NBA Draft: No one knows what they're doing

Like grief, the NBA Draft comes in stages.  There's the part when you kind of know what's going to happen, the part when you pretend you know what's going to happen, and the part when you give up on the idea of knowing what's going on (and so have the teams). 

                If you follow the NBA with any sort of intensity then you probably knew a fair bit about the top ten prospects, or at least the top three.  You knew about Andrew Wiggins, from his freakish athleticism to his perceived lack of "alpha-dog-ness." You knew that there was no way in hell Jabari Parker was not going to Milwaukee at number two.  You saw Julius Randle bulldoze his way to the NCAA final and you were aware that Dante Exum was a real person.

                But more than anyone else, you knew Joel Embiid.  You knew the Cameroonian native who hadn't picked up a basketball until the age of 15(more on that later).  More importantly, you knew about his 7 ft 250 lb frame and advanced set of moves that led him to be the consensus number one prospect.  And you knew about the micro fracture surgery that led him to no longer be the consensus number one prospect. 

                That injury had the potential to upset the usually predictable order of the first ten picks.  Embiid sliding past the top three could send every team scrambling to reassess its strategy for their respective picks.  Wiggins went to Cleveland, Parker went to Milwaukee.  In came Philadelphia, the potential wild card of the draft.  And...they stash Embiid.  Tension: Gone.  Every team breathed a sigh of relief and went back to their normal decision making processes.

                Not that this sped the draft along.  Each team had five minutes in the first round to make their picks and they were intent on using all of them.  This either means selections were submitted via carrier pigeon from each team's respective cities or that no team had made any sort of final decision coming into tonight's draft.  Sort of like when you wait until entering the poll booth before deciding on who to vote for, except that you aren't paid millions of dollars to vote.  It's somewhat understandable for teams past the top five and especially after the top ten, since there is so much potential variability in who is picked by whom.  But Cleveland takes it to the buzzer with the first overall pick?  Really?  Months to pick from any player and several days to mull over Joel Embiid's injury and the choice is still left to the last minute.  Same story with Milwaukee; everyone under the sun knew they were going to draft Jabari Parker before they apparently did, although I suppose this makes sense considering that Milwaukee receives approximately two hours of sunlight every year. 

                That brings us to the second stage of the draft.  This is the part when we all have to act like every pick is a big upset so we can maintain the illusion that we were well-prepared for the draft and actually have pre-conceived predictions to be upset.  By pick number 20, the airplane PA-style chimes which preceded Adam Silver's announcements were joined by the almost as regular shocked exclamations from Bill Simmons after each pick.  Simmons's reactions were almost enough to salvage potential drinking games torpedoed by the shocking lack of analysis of players wingspans by Jay Bilas. 

                But you could've made a great drinking game by observing how many times the ESPN analysts certified that a prospect was "raw" in that they had little basketball experience but high athletic upside.  For this draft, the aforementioned Embiid was the poster-boy for this relatively recent but rapidly proliferating trend in NBA drafting methodology, but the best example had to be Bruno Caboclo: "The Brazilian Kevin Durant." 

                This pick by Toronto at the number 20 spot was described as being an athletic marvel but so raw that he is "two years away from being two years away,"(from being NBA ready) a quote which may be roughly two years away from being three years away from being a punch line about reckless gambles on upside.  If the trend continues, then it is inevitable that we will see a highly drafted NBA prospect who has never even heard of basketball and may not even be aware of his drafting at the time.  This could open up great new possibilities for teams to sabotage their competition by inventing fictitious draft prospects.  All it would take is doctoring blurry cell phone footage and claiming he won the MVP award for a league that sounds made up(basically all we have on Caboclo) and you can't fail.

                If that stage settled for obscure information then the last stage, that NBA wasteland we call "the second round," was content to give us viewers near to no information at all.  Blurry footage is replaced by no footage, the prospects's names become even harder to pronounce, and multiple picks occur during commercial breaks without any following commentary.  It's hard to blame the ESPN analysts though, since they didn't seem to leave their table once during the four hour affair.  Simmons and Jalen Rose can probably sustain their energy perpetually just from bantering, but the others?  It was a pretty herculean feat.   They wanted it to be over, we wanted it to be over, and it's not like we're going to remember some player picked here when they become a surprise super star later on.  No one can call those picks, not even the teams really can.  

In Defense of Luis Suárez

Luis Suárez is my hero.  Not because he did the right thing, I'm pretty sure the guy has never done the right thing in his life, but because he did the only thing.  At least, the only thing he knew how to.  I'm not referring to Tuesday's repeat incidence of dental assault on Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini, or rather I'm not referring to that exclusively. 

                Everything Suárez has ever done, whether heroic or villainous, has been unbridled and pure Suárez.  The good guy and bad guy roles were just molds that we tried to fit onto him.  And he has certainly been cast into both roles multiple times.  But he has always been the same ball of reckless energy that burst onto the scene all those years ago with Ajax, dazzling us with his world class finishing ability and charming us with his boyish passion for the sport of football. 

                His feats, whether good or bad, have a legendary quality to them.  He led Uruguay to victory over Ghana in the 2010 World Cup with the second most infamous intentional handball in the tournament's history(the top spot must always be held by the maestro Maradona, who actually defended Suárez this week) just as surely as he felled England with his two goals in 2014's edition.  He has given us the most spectacular goal scoring campaigns this side of the Messi-Ronaldo duumvirate, but those are matched by his hat trick of three bites on opposing players without being carded in any of those games.  I don't think any player in any sport has gotten away with that kind of flagrant and violent assaults on other players with such regularity since the epidemic of unpunished sucker punches from the 1970s American Basketball Association.  It should also be noted that in two of those three matches, Suárez's team went on to score a crucial goal to gain the result it needed. 

                So maybe Suárez is secretly the world's best footballer as well as its most insidious criminal.  In that moment when he chomped down on the shoulder of Chiellini, he became the man of the match just the same as if he had scored the deciding goal.  Suddenly, a terrible match full of pitiful offense, plentiful non-oral foul play from men on both sides(ironically, Suárez was one of the few key players NOT to get carded), and disappointment from fans awaiting the high-profile match up was entirely forgotten, forever washed away in a tide of Suárez vampire memes and incredulous head shakes from Ruud Van Nistelroy. 

                But his luck may have finally run out.  He can't help his team if he can't play, and FIFA's ruling ended Suárez's best chance at potentially capturing the game's greatest prize.  Uruguay's suddenly toothless offense was never going to cut it against Colombia, but thankfully the brilliance of young James Rodriguez prevented the Suárez storyline from completely overshadowing the match in the same way it had in the bout against Italy. 

                In that instance, we made Suárez bigger than the game.  Just the same as we did the first two times(I'm still giddy that we could see one player bite another and hear "Not again" as the first reaction of commentator Jon Champion), or the time when he racially abused Manchester United defender Patrice Evra.  He paid his fines, served his suspensions, and ultimately came back to play one of the most dominant seasons of English football in recent history.  He was one heroic run at this World Cup away from a clean slate, total forgiveness from the world's football populace.  Of course, that really says more about us as fans and observers than it does about Luis Suárez.  We went the other direction: we made the game, and the results he was getting in it, bigger than the man who was playing it. 

                Put simply, it's more fun to watch a player play his best than to ruminate on his past transgressions just the same as it is more appealing to point the magnifying glass on the same player at the moment of his transgression than to explore a few moments of otherwise mundane sport that will ultimately be forgotten.  Suárez has allowed us to do both of those things throughout his career.  And that is why, for better or worse, I love Luis Suárez.  Players like him allow us to make sports be about what we want them to be in any given moment.  The ecstasy of the game at its most beautiful and the hedonism of it at its ugliest.