NBA Draft

[msgkings322]

Ref calls are much easier to affect than the overly complicated draft lottery. Just because it isn't done in front of a TV camera, that allows you to become a "random denier" or whatever you want to call it. Doesn't make it one iota appropriate or accurate however.

Conspiracists create comforting fictions to soothe their anxieties about having little control over their measly lives.

 

[eaglesnut]

Ref calls are much easier to affect than the overly complicated draft lottery. Just because it isn't done in front of a TV camera, that allows you to become a "random denier" or whatever you want to call it. Doesn't make it one iota appropriate or accurate however.

If it was in front of a camera they would fake it too. But why bother when no one really cares that it's fake. Some win, some lose. Just keep the ball moving and count the money.

 

[eaglesnut]

Conspiracists create comforting fictions to soothe their anxieties about having little control over their measly lives.

Too bad your stupidity won't get you slaughtered

 

[Macho Grande]

Long article about what took place in the room where the lottery drawing took place. It's kinda hard to support any tinfoil hat conspiracy theories when you know that every lottery team had a representative there to witness the entire process, as well as 19 members of the media.


Zach Lowe, ESPN Senior Writer
May 17, 2023, 08:00 AM ET


Seconds before the pingpong balls started flying in the real NBA lottery drawing, held in a locked-down room shortly before the televised version, Brian Wright, the San Antonio Spurs general manager, reached his right hand across his chest and tapped his left shirt pocket twice.

That is the end of the secret handshake Wright shares with his 9-year-old son. Something was in that pocket -- some good luck trinket -- but Wright would not reveal what it was after the Spurs won the momentous 2023 lottery and the right to draft French phenom Victor Wembanyama. At their family home, Wright's son was supposed to have a corresponding good luck charm and execute their secret handshake, Wright said.

Hours earlier, R.C. Buford, the Spurs CEO, had arrived at his hotel room in Chicago and was astonished to see a familiar blue leather chair with a card attached. It was the same chair Buford had been sitting in in his office in San Antonio when the Spurs won the Tim Duncan lottery in 1997. He had given the chair to his daughter when she went to college, he told ESPN after the lottery Tuesday. His family secretly sent it to his hotel.

"I had a meditation in my blue leather chair this afternoon," Buford said.

Back in the drawing room, the first pingpong ball came up: No. 14. Fourteen balls, numbered 1-14, zip around a classic air-powered lottery machine before a league attorney stops the machine and sucks one up. That ball becomes the first of four drawn in sequence, eventually making up a four-number combination. There are 1,001 possible four-number combinations using the numbers 1-14. The NBA tosses out one of them -- 11, 12, 13, 14 -- and divides the rest among the 14 lottery teams based on their team record and lottery odds.

The Spurs, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets held 140 combinations apiece -- 420 of the 1,000. The New Orleans Pelicans, the lottery team with the best record, owned only five.

The combinations go in numerical order, so that the worst teams -- Houston, Detroit, San Antonio -- have almost all the combinations featuring the numbers 1 and 2. Seeing 14 as the first ball had the whole room in play for Wembanyama for a fleeting 10-second window. Wright panicked. "Oh my god, we are out," he thought to himself, Wright told ESPN in the drawing room minutes after the drawing ended. (ESPN had one of 19 media members present to watch the drawing.) Each lottery team sends one person to the room to represent them. They sit in rows, with the teams with the best odds up front and the long shots in the back.

In that last row, Teresa Resch, the Toronto Raptors vice president of basketball operations, elbowed Bryson Graham, the New Orleans Pelicans assistant general manager, when that 14 came up, both recalled: We have a chance!

Ten seconds after the 14, up popped the next ball: 5. Almost everyone was still in play. Michael Finley, the Dallas Mavericks assistant general manager, knew that any of the teams below the Mavericks in the lottery pecking order -- the Raptors, Pelicans, Chicago Bulls and Oklahoma City Thunder -- leaping into the top-4 could knock the Mavs back from No. 10 to No. 11. That would have meant the Mavericks sending their top-10 protected pick to the New York Knicks -- a potential embarrassment given Dallas' late-season tanking to slide out of the play-in race and into that No. 10 slot. (The NBA fined the Mavericks $750,000 for "conduct detrimental to the league.")

Finley stayed calm, knowing the odds still favored the worst teams. "I wasn't nervous," he said. Finley won a championship with the Spurs in 2007, and joked after that drawing that perhaps he should have brought along his Spurs championship ring for good luck.

(On the flip side, many within the league feared the Mavericks 3% chance of winning the lottery -- and being rewarded for their late-season resting with Wembanyama.)

All around the room, team officials flipped through eight sheets of paper showing which teams owned each combination. The mood was frantic.


Ten seconds later, the third ball: No. 8. Several teams were still alive. Brett Greenberg, the Washington Wizards assistant general manager, knew instantly the Wizards had a chance. All 67 of their combinations had the No. 5 as the lowest digit. There were 11 balls left in the hopper. If the last ball drawn was No. 7, No. 9, No. 10, No. 11, No. 12 or No. 13, the Wizards would get Wembanyama. Eleven balls left; six were winners for Washington.

"Holy s---, we have a chance," Greenberg thought to himself. He hunched over his combination sheets and took a deep breath. Greenberg was well-stocked with lucky charms: his father's lucky coin (a Kona dollar); a replica 1978 Washington Bullets championship ring; and a silver coin inscribed with the Wizards logo and the phrase "game-changer" -- a memento Flip Saunders, the Wizards head coach from 2009-2012, gave to players who made pivotal plays. Greenberg also wore orange socks -- his grandmother's favorite color. (Jon Phelps, the Detroit Pistons senior director of basketball strategy, wore socks with dinosaurs on them -- a gift from his nephew, and the same pair he wore when the Pistons won the 2021 drawing.)

Joel Glass, the Orlando Magic's chief communications officer and drawing room representative, also knew his team had shot: The No. 4 ball would send Wembanyama to Orlando. Glass continued his tradition of bringing the pingpong balls from Orlando's previous lottery wins -- Shaquille O'Neal, the No. 1 pick they turned into Anfernee Hardaway, Dwight Howard and Paolo Banchero last season -- into the drawing room for luck. For the first time, Glass carried them in a small briefcase emblazoned with the Magic logo. It was gently suggested to Glass that needing a suitcase to carry all the franchise's lottery winning balls was perhaps not a great sign.

Glass squinted to see if the last ball showed a single-digit.

Meanwhile, a No. 6 would give the Indiana Pacers the No. 1 pick. "For a short second, it was pure joy," Kevin Pritchard, the Pacers president of basketball operations, told ESPN afterward. A No. 3 ball would have sent Wembanyama to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Then the final ball: No. 2. That disqualified most teams, but Wright wasn't sure if the Spurs owned the winning combination: 14-5-8-2. As Wright scanned those eight pages, Clay Allen, the Houston Rockets general counsel, tapped him: "I think that's you," Wright recalled.

A league official announced that it was indeed the Spurs. Wright barely reacted. He stayed silent and gazed downward until Allen reached over to shake his hand.

"Brian was way too calm," Graham joked afterward. "I mean, come on!"

"I was going to get up and run around the room," Resch said of her plans to celebrate if the Raptors had won. (Resch was the team's drawing room representative when they moved up to No. 4 in the 2021 lottery; she recalled raising her arms and letting out a brief "woop!" Another executive in the room was worried he would scream so loudly if his team won that security would have to subdue him or eject him.)


The drawing was largely anticlimactic after that, with the Charlotte Hornets, Blazers and Rockets claiming picks No. 2-4 in that order. (The NBA actually had to draw seven four-number combinations; the Spurs and Hornets each "won" the No. 4 pick -- the Spurs twice! -- before it finally went to Houston. That is believed to be a record for total drawings in one lottery, league officials said.)

After the drawing, everyone stays in the room for about an hour until the televised reveal is over. No one is allowed to leave. Everyone in the room surrenders their phones, tablets, laptops and smart watches upon entering so that no one can communicate the results to the outside world. The attendees gossip and eat until watching ESPN's lottery broadcast -- the only people alive who know the results already.

Wright sat in his same seat in the front row watching to see the moment the rest of the world would learn the Spurs had won. When that moment came -- when Peter Holt, the Spurs governor, leaped and shouted in joy on the stage, the camera then cutting to an emotional Buford sitting in the ballroom -- Wright tapped his chest twice again.

Buford knows better than most how one player can transform an entire franchise. The Spurs were stuck in the middle for several years after trading Kawhi Leonard in 2018 before making a choice over the last year to go into a full rebuild -- peaking with the June 2022 trade that sent Dejounte Murray to the Atlanta Hawks for three first-round picks.

"We made a decision last summer," Buford told ESPN. "We liked the way this year went for our team. We had good young players getting better. We've seen the impact and transformation that one player can have on a program. We hope we can do everything we can to set another player up for that kind of success."

Some other tidbits from the drawing room and the ongoing draft combine in Chicago:

• The Blazers moving up from No. 5 to No. 3 raised eyebrows all over the league right away. The Blazers could of course keep that pick, but rival executives expect them to explore the kind of veteran help that pick -- plus other players -- might fetch for Damian Lillard. (Executives also expect the Blazers to re-sign Jerami Grant.) The No. 3 pick by itself won't net a game-changing veteran. What might the combination of that pick and Anfernee Simons get Portland? If they do try to load up around Lillard -- which requires Lillard indicating he'd like to stay in Portland -- expect the Blazers to go after wings and big men, sources said.

Portland also has Shaedon Sharpe, but his strong finish to the season would make the Blazers even queasier about including him in any kind of win-now trade...

• I'd also expect at some point for the Blazers to try to renegotiate the protections on the first-round pick they owe the Bulls from the 2021 three-team trade in which they acquired Larry Nance Jr. The pick is lottery-protected every year through 2028 -- restricting the Blazers ability to deal picks in trades. Such renegotiations are always tricky. The Bulls will want something.

 

[msgkings322]

Too bad your stupidity won't get you slaughtered

View attachment 328828

 

[msgkings322]

Long article about what took place in the room where the lottery drawing took place. It's kinda hard to support any tinfoil hat conspiracy theories when you know that every lottery team had a representative there to witness the entire process, as well as 19 members of the media.


Zach Lowe, ESPN Senior Writer
May 17, 2023, 08:00 AM ET


Seconds before the pingpong balls started flying in the real NBA lottery drawing, held in a locked-down room shortly before the televised version, Brian Wright, the San Antonio Spurs general manager, reached his right hand across his chest and tapped his left shirt pocket twice.

That is the end of the secret handshake Wright shares with his 9-year-old son. Something was in that pocket -- some good luck trinket -- but Wright would not reveal what it was after the Spurs won the momentous 2023 lottery and the right to draft French phenom Victor Wembanyama. At their family home, Wright's son was supposed to have a corresponding good luck charm and execute their secret handshake, Wright said.

Hours earlier, R.C. Buford, the Spurs CEO, had arrived at his hotel room in Chicago and was astonished to see a familiar blue leather chair with a card attached. It was the same chair Buford had been sitting in in his office in San Antonio when the Spurs won the Tim Duncan lottery in 1997. He had given the chair to his daughter when she went to college, he told ESPN after the lottery Tuesday. His family secretly sent it to his hotel.

"I had a meditation in my blue leather chair this afternoon," Buford said.

Back in the drawing room, the first pingpong ball came up: No. 14. Fourteen balls, numbered 1-14, zip around a classic air-powered lottery machine before a league attorney stops the machine and sucks one up. That ball becomes the first of four drawn in sequence, eventually making up a four-number combination. There are 1,001 possible four-number combinations using the numbers 1-14. The NBA tosses out one of them -- 11, 12, 13, 14 -- and divides the rest among the 14 lottery teams based on their team record and lottery odds.

The Spurs, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets held 140 combinations apiece -- 420 of the 1,000. The New Orleans Pelicans, the lottery team with the best record, owned only five.

The combinations go in numerical order, so that the worst teams -- Houston, Detroit, San Antonio -- have almost all the combinations featuring the numbers 1 and 2. Seeing 14 as the first ball had the whole room in play for Wembanyama for a fleeting 10-second window. Wright panicked. "Oh my god, we are out," he thought to himself, Wright told ESPN in the drawing room minutes after the drawing ended. (ESPN had one of 19 media members present to watch the drawing.) Each lottery team sends one person to the room to represent them. They sit in rows, with the teams with the best odds up front and the long shots in the back.

In that last row, Teresa Resch, the Toronto Raptors vice president of basketball operations, elbowed Bryson Graham, the New Orleans Pelicans assistant general manager, when that 14 came up, both recalled: We have a chance!

Ten seconds after the 14, up popped the next ball: 5. Almost everyone was still in play. Michael Finley, the Dallas Mavericks assistant general manager, knew that any of the teams below the Mavericks in the lottery pecking order -- the Raptors, Pelicans, Chicago Bulls and Oklahoma City Thunder -- leaping into the top-4 could knock the Mavs back from No. 10 to No. 11. That would have meant the Mavericks sending their top-10 protected pick to the New York Knicks -- a potential embarrassment given Dallas' late-season tanking to slide out of the play-in race and into that No. 10 slot. (The NBA fined the Mavericks $750,000 for "conduct detrimental to the league.")

Finley stayed calm, knowing the odds still favored the worst teams. "I wasn't nervous," he said. Finley won a championship with the Spurs in 2007, and joked after that drawing that perhaps he should have brought along his Spurs championship ring for good luck.

(On the flip side, many within the league feared the Mavericks 3% chance of winning the lottery -- and being rewarded for their late-season resting with Wembanyama.)

All around the room, team officials flipped through eight sheets of paper showing which teams owned each combination. The mood was frantic.


Ten seconds later, the third ball: No. 8. Several teams were still alive. Brett Greenberg, the Washington Wizards assistant general manager, knew instantly the Wizards had a chance. All 67 of their combinations had the No. 5 as the lowest digit. There were 11 balls left in the hopper. If the last ball drawn was No. 7, No. 9, No. 10, No. 11, No. 12 or No. 13, the Wizards would get Wembanyama. Eleven balls left; six were winners for Washington.

"Holy s---, we have a chance," Greenberg thought to himself. He hunched over his combination sheets and took a deep breath. Greenberg was well-stocked with lucky charms: his father's lucky coin (a Kona dollar); a replica 1978 Washington Bullets championship ring; and a silver coin inscribed with the Wizards logo and the phrase "game-changer" -- a memento Flip Saunders, the Wizards head coach from 2009-2012, gave to players who made pivotal plays. Greenberg also wore orange socks -- his grandmother's favorite color. (Jon Phelps, the Detroit Pistons senior director of basketball strategy, wore socks with dinosaurs on them -- a gift from his nephew, and the same pair he wore when the Pistons won the 2021 drawing.)

Joel Glass, the Orlando Magic's chief communications officer and drawing room representative, also knew his team had shot: The No. 4 ball would send Wembanyama to Orlando. Glass continued his tradition of bringing the pingpong balls from Orlando's previous lottery wins -- Shaquille O'Neal, the No. 1 pick they turned into Anfernee Hardaway, Dwight Howard and Paolo Banchero last season -- into the drawing room for luck. For the first time, Glass carried them in a small briefcase emblazoned with the Magic logo. It was gently suggested to Glass that needing a suitcase to carry all the franchise's lottery winning balls was perhaps not a great sign.

Glass squinted to see if the last ball showed a single-digit.

Meanwhile, a No. 6 would give the Indiana Pacers the No. 1 pick. "For a short second, it was pure joy," Kevin Pritchard, the Pacers president of basketball operations, told ESPN afterward. A No. 3 ball would have sent Wembanyama to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Then the final ball: No. 2. That disqualified most teams, but Wright wasn't sure if the Spurs owned the winning combination: 14-5-8-2. As Wright scanned those eight pages, Clay Allen, the Houston Rockets general counsel, tapped him: "I think that's you," Wright recalled.

A league official announced that it was indeed the Spurs. Wright barely reacted. He stayed silent and gazed downward until Allen reached over to shake his hand.

"Brian was way too calm," Graham joked afterward. "I mean, come on!"

"I was going to get up and run around the room," Resch said of her plans to celebrate if the Raptors had won. (Resch was the team's drawing room representative when they moved up to No. 4 in the 2021 lottery; she recalled raising her arms and letting out a brief "woop!" Another executive in the room was worried he would scream so loudly if his team won that security would have to subdue him or eject him.)


The drawing was largely anticlimactic after that, with the Charlotte Hornets, Blazers and Rockets claiming picks No. 2-4 in that order. (The NBA actually had to draw seven four-number combinations; the Spurs and Hornets each "won" the No. 4 pick -- the Spurs twice! -- before it finally went to Houston. That is believed to be a record for total drawings in one lottery, league officials said.)

After the drawing, everyone stays in the room for about an hour until the televised reveal is over. No one is allowed to leave. Everyone in the room surrenders their phones, tablets, laptops and smart watches upon entering so that no one can communicate the results to the outside world. The attendees gossip and eat until watching ESPN's lottery broadcast -- the only people alive who know the results already.

Wright sat in his same seat in the front row watching to see the moment the rest of the world would learn the Spurs had won. When that moment came -- when Peter Holt, the Spurs governor, leaped and shouted in joy on the stage, the camera then cutting to an emotional Buford sitting in the ballroom -- Wright tapped his chest twice again.

Buford knows better than most how one player can transform an entire franchise. The Spurs were stuck in the middle for several years after trading Kawhi Leonard in 2018 before making a choice over the last year to go into a full rebuild -- peaking with the June 2022 trade that sent Dejounte Murray to the Atlanta Hawks for three first-round picks.

"We made a decision last summer," Buford told ESPN. "We liked the way this year went for our team. We had good young players getting better. We've seen the impact and transformation that one player can have on a program. We hope we can do everything we can to set another player up for that kind of success."

Some other tidbits from the drawing room and the ongoing draft combine in Chicago:

• The Blazers moving up from No. 5 to No. 3 raised eyebrows all over the league right away. The Blazers could of course keep that pick, but rival executives expect them to explore the kind of veteran help that pick -- plus other players -- might fetch for Damian Lillard. (Executives also expect the Blazers to re-sign Jerami Grant.) The No. 3 pick by itself won't net a game-changing veteran. What might the combination of that pick and Anfernee Simons get Portland? If they do try to load up around Lillard -- which requires Lillard indicating he'd like to stay in Portland -- expect the Blazers to go after wings and big men, sources said.

Portland also has Shaedon Sharpe, but his strong finish to the season would make the Blazers even queasier about including him in any kind of win-now trade...

• I'd also expect at some point for the Blazers to try to renegotiate the protections on the first-round pick they owe the Bulls from the 2021 three-team trade in which they acquired Larry Nance Jr. The pick is lottery-protected every year through 2028 -- restricting the Blazers ability to deal picks in trades. Such renegotiations are always tricky. The Bulls will want something.

@eaglesnut says: "Fake news, NBA plants these stories, you are all sheep"

 

[eaglesnut]

Long article about what took place in the room where the lottery drawing took place. It's kinda hard to support any tinfoil hat conspiracy theories when you know that every lottery team had a representative there to witness the entire process, as well as 19 members of the media.


Zach Lowe, ESPN Senior Writer
May 17, 2023, 08:00 AM ET


Seconds before the pingpong balls started flying in the real NBA lottery drawing, held in a locked-down room shortly before the televised version, Brian Wright, the San Antonio Spurs general manager, reached his right hand across his chest and tapped his left shirt pocket twice.

That is the end of the secret handshake Wright shares with his 9-year-old son. Something was in that pocket -- some good luck trinket -- but Wright would not reveal what it was after the Spurs won the momentous 2023 lottery and the right to draft French phenom Victor Wembanyama. At their family home, Wright's son was supposed to have a corresponding good luck charm and execute their secret handshake, Wright said.

Hours earlier, R.C. Buford, the Spurs CEO, had arrived at his hotel room in Chicago and was astonished to see a familiar blue leather chair with a card attached. It was the same chair Buford had been sitting in in his office in San Antonio when the Spurs won the Tim Duncan lottery in 1997. He had given the chair to his daughter when she went to college, he told ESPN after the lottery Tuesday. His family secretly sent it to his hotel.

"I had a meditation in my blue leather chair this afternoon," Buford said.

Back in the drawing room, the first pingpong ball came up: No. 14. Fourteen balls, numbered 1-14, zip around a classic air-powered lottery machine before a league attorney stops the machine and sucks one up. That ball becomes the first of four drawn in sequence, eventually making up a four-number combination. There are 1,001 possible four-number combinations using the numbers 1-14. The NBA tosses out one of them -- 11, 12, 13, 14 -- and divides the rest among the 14 lottery teams based on their team record and lottery odds.

The Spurs, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets held 140 combinations apiece -- 420 of the 1,000. The New Orleans Pelicans, the lottery team with the best record, owned only five.

The combinations go in numerical order, so that the worst teams -- Houston, Detroit, San Antonio -- have almost all the combinations featuring the numbers 1 and 2. Seeing 14 as the first ball had the whole room in play for Wembanyama for a fleeting 10-second window. Wright panicked. "Oh my god, we are out," he thought to himself, Wright told ESPN in the drawing room minutes after the drawing ended. (ESPN had one of 19 media members present to watch the drawing.) Each lottery team sends one person to the room to represent them. They sit in rows, with the teams with the best odds up front and the long shots in the back.

In that last row, Teresa Resch, the Toronto Raptors vice president of basketball operations, elbowed Bryson Graham, the New Orleans Pelicans assistant general manager, when that 14 came up, both recalled: We have a chance!

Ten seconds after the 14, up popped the next ball: 5. Almost everyone was still in play. Michael Finley, the Dallas Mavericks assistant general manager, knew that any of the teams below the Mavericks in the lottery pecking order -- the Raptors, Pelicans, Chicago Bulls and Oklahoma City Thunder -- leaping into the top-4 could knock the Mavs back from No. 10 to No. 11. That would have meant the Mavericks sending their top-10 protected pick to the New York Knicks -- a potential embarrassment given Dallas' late-season tanking to slide out of the play-in race and into that No. 10 slot. (The NBA fined the Mavericks $750,000 for "conduct detrimental to the league.")

Finley stayed calm, knowing the odds still favored the worst teams. "I wasn't nervous," he said. Finley won a championship with the Spurs in 2007, and joked after that drawing that perhaps he should have brought along his Spurs championship ring for good luck.

(On the flip side, many within the league feared the Mavericks 3% chance of winning the lottery -- and being rewarded for their late-season resting with Wembanyama.)

All around the room, team officials flipped through eight sheets of paper showing which teams owned each combination. The mood was frantic.


Ten seconds later, the third ball: No. 8. Several teams were still alive. Brett Greenberg, the Washington Wizards assistant general manager, knew instantly the Wizards had a chance. All 67 of their combinations had the No. 5 as the lowest digit. There were 11 balls left in the hopper. If the last ball drawn was No. 7, No. 9, No. 10, No. 11, No. 12 or No. 13, the Wizards would get Wembanyama. Eleven balls left; six were winners for Washington.

"Holy s---, we have a chance," Greenberg thought to himself. He hunched over his combination sheets and took a deep breath. Greenberg was well-stocked with lucky charms: his father's lucky coin (a Kona dollar); a replica 1978 Washington Bullets championship ring; and a silver coin inscribed with the Wizards logo and the phrase "game-changer" -- a memento Flip Saunders, the Wizards head coach from 2009-2012, gave to players who made pivotal plays. Greenberg also wore orange socks -- his grandmother's favorite color. (Jon Phelps, the Detroit Pistons senior director of basketball strategy, wore socks with dinosaurs on them -- a gift from his nephew, and the same pair he wore when the Pistons won the 2021 drawing.)

Joel Glass, the Orlando Magic's chief communications officer and drawing room representative, also knew his team had shot: The No. 4 ball would send Wembanyama to Orlando. Glass continued his tradition of bringing the pingpong balls from Orlando's previous lottery wins -- Shaquille O'Neal, the No. 1 pick they turned into Anfernee Hardaway, Dwight Howard and Paolo Banchero last season -- into the drawing room for luck. For the first time, Glass carried them in a small briefcase emblazoned with the Magic logo. It was gently suggested to Glass that needing a suitcase to carry all the franchise's lottery winning balls was perhaps not a great sign.

Glass squinted to see if the last ball showed a single-digit.

Meanwhile, a No. 6 would give the Indiana Pacers the No. 1 pick. "For a short second, it was pure joy," Kevin Pritchard, the Pacers president of basketball operations, told ESPN afterward. A No. 3 ball would have sent Wembanyama to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Then the final ball: No. 2. That disqualified most teams, but Wright wasn't sure if the Spurs owned the winning combination: 14-5-8-2. As Wright scanned those eight pages, Clay Allen, the Houston Rockets general counsel, tapped him: "I think that's you," Wright recalled.

A league official announced that it was indeed the Spurs. Wright barely reacted. He stayed silent and gazed downward until Allen reached over to shake his hand.

"Brian was way too calm," Graham joked afterward. "I mean, come on!"

"I was going to get up and run around the room," Resch said of her plans to celebrate if the Raptors had won. (Resch was the team's drawing room representative when they moved up to No. 4 in the 2021 lottery; she recalled raising her arms and letting out a brief "woop!" Another executive in the room was worried he would scream so loudly if his team won that security would have to subdue him or eject him.)


The drawing was largely anticlimactic after that, with the Charlotte Hornets, Blazers and Rockets claiming picks No. 2-4 in that order. (The NBA actually had to draw seven four-number combinations; the Spurs and Hornets each "won" the No. 4 pick -- the Spurs twice! -- before it finally went to Houston. That is believed to be a record for total drawings in one lottery, league officials said.)

After the drawing, everyone stays in the room for about an hour until the televised reveal is over. No one is allowed to leave. Everyone in the room surrenders their phones, tablets, laptops and smart watches upon entering so that no one can communicate the results to the outside world. The attendees gossip and eat until watching ESPN's lottery broadcast -- the only people alive who know the results already.

Wright sat in his same seat in the front row watching to see the moment the rest of the world would learn the Spurs had won. When that moment came -- when Peter Holt, the Spurs governor, leaped and shouted in joy on the stage, the camera then cutting to an emotional Buford sitting in the ballroom -- Wright tapped his chest twice again.

Buford knows better than most how one player can transform an entire franchise. The Spurs were stuck in the middle for several years after trading Kawhi Leonard in 2018 before making a choice over the last year to go into a full rebuild -- peaking with the June 2022 trade that sent Dejounte Murray to the Atlanta Hawks for three first-round picks.

"We made a decision last summer," Buford told ESPN. "We liked the way this year went for our team. We had good young players getting better. We've seen the impact and transformation that one player can have on a program. We hope we can do everything we can to set another player up for that kind of success."

Some other tidbits from the drawing room and the ongoing draft combine in Chicago:

• The Blazers moving up from No. 5 to No. 3 raised eyebrows all over the league right away. The Blazers could of course keep that pick, but rival executives expect them to explore the kind of veteran help that pick -- plus other players -- might fetch for Damian Lillard. (Executives also expect the Blazers to re-sign Jerami Grant.) The No. 3 pick by itself won't net a game-changing veteran. What might the combination of that pick and Anfernee Simons get Portland? If they do try to load up around Lillard -- which requires Lillard indicating he'd like to stay in Portland -- expect the Blazers to go after wings and big men, sources said.

Portland also has Shaedon Sharpe, but his strong finish to the season would make the Blazers even queasier about including him in any kind of win-now trade...

• I'd also expect at some point for the Blazers to try to renegotiate the protections on the first-round pick they owe the Bulls from the 2021 three-team trade in which they acquired Larry Nance Jr. The pick is lottery-protected every year through 2028 -- restricting the Blazers ability to deal picks in trades. Such renegotiations are always tricky. The Bulls will want something.

Slup slurp slurp it up

Lol the story starts with a 9 year old kid. Nice feature article.

 

[msgkings322]

Slup slurp slurp it up

Lol the story starts with a 9 year old kid. Nice feature article.

It's bizarre how easily people fall for what the media reports as "news"

 

[wildturkey]

Had a bad wind and hail storm last night that knocked over a tree on one of the main lines on the main road the feeds off all the little side streets. My power went out exactly when Ben Wallace just about died on stage when Detroit drew #5. If it would have just waited like 2 more minutes to fall I could have seen the rest of the reactions.

What a gut punch for Charlotte yet again. In the Dwight Howard draft, they came up 2nd and got Emeka Okafor. In the Anthony Davis draft, they came up #2 and got Michael Kidd Gilcrest. And now this. They are so fucking cursed. Now you see why they were my sentimental pick to win it. They desperately need SOMETHING to go their way. .

 

[thunderc]

Conspiracists create comforting fictions to soothe their anxieties about having little control over their measly lives.

Ooh that’s deep

 

[wildturkey]

For all you conspiracy nuts, here you can watch the ACTUAL lottery. NBA releases it after the televised ESPN show. What happened?

They draft 4 slots. SA won the #1 pick. Charlotte won the #2 pick. Portland won the #3 pick. But then San Antonio and Charlotte kept winning the 4th pick so they had to re-do it each time until a new team popped up.

 

[wildturkey]

Fun video of a Spurs lottery watch party

 

[The Q]

For all you conspiracy nuts, here you can watch the ACTUAL lottery. NBA releases it after the televised ESPN show. What happened?

They draft 4 slots. SA won the #1 pick. Charlotte won the #2 pick. Portland won the #3 pick. But then San Antonio and Charlotte kept winning the 4th pick so they had to re-do it each time until a new team popped up.

Why on earth would you go in that order?

Makes no sense

Sa should be picking 4th

 

[thunderc]

For all you conspiracy nuts, here you can watch the ACTUAL lottery. NBA releases it after the televised ESPN show. What happened?

They draft 4 slots. SA won the #1 pick. Charlotte won the #2 pick. Portland won the #3 pick. But then San Antonio and Charlotte kept winning the 4th pick so they had to re-do it each time until a new team popped up.

The guy has a microphone in his ear and someone is telling him exactly when to hit the button. See, rigged.

 

[Shanemansj13]

Fun video of a Spurs lottery watch party

 

[The Q]

The nba might have to be dead to me for 2 decades

Dealing with them rigging the lottery for Duncan almost killed me

 

[msgkings322]

The nba might have to be dead to me for 2 decades

Dealing with them rigging the lottery for Duncan almost killed me

You might be a little too tightly wound about this stuff

 

[thunderc]

You might be a little too tightly wound about this stuff

Everyone needs a hobby

 

[msgkings322]

Everyone needs a hobby

If your hobby almost kills you, you might need a different one

 

[Shanemansj13]

If your hobby almost kills you, you might need a different one

Maybe he just needs to blow off a little steam. I did it during the 1Q