as a senior.

Mark Gerald, one of Felton's AAU coaches and now the coach of Mullins High in South Carolina, says Felton became a cult figure in his area. "People would pack the gym to watch him," Gerald says. "We hadn't had a guy like that in our area. People from all around, but he just tuned it out. Once he started doing well, I had people starting to call me,