Draft Lottery
One of the major issues in the NBA this year centered around teams tanking games after they were eliminated from playoff contention in order to give themselves a better opportunity to secure one of the coveted top 2 spots in the lottery. This was a unique year. The NBA passed a rule pretty much prohibiting high school players from entering the draft. Therefore, this draft is loaded with several freshman entering the NBA who would have declared as High Schoolers a year earlier. It is one thing to tank games in years past and end up drafting Dwight Howard #1, who no one had heard of or seen play, but this years’ prize is Greg Oden and Kevin Durant: players equal to Howard, but much more well known, due to their college “careers”. Basically, I am saying we are not going to see this type of talent entering the NBA for several years. Two teams will be rewarded with stud franchise saving players.
There is nothing that David Stern can do to prevent teams from tanking games. Players can easily miss games due to questionable injuries, and coaches can decide it is in the best interest of the franchise to play younger players. This year was unique. Ryan Gomes publicly stated that the Celtics tried to lose games at the end of the year. So Stern’s only option was to fix the lottery to ensure that teams he deemed to have tanked games did not “win” the lottery. The odds of none of the bottom three teams securing one of the 3 spots has to be close to 100/1, but when it happened last night, i was not in the least surprised. While Stern cannot prevent teams from trying to get more ping pong balls, he can prevent those teams from benefiting from losing games on purpose.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Well then, fellow conspiracy theorists, it looks like we have an explanation for the Grizz and Celtics falling to 4/5. I happen to think it was more a “basketball gods” scenario as opposed to any nefarious doings on the part of the commissioner or his staff… but regardless, tough to feel sorry for Team Tank One and Team Tank Two (who were able to tank better than potential Team Tank Three, up in Milli-wau-kay).
On a related note, Nike is headquarted up in the northwest and Oden will be playing up in Portland. Hmmmm…..
And finally, I understand the Trailblazers are entertaining the possibility of acquiring a second lottery pick this year to grab Connelly so he and Oden can stay together (as they’ve been thru high school and college). If they do both end up in Portland, there will be high expectations indeed - given their success together all these years. Course, if they go more than five years without an NBA title, the questions will start - and they’ll be forced to channel Shaq, “We’ve won at every level except the college and pros.” Uh-huh.