The fates of millions of dollars, years of media coverage and many young men’s lives, all decided by a few tiny, hollow balls weighing about a tenth of an ounce.
Nope, for once I’m not talking about Ma Lin or any other legendary Chinese ping-pong players. It’s not even the SAE beer pong tournament. No, it’s something much more widely known, and something much more pathetic than either of these.
It’s the NBA Draft Lottery.
Anyone who turned on ESPN a little early on Tuesday night before Game 1 between Dirk Nowitzki and the Thunder got the treat of one of the oddest spectacles in sports before the game itself tipped off.
For those of you that don’t know, the NBA uses a different system from the other major sports leagues to decide the order of its draft. Instead of making the order depend solely on the teams’ records and playoff performances in the previous season, the NBA holds a lottery to decide the order for all the non-playoff teams. Teams with worse records still have the best chance to get earlier picks, but there is much more randomness thrown in.
And, in this era where computers can sort random numbers and display the results in the blink of an eye (Stanford’s housing draw apparently not included), it’s only natural that the NBA uses…ping-pong balls?
That’s right, your favorite team’s first-round pick (who am I kidding, you’re probably a fair-weather Lakers or Heat fan; you don’t care about the lottery) depends on which ping-pong balls are randomly chosen in a highly official, secretive process. Hey, if it works for other lotteries, why not the NBA?
As silly as this seems, the randomness makes sense for the NBA. After all, no other major sports league relies so heavily on the power of one or two star players. Think about it, in any other league, even a player as talented as LeBron James wouldn’t be able to win a title by himself. He’d probably have to team up with some of the other best players in the league just to have a shot. Can you imagine that happening in the NBA? Oh wait…
In any case, after a massive spectacle that involved some of the most awkward, pointless interviews of all time (“Hey John Wall, what are your chances at getting two straight No. 1 picks in Washington?” “It all depends on luck.”), the order is set. The Cavaliers, trying to rebuild from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-But-Was-Just-Named-In-The-Last-Paragraph, earned the rights to two of the top four picks. And the way the NBA Draft works, especially with this year’s class, the Cavs have roughly a 10 percent chance at getting a decent NBA player in the first round.
Think about it–this year’s top two picks in most people’s minds and mock drafts consist of a guy who was hurt most of last year before coming back in time to lead Duke to an upset loss in the NCAA Tournament (Kyrie Irving) and a guy who 90 percent of the country didn’t know about until that same game (Derrick Williams). And those are the best prospects available. Other top-10 options include a guy who didn’t play organized ball for the past year, a guy who might not want to leave Europe for contract reasons and a guy who averaged 6.3 points per game in Spain this year.
While this class is particularly lacking in flashy names (and good players), it is in some ways par for the draft course. Looking back, the draft is as much of a crapshoot as the lottery. Names like Sam Bowie, Darko Milicic and Greg Oden are ingrained in the collective basketball mind as warnings and, in some cases, laughable mistakes.
But before you go bashing draft blunders, take a closer look at old drafts. Take 2007, when Greg Oden was still Greg Oden-with-knees. Now it seems silly to think of taking Oden over Kevin Durant and Al Horford, who were the next two picks. But back then, who knew?
Who knew Oden would have more surgeries than playoff games by this point? But when you look deeper at that draft, though, you see even more of the unpredictability of drafts in general. After Durant and Horford, there were exactly zero players taken that year that have made an All-Star or All-NBA Team.
Marc Gasol, one of the stars in the Memphis Grizzlies’ surprising playoff run this season, was taken 48th overall that year. He was seen as a lesser version of his brother Pau, and as a foreigner, most teams didn’t know exactly what to make of him. As it turns out, the 10 guys picked immediately before him in that draft have started 78 NBA games–less than a full season–in their careers combined (Gasol outdid that mark this year alone). Gasol’s 2,934 points in three seasons are over double the 1,182 points scored by the other 10 in their careers.
In 2007, what separated Gasol from Kyrylo Fesenko, Stanko Barac, Sun Yue, Chris Richard, Derrick Byars, Adam Haluska, Reyshawn Terry, Jared Jordan, Stephane Lasme and Dominic McGuire?
NBA executives didn’t know. Would you?
Jacob Jaffe drew third overall. So did Michael Jordan. Find out other similarities at jwjaffe “at” stanford.edu.