journalist mindlessly bitches about the NBA draft lottery; makes zero good points

its over a week old, but please, do enjoy this fine piece of garbage from aol fanhouse writer steve aschburner. everyone knows the NBA draft lottery is somewhat controversial. some support it, saying it discourages teams from "tanking" down the stretch because even finishing with the worst record in the league only gives you a 25% chance at the top pick. this in comparison to other leagues, notably the NFL, where finishing with the worst record gives you a 100% chance at the top pick. others dislike the lottery, because sometimes (the orlando magic in 1993 being the most extreme example) teams that were nowhere close to being bottomfeeders end up getting a very high pick. thus, teams that didn't "tank" and really genuinely were terrible arent getting what they deserve- the best chance possible to help their team improve. somehow, over the course of this article, aschburner manages to flip flop between both sides of the argument, contradict everything he says at least once, almost declare that the lottery should be modified to give bad teams even worse odds at getting the top 3 picks, and ultimately provide one of the worst non-solutions to a sports related problem i have ever read. its all pretty disorienting. also, this is going to be pretty long. but its such a bad article, especially at the end, that i strongly encourage you to stick with me and finish. i promise youll feel all warm and fuzzy if you do.

NBA Comes Out as Loser in Draft Lottery
System Again Leaves More Deserving Teams Out of Top 3

remember that subheadline. eventually it will make steve look like a complete moron.

The NBA's draft lottery blew up on national television Tuesday night so stealthily, so thoroughly and so quietly that the broadcasters covering the pseudo-event didn't see, hear or feel the blast until several long moments later.

The explosion was muted, like a bomb deep beneath an ocean pumping a hump of a bubble to the surface, the damage all done below. The TV guys and probably a lot of viewers didn't catch on right away -- they were fixated on the teams that would slot into the Nos. 1 and 2 spots at the very end -- but other, more dedicated or more frustrated lottery followers knew things had gone awry the moment the Milwaukee Bucks were announced as the No. 6 pick.

that is a horrendously crappy pseudo-run-on-sentence of an intro. i write crappy sentences all the time... but im not being paid to do this, and besides that im writing from my parents' basement wearing nothing but dirty underpants (as all bloggers do). nothing can blow up "stealthily." if a high school english teacher were grading this, she would write "WORD CHOICE?" in red pen here. also, i watched the broadcast of the lottery results announcement. the broadcasters had a very firm grip on what was happening the entire time, and recognized the surprising nature of the results almost instantly. they didnt make a huge deal about it or get frustrated for no apparent reason like aschburner is about to do throughout his article, but they did point out that the bucks, celtics, and grizzlies all dropped an unexpected 3 spots. and your extended explosion analogy is freaking terrible, aschburner.

Anyone familiar with the mechanics of the league's annual Ping-Pong losers' derby realized immediately that the system, again, had failed. And that a messy situation for the NBA had just gotten way messier.

if the point of the lottery system is to prevent teams from tanking games, then (as aschburner himself will say later in this same article) it definitely succeeded. on the other hand, if the point of the system is to make absolutely sure that the teams with the worst records get the best picks, then i guess it failed. but if the league wanted that scenario to happen, there wouldnt be a lottery in the first place. they'd just do things the way the NFL does them. this is equivalent to saying "this past year the rich paid the government a higher percentage of their income than the poor. our country's progressive taxation policies have failed, yet again."

also, i dont know what "messy situation" he's referring to... there hasnt been any lottery controversy for several years now. people still talk about the famous lottery that brought patrick ewing to the knicks, that orlando situation in '93 i already referenced, and how the spurs got lucky to land tim duncan in '97. but those are mostly distant memories. the more current draft related "messy situation" is the problem with tanking ive already mentioned. and again, as we will later see, aschburner acknowledges that boston and milwaukee did exactly that! so other than memphis getting hosed, what exactly is the problem? dont hold your breath waiting for a clear answer. youre not going to get it.

By lottery rule, a maximum of three teams could move up from the pack into the top three spots. That meant teams could drop no more than three places in selection order. The first eight cards unsheathed by NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver lined up exactly, by inverse order of the teams' records, as they were supposed to.

Ever so briefly, it appeared as if no team was going to move, that the entire process was stick to the chalk and be a monumental waste of time, money and hype. Then the Bucks dropped from third, their statistically targeted position, all the way to sixth.

Uh oh.

let the contradictions begin- first the lottery was bad because the teams with the worst records didnt get the best picks. but now, if that theoretically hadn't happened and everyone had gotten the pick they were supposed to get, steve implies this would have made the whole deal "a waste of time, money, and hype." make up your mind, idiot. calm down and tell me what the problem is.

Instantly, we knew that three teams had moved up, the only possible way for Milwaukee to drop the maximum number of spots. Instantly, before Silver even reached for the next oversized envelope, we knew that Boston and Memphis were about to land at No. 5 and No. 4, respectively.

Instantly, before a thousand distraught Celtics fans even had time to grab their bricks, we knew that serious trauma was about to be inflicted on all manner of LCD, plasma, DLP and traditional picture-tube television sets. Instantly, we knew that Memphis boss Jerry West had made the right choice in waving goodbye to the Grizzlies this spring, but unfortunately now for the wrong reason.

im not a professional writer but im pretty sure starting four consecutive sentences with the same melodramatic adverb is dumb and annoying. we get the point- once the bucks were revealed at number 6, discerning viewers knew right away that the fates of the celtics and grizzlies were sealed as well. as ive already said, the TV guys didnt exactly fail to notice this. they didnt shit their pants about it, but they definitely brought it up. also- considering west's reason for leaving the grizzlies is because hes in his late 60s, has a son playing college basketball who he wants to watch, and doesnt want a fulltime GM role anymore im pretty sure hes still doing it for the right reason(s).

That left three relatively undeserving teams vying, in some order, for the top three spots in next month's NBA draft: The perpetually mismanaged and unloved Atlanta Hawks, the near-homeless and potentially relocating Seattle SuperSonics and the already-stocked-with-superb-young-talent Portland Trail Blazers.

i know he says "relatively" undeserving, but this is pretty dumb. i think the difference between the crappiness of the hawks/sonics and celtics/bucks/grizzlies is pretty much negligible. he doesnt exactly make either of the former sound like theyre on the verge of a title. the blazers, well, they got lucky. good for them. the sentence still mostly contradicts itself.

A draft class boasting two of the most exciting players in recent college basketball history, Ohio State center Greg Oden and Texas forward Kevin Durant, was getting skewed -- some might say screwed -- because the balls came up crazy in the NBA hopper.

no one would say the draft class itself got "screwed". nice try for the play on words there, though.

This is what we and the league were left with:

get ready for a steady stream of contradictions and pure confusion as steve breaks down the outlook for most of the teams who were involved with the lottery. as a side note, i love the word choice here- he makes it sound like every NBA fan out there is picking up the pieces of their love for the game after this monumental tragedy of a lottery. relax, steve.

-- Portland, which cleaned up in last year's draft (Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy, No. 2 man LaMarcus Aldridge and budding point guard star Sergio Rodriguez), now figures to add Oden, the best center prospect since Shaquille O'Neal and Alonzo Mourning entered the league together in 1992. Assuming Aldridge can log most of his minutes at power forward, the Blazers are in position now to trade 20-10 man Zach Randolph, a headache too reminiscent of their "Jail Blazers" days, for even more young assets.

no problems here- the blazers are in great shape. however, i think its important to note that roy was taken with the 6th overall pick and rodriguez with the 27th. the blazers were lucky to have acquired 2 lottery selections but its not like theyre going to end up with the no. 1 pick in back to back years like the magic. rodriguez, notably, is a guy who has greatly exceeded expectations. or maybe the blazers' scouts knew something everyone else didn't. either way, no one should be mad about them having rodriguez in addition to these other guys. basically every team in the league passed on a chance to get him.

-- Seattle, stuck in its quest for a new arena, is in position to grab Durant, a multi-dimensional player capable of creating a buzz unlike anything the Sonics have had since the days of Gary Payton, Shawn Kemp and coach George Karl. Trouble is, it's not as much buzz as Oden would have brought and the Sonics still might end up being Bekins-ed down to Oklahoma City by their out-of-town ownership. Even if the franchise stays in Seattle, it will watch Oden's development play out three hours to the south via I-5, for its nearest rival in the Northwest Division.

so... confusing. a minute ago, the sonics were a bunch of lucky bastards who screwed poor little memphis/boston/milwaukee out of their birthright. now, even though they jumped to pick number 2 when they were supposed to have number 5, THEY are somehow the ones who got screwed? make up your mind, idiot. are the sonics lucky or aren't they?

-- Atlanta winds up retaining its pick, thanks to top-three protection. Had the Hawks stayed at No. 4 or slipped back, their pick would have gone to the Phoenix Suns, allowing coach Mike D'Antoni, Steve Nash and crew to add a valuable piece off the bench that maybe could have pushed the league's most exciting and entertaining team all the way to the Finals for once. Instead, Brandan Wright or Al Horford or another top prospect will join a bunch of other top prospects -- the Hawks will have picked third, fifth, second and sixth in consecutive drafts, working backward from this one -- playing aimlessly in front of empty seats at Philips Arena.

same idea, roughly. a few paragraphs ago the hawks were the beneficiaries of everything thats wrong with the lottery. now we hear that the teams plays aimlessly in front of a sparse crowd. hmmm, sounds like just the kind of team that needs more talent. at this point steve has probably forgotten what he was angry about.

-- Memphis, after posting the NBA's worst record (22-60) with a minimum of alleged "tanking," gets penalized again. The Grizzlies had the deck temporarily stacked against them by the NBA Board of Governors upon entering as an expansion club in Vancouver in 1995, barred with Toronto from earning a top pick on merit. Now the Grizzlies, who also play before a disturbing number of empty seats at the FedExForum, miss out again thanks to a bad system.

a very fair blurb. its true, they got screwed, and didnt seem to tank much. too bad. these things happen. its about to get ugly, though.

-- Plenty of fans who root for other NBA teams are reveling in Boston's pain today. The Celtics tanked games as conspicuously as anyone in the season's final month, and the team's heavy media coverage flushed out the lottery angle as far back as, what, November? Worse, Boston fans felt they deserved some lottery luck, 10 years after the Tim Duncan debacle drove coach Rick Pitino back to college and left the Celtics' fate in the hands of an Antoine Walker for so long.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand... i think i just pulled some tissue in my brain trying to figure out why its bad that they got screwed. wait! aschburner is about to make a horrible attempt at explaining himself!

But you know what? The NBA is a stronger league if the Celtics -- its most storied franchise -- are a legitimate contender with a true marquee player. Boston is important as an NBA anchor market, on par with New York and Los Angeles and ahead of Philadelphia and Chicago. Its tradition, the passion of its fans and its media and its role in a better East-West competitive balance make it vital to the other 29 clubs, in ways that a strong Golden State or Orlando or Milwaukee club never would be.

so the celtics should have gotten a better pick, because theyre a storied franchise and its good for the league. ok. worst fucking argument ive ever heard. moving on.

-- Speaking of Milwaukee, the sympathy factor starts to slip with the Bucks' fall to sixth. This team was lucky enough to land the No. 1 pick (Andrew Bogut) just two years ago and has the No. 7 guy from that draft (Charlie Villanueva) on board as well. The Bucks shut down Villanueva and Bogut early, and Michael Redd missed 29 games and played only twice after March 30.

ok, so the bucks probably tanked too. and they have a lot of young talent on their roster. and they dont deserve a high pick because they're not "important as an NBA anchor market" like boston. (seriously, i cannot get over that. that is the stupidest shit i have ever read on a major sports website.) so why are we supposed to feel sorry for them? steve never really tells us, even though his thesis so far has basically been "the lottery is flawed because teams with bad records arent getting the high picks they deserve." remember that subheadline? how much nonsense that make at this point? he just kind of sounds like a bitter celtics fan, but his bio at the bottom of the column says he was a timberwolves writer for several years. so your guess as to why this column blows is as good as mine.

-- Minnesota? Eleven trips to the lottery, 11 failed attempts to move up. Whatever warm and fuzzies Kevin Garnett might engender from serious basketball aficionados get balanced away by the front office's mistakes, most of them related to the draft (losing three first-round picks over Joe Smith's illegal contracts, picking players such as Ndudi Ebi and William Avery, and outsmarting themselves with the Brandon Roy-Randy Foye swap last June). The Timberwolves, too, were guilty for the second consecutive year of backpedaling their way down the standings, not so much to improve their draft position but to avoid paying off the Clippers -- for the 2005 Marko Jaric/Sam Cassell deal -- with a pick worse than No. 10.

so we should feel bad that they didnt move up (first sentence). except that we shouldnt, because theyve made lots of dumb moves and probably tanked this year (rest of paragraph).

-- Of the remaining lottery teams, Chicago -- in possession of New York's pick, courtesy of the Eddy Curry trade -- was the only one whose climb into the top three might have made one team while breaking another, simultaneously. Knicks fans will have an easier time getting over the loss of the ninth-best prospect. Unless, say, he becomes a No. 9 the way Amare Stoudemire, Shawn Marion and Tracy McGrady were No. 9s.

irrelevant to what you claimed you were going to write about.

-- It would have been nice to see Oden wind up close to home in Indiana, had the Pacers beaten the odds for the No. 1 pick. It would have been nice to see Philadelphia, which survived the Allen Iverson and Chris Webber trades nicely and actually played hard down the stretch, get rewarded with some lottery luck. It would have been nice if New Orleans, as it tries to revive its franchise in the Big Easy, had been blessed with one of the top two picks.

it would be nice if good things always happened to good people, war and hunger were ended forever, and if i didnt have to write for this blog because sportswriters like you got their heads out of their asses.

Then again, six winning Powerball numbers, on a ticket somewhere in my house where I actually could find it, would be really, really nice, and that's not happening, either.

that too. actually, that would help both of us, because if you won powerball youd probably quit this job. everybody wins!

Which leaves us with the draft lottery itself. NBA commissioner David Stern, who hasn't had a very good May so far, told reporters before the event Tuesday that he doesn't like the way the system gets played by teams trying to improve their odds of winning by losing.

much as i often dislike stern, he makes a great point. maybe the painful lessons learned by boston and milwaukee will resonate with some teams in the future, and those teams will actually play their best players all season long and not screw over their fans for a slightly better shot at a better player in the draft.

In a sense, the improbable result from Tuesday ought to argue pretty loudly against such tanking. That Portland, Seattle and Atlanta would line up for the top three picks had less than a one-10th of one percent chance of happening. Combined, there was a 60 percent chance that Memphis, Boston or Milwaukee would land the No. 1 pick. And still teams maneuver, too often taking money out of fans' pockets with their lack of serious competition.

"It's a system that favors teams to not win games," Philadelphia president Billy King told reporters. "Anytime you have a system like that, it's not good for the league."

ok, good, weve established that aschburner is anti-tanking. why were then supposed to feel sorry for milwaukee and boston continues to go unexplained.

The way to end the tanking would be to give every lottery team one Ping-Pong ball, no weighting involved. Then the only temptation to lose might come from a club faced with a shot at a franchise-altering draft pick vs. a rough first-round playoff series against a No. 1 seed. And Golden State's work against Dallas this year might have enough shelf life to stifle that.

thus giving teams with bad records even LESS of a chance of winning the lottery! thatll solve all our problems! the NBA actually tried this, or a variation of it, from 1985-1989. it was not popular for obvious reasons. but as were about to see, aschburner doesnt recommend this system.

Unfortunately, we'd get more of what happened Tuesday: The most deserving teams missing out on the help they desperately need. That's what a draft is supposed to provide anyway.

fair enough, i agree.

So what Stern and his lieutenants in the NBA need to do is reinstate the old East-West coin flip between the conference bottom-dwellers, let teams draft in inverse order of record after that -- and properly police the final month of regular-season games, to make sure penalties are stiff for those tempted to tank.

at least aschburner seems to have realized the problem with his line of thinking (about 20 paragraphs too late)- you cant be both anti-tanking and anti-lottery. the latter was created to prevent the former. in a twisted way they are opposites of each other. look at the NFL's non-lottery system. if you like it, then you have to admit, youre leaving room for tanking. if you hate it, then youd have to agree that one of the easiest ways to fix it is to enstate a lottery. steve tries to get around this by talking about "imposing penalties" on those who would tank under his proposed non-lottery system. lets hear him out before i rip him to shreds.

If the league can throw the book at the likes of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw, according to the letter of the law, it can flex a lot more when the Celtics sit starters, when Kevin Garnett checks out five games from the finish line or when Milwaukee lines up more suits than warmups on its bench.

no, it cannot. it abso-goddamn-lutely cannot. how is the league supposed to tell team to play their injured players? in many cases of "injured/inactive" star players on teams fading down the stretch over the course of the past however many years, i would guess that its very possible they could have been on the floor if their teams really needed them there. but there is a bottom line here: the team says theyre injured. how the hell is the league going to fight you on this if youre the GM/head of operations/coach for one of these teams? put a quota on minutes your stars have to play every night? fine you? bring in league approved doctors to examine players and overrule the diagnosis of your team physician? slap you on the wrist? im pretty much flabbergasted. what the hell is he talking about? i give steve a "D-" on this column, only for his acknowledgment that getting rid of the lottery heavily adds to the incentive to tank. then i'll lower it to an "F" for his completely moronic attempt to explain how the league could remove this incentive. dear lord. what is this profession coming to.