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.