Basketball Free For All

As I’m sure you remember, Greg Oden will once again miss the rest of the season due to another horrific injury.  This time he fractured his left knee cap.  First, it was a right knee injury in his rookie season that led to microfracture surgery.  Last year, he missed 15 games due to a bone chip in his left knee and 6 games to a foot sprain.  It’s no wonder Blazer fans are scared out of their minds as they’ve gone through big man troubles with Bill Walton and then Sam Bowie.  So what does the future hold for Greg Oden?  Specifically, can he take some precautions to significantly reduce the liklihood of injury?  On a broader note, is it feasible to eliminate the injury prone label from all NBA players?

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The Los Angeles Clippers Memphis Grizzlies win the 2009 NBA Draft Lottery!

1. Los Angeles (17.7%)
2. Memphis (8.3%)
3. Oklahoma City (13.2%)
4. Sacramento (17.7%)
5. Washington (13.7%)
6. Minnesota (38.5%)
7. Golden State (60.0%)
8. New York (72.5%)
9. Toronto (81.3%)
10. Milwaukee (87.0%)
11. New Jersey (90.4%)
12. Charlotte (93.5%)
13. Indiana (96.0%)
14. Phoenix (98.2%)

Although the Clippers won the Blake Griffin Sweepstakes, the Memphis Grizzlies are the ones that really defied that odds and upgraded the most in the lottery. With only an 8.3 percent chance of landing the second pick in this year’s draft, Memphis overcame the biggest odds to secure its lottery pick. With the second pick, the player with the biggest upside is Spanish guard Ricky Rubio. However, the Grizzlies recently traded Kyle Lowry to Houston in a move that was widely interpreted as a sign of support for their young starting point guard out of Ohio State, Mike Conley.

A few months later, how would it look if Memphis turns around and drafts another point guard in this season’s draft? To look at it from another perspective, does it really matter what Conley thinks about the move at all? Well, yes and no. From management’s perspective, the team should take the best player available with the second pick of the draft (no). From a coach’s perspective, it is important to show public support for your point guard because he is the filter between the coaching staff and the players. He makes the entire offense and defense function (yes).

Positional needs can always be addressed during the offseason and even up until the trade deadline. However, a second pick overall allows you the opportunity to get premier talent on the cheap. If you draft by position instead of by talent and ceiling with the second pick in the draft, you end up with Sam Bowie instead of Michael Jordan. Although Memphis does lack size, passing on Rubio could end up being a “Bowie” moment for the Grizzlies franchise as Rubio has the potential to be a very special player.

Regarding the “real” winner of the draft lottery, the Clippers have an opportunity that they can’t screw up. They can’t screw this up, can they? The first step to success for L.A.’s other team is to draft Blake Griffin. No need to spend money on costly workouts or interviews this year. Second, get rid of Zach Randolph. Worst. Possession. Ever. If I am Clippers owner Donald Sterling (which, thankfully, I am not), I have already called, texted or twittered every other owner in the league to personally let them know that Z-Bo is available. That is addition by subtraction (Randolph) and just plain old addition (Griffin). Success!

One of the most anticipated and least understood hallmarks of the NBA season is rapidly approaching. In just over a month, the 2009 NBA Draft will take place at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Before teams can really start to strategize though, the Draft Lottery must first take place.

This year’s Draft Lottery will take place on May 17, 2009 and will alter the fate of franchises, as they have each year since the lottery’s inception in 1985. By most accounts, the lottery system was established to prevent intentional tanking, which many said the Houston Rockets did in order to acquire top draft prospect Hakeem Olajuwon. The irony of the situation is that the Chicago Bulls selected an athletic guard from North Carolina named Michael Jordan with the third pick overall.

So the Rockets’ perceived tanking did not even net them the best player of the 1984 draft class. However, you cannot fault the Rockets franchise for taking The Dream with the first overall pick. His size and athleticism were a slam dunk to translate immediately to the NBA. Almost nobody could have predicted that Jordan would eventually become the league’s best player of all time (well, maybe legendary UNC Coach Dean Smith might have been able to see what was to come or Jordan himself). But I digress…

For the fourteen teams that failed to make the playoffs this year, this Tuesday evening will be one of the most highly anticipated events of the off season. The fate of fourteen franchises rests upon fourteen ping-pong balls and a few independent accountants.

How the Lottery Actually Works

Everyone knows that the draft lottery involves ping-pong balls with teams being assigned a certain probability of obtaining the top three picks. However, few appreciate the subtleties of exactly how the draft lottery is carried out.

Each of the fourteen ping-pong balls is assigned a number, from one through fourteen. For each of the top three picks, four ping-pong balls are selected, with the order of the numbers being irrelevant. By not paying attention to the order in which the balls are selected, it reduces the number of different combinations from24,024 to 1,001 (the 1,001st  combination, 11-12-13-14, does not belong to any team; it is disregarded if it is ever chosen in order to provide a nice, even number for assigning odds).

These number combinations are assigned to the fourteen lottery teams with the team with the worst record “owning” 250 combinations and the team with the best record “owning” a paltry 5 combinations. Thus, this season the Sacramento Kings have a twenty-five percent chance of securing the first pick in this year’s draft and obtaining this year’s consensus number one pick, Oklahoma’s Blake Griffin. On the other end of the spectrum, the Phoenix Suns have a half of a percent chance of winning the 2009 Griffin Sweepstakes. For a complete listing of odds by team and by pick number, refer to the 2009 NBA Draft Wikipedia page.

But what happens if two teams end up with the same (bad) record? How are the number of combinations assigned? This season, there were three pairs of lottery teams that ended the regular season with the same records: Wizards and Clippers (19-63); Timberwolves and Grizzlies (24-58); and Bucks and Nets (34-48). Let’s use the example of the Wizards and Clippers to illustrate how tied records affect the distribution of ping-pong ball combinations.

The Wizards and Clippers tied for the second best-worst record in the league by notching up nineteen wins each in highly disappointing seasons for both franchises. Under normal circumstances, the second worst team is assigned 199 combinations and the third worst team is assigned 156 combinations (giving a combined total of 355). However, in a tie situation, the teams are assigned an almost even share with random drawing determining which team gains the additional ping pong ball (one team gets 178 ping-pong balls and the other team gets 177). This season, the Wizards won the tiebreaker and were awarded the 178th ping-pong ball combination.

So that is a crash course in how the 1,000 combinations are assigned to the fourteen lottery teams. With the combinations assigned, the next step is the lottery itself which is repeated three times to determine who will obtain the first, second and third picks. For the first pick overall, four ping-pong balls are selected with the team that “owns” the pulled combination being the big lottery winner. The balls are replaced. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. Once the first three picks are assigned, the remaining teams are assigned picks four through fourteen based solely upon records, with pick four going to the team of the remaining eleven with the worst record and so on (refer back to tie breakers for teams with the same records).

Final Thoughts

Although it matters a great deal, draft position is not the only thing that matters when it comes to drafting the next superstar. Although there is a strong correlation between draft position and career performance, there are plenty of examples of teams drafting a Sam Bowie before a Jordan or a team snagging a Gilbert Arenas or a Rashard Lewis in the second round of the draft. The single most important factor in a team’s ability to spot and draft the next superstar is the team’s front office and the due diligence they conduct between the lottery and the actual draft. This is where scouting, workouts, interviews, research and just plain intuition come into play and separate the great franchises from the average.