NBA Lottery Carries No Guarantee for Immediate Improvement

Watching this season’s playoff action from his home in Sacramento, it has occurred to Wayman Tisdale that, for him, the difference between National Basketball Assn. purgatory and the regal welcome that Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman and 19,500 others regularly bestow upon Patrick Ewing and the New York Knicks may have come down to Sunday, May 12, 1985.

Tisdale, then a junior at Oklahoma, was watching from a dormitory on the day of the first NBA draft lottery. At 2 p.m. that day, Commissioner David Stern drew envelopes from a clear drum at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and placed them beneath legends bearing the numbers one through seven.

A short time later, only Envelopes 1 and 2 remained unopened. New York and Indiana would pick first and second in the June draft. If the card inside Envelope 2 read “Pacers” then Ewing, the Georgetown all-American and certain first choice, would be going to the Big Apple, with Tisdale, the power forward, likely to have to make do in Indiana.

Envelope 2 read “Pacers.”

“I was watching my life unfold right in front of my eyes,” said Tisdale, now a veteran of four seasons with the Pacers and the Kings.

Two weeks from now, another Sooner, Stacey King, will be part of another select group of young men glued to television sets all around the country as the league conducts its fifth lottery, from the Prudential Center in New York.

That first lottery may have saved a marriage. The wife of Southern Methodist alumnus Jon Koncak threatened to leave her husband if he wasn’t selected before Southwest Conference rival Joe Kleine (he was, by one pick). This year, it could unite a father and son if the Washington Bullets, participating for the first time, get one of the top two picks and use the choice to select Duke forward Danny Ferry, son of General Manager Bob Ferry.

So far, the Bullets have given no indication of whether they would take Ferry should he be available.

“Have we made a decision about Danny? No,” said Bullet Coach Wes Unseld. “We haven’t talked about Danny or anyone else yet.”

It has been suggested that Washington would open up itself to an avalanche of criticism from fans and media if the Duke star were taken and didn’t become an immediate success. Others, however, argue that potential criticism should be a minor consideration.

“I certainly wouldn’t look at it with regards to problems,” said Knick General Manager Al Bianchi. “Danny Ferry is a great player, and if he’s the right thing for Washington, all the other stuff can be worked out.”

If the Bullets don’t pick first or second, Ferry--he and Arizona’s Sean Elliott are regarded as the nation’s top two seniors--surely will be gone. Washington could end up picking ninth, with the lottery expanded to include the league’s first-year entries, Charlotte and Miami. After next season, when Minnesota and Orlando have been added to the league, there will be 11 teams participating, an unwieldy number that will undoubtedly beget changes in the system.

“The lottery may need an occasional new look due to changing circumstances,” said Stern, who hints that in the future the system may be changed so that the teams with the poorest records have a better chance of getting one of the top two choices.

There have been cries for modification since the system began. Tisdale has averaged 15 points a game during his career but still is regarded as an underachiever and was traded to the Kings this February. And while Ewing creeps closer to superstar status and a league championship with each season, Tisdale has had barely 100 minutes of playoff action.

“I remember sitting at Oklahoma watching and thinking that it sure felt funny being in a situation where you didn’t have a ball in your hand so you couldn’t do anything to control the outcome of the game,” he said. “I figured I was going to be the second pick after Patrick, but I didn’t know where--it was a pretty big deal. That was the rest of my life right there.”

There are some who say it was no coincidence that Tisdale ended up in Indiana and Ewing, the glamour player, went to the biggest media market in the country. In fact, the first lottery always will be famous for a pair of enduring images: the Knicks’ envelope and Al Attles’ face.

Stern says that four years later he’s still occasionally tweaked by people who want to know if the first lottery was rigged. One Indianapolis television station, crying foul, used a freeze frame of the drawing to point out that the Knicks’ envelope was bent in a corner, supposedly the better to help Stern make the right choice. There was another report that the same envelope had been placed in a freezer earlier in the day so that Stern could use the cold to sense which one to take.

“I’ve either stopped listening to people talk about it or I’ve become less sensitive to the talk--probably both,” Stern said. “There wasn’t anything rigged, that was just how the process worked.”

Unfortunately, the first envelope he selected belonged to the Golden State Warriors, which meant that they would have the seventh choice even though they’d tied for last in the league with a 22-60 record.

“Now, I’m glad it turned out the way it did,” said Bianchi, who was an assistant coach at Phoenix in ’85. “But then . . . I can still remember the look on Al Attles’ face. He looked like he’d gotten kicked right in the gut.”

Attles, then the Warriors’ general manager and now a vice president with them, probably feels better today about that seventh pick, Chris Mullin, who has become an all-star and led Golden State into this season’s Western Conference semifinals.

The system has since been amended to ensure that the team with the worst record during the regular season doesn’t pick lower than fourth. In addition, instead of selecting each of the envelopes, Stern only draws the first, placing it in the last spot, with executives from each of the participating teams plucking the remaining envelopes and setting them in descending order. The last general manager to pick is the one who holds the card bearing the name of the team that will get the opening pick. The rotation of GMs is set by another draw shortly before the lottery.

None of that helped the Warriors in 1986. That year, Golden State moved up to third in the draft and selected North Carolina State center-forward Chris Washburn. The Warriors, thin in the middle, gave the rookie a four-year contract at close to $4 million.

The first year of that investment brought averages of 11 minutes, 3.8 points and 2.9 rebounds in 35 games as Washburn spent most of his time being rehabilitated for drug abuse. When the ‘87-88 season started in a similar manner, Golden State traded him to Atlanta. In a total of 37 games with the Warriors and the Hawks, Washburn averaged 2.4 points and two rebounds. He spent the entire 1988-89 season on the Hawks’ inactive-unable to perform list.

Washburn is perhaps the prime example of why inclusion in the lottery doesn’t guarantee that a team will immediately improve. If that were the case, the Warriors wouldn’t have been participants in three of the first four years, and the Clippers might be doing battle with the Lakers for the Western Conference championship instead of preparing for their third consecutive lottery appearance and fourth of five.

The only year the Clippers didn’t participate in the lottery was 1986, and that was only because Philadelphia owned that choice in return for giving up the immortal Joe (Jellybean) Bryant in a 1979 trade. But the 76ers hardly draped themselves in glory, trading the first overall choice to Cleveland on draft day in return for Roy Hinson.

Hinson spent just 1 1/2 seasons in Philadelphia before being traded to New Jersey for center Mike Gminski. Meanwhile, the Cavaliers used the pick to take Brad Daugherty, an all-star at center in two of his three seasons.

John Nash, the Philadelphia general manager, can recite all the stratagems that accompanied the 76ers’ moves at that time but admits that the bottom line was, “We went for broke and that’s what happens sometimes--you end up broke.”

The same can be said for some of the teams that held on to their choices. Although a lottery pick, especially one in the top three, is supposed to at least net a team a cornerstone player, a look back shows that having one of the top seven choices has been a 50-50 proposition at best.

“It’s not that obvious who’s the best player available,” Stern said. “Teams still have to work at making good judgments about who to pick.”

“The fact that you’re rewarded with a pick doesn’t mean that you automatically improve,” Nash added. “You can point to teams who have picked in the lottery in successive years and haven’t moved onward and upward and, meanwhile, there have been great late picks like John Stockton and Karl Malone and Mark Price and Reggie Lewis.”

Of the 1985 crop, only Ewing, Mullin and Seattle’s Xavier McDaniel have made an all-star team. Although he’s shown flashes, Clipper center Benoit Benjamin, the No. 3 choice that year, has never averaged more than 13 points a game. Koncak and Kleine have never reached double figures.

The next class produced Daugherty, Dallas’ Roy Tarpley (whom the Mavericks acquired along with guard Derek Harper after a series of deals that cost them only Jerome Whitehead and Richard Washington) and rookie of the year Chuck Person. But there were also Washburn, New York forward Kenny Walker, Detroit problem William Bedford, and Len Bias, who died less than 48 hours after being selected by the Boston Celtics.

The true barometer may come after next season, when Ensign David Robinson begins his long-delayed career with the San Antonio Spurs, but the best lottery group may have come in 1987. Robinson was the No. 1 choice but has been serving a two-year hitch in the Navy. The second choice, Phoenix’s Armon Gilliam, has averaged a solid 16 points a game, and Scottie Pippen, Kenny Smith and Kevin Johnson have all made significant contributions to Chicago, Sacramento and the Suns, respectively.

Today, the biggest question mark is the player some thought would be the best of the bunch, former Georgetown forward Reggie Williams, who has had troubles ever since he joined the Clippers. Should Los Angeles trade Williams as expected, it would be the sixth time a lottery pick has been traded (joining Tisdale, Kleine, Washburn, Bedford and Johnson).

Because he feels that so many lottery teams do such a poor job of selecting players, Nash believes the process should be opened up to include all 27 teams next year.

“I’m not so sure we should reward failure,” he said. “I think teams like the Lakers, who do a tremendous job in player personnel, are penalized by not being included.”

Nash said he’ll present his idea at the next league meetings but admits he expects the plan to be hooted down. There are some executives, however, who would like to enact a change--back to the old days.

“When you go 82 games and finish with the worst record in the league, you know you’re a bad team, I mean it’s no fluke,” said one. “So now you get into the lottery and some team that should be ninth comes out with the first pick? Come on. You take the two worst teams and let them pick between one and two. What’s fair is fair.”

But the lottery was installed to prevent the late-season shenanigans that some felt could result when two teams were hopelessly mired in last place, and Stern, the man with the biggest voice in any argument, says he doesn’t envision the league going back in the future.

“I think the lottery represents an annual rite of renewal for the fans of teams that suffer through losing seasons,” he said. “It helps them focus upon the future and that interest gets heightened by the possibility that their team might get extremely lucky.”