The Delight of Draft Lies in Uncertainty

The year: 1996. The place: Atlanta. The occasion: America’s greatest (male) basketball players gather to rehearse for the Summer Olympics.

The players:

Shaquille O’Neal? Adam Keefe? Harold Miner? Doug Christie? Tracy Murray? Don MacLean?

They will be NBA veterans then, or at least some of them will. Fourth-year professionals, originally selected in the jam-packed, slam-packed college player draft of June 24, 1992.

Or else they will be playing for money in Italy. Or in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Or for one of those Continental Basketball Assn. franchises--the Yakima Yaks or the Albany Spittoons or the Rockford Files or whatever they are called.

Maybe they will be starting and starring for the Chicago Bulls. Or maybe they will be riding the end of the bench for the Charlotte Hornets.

Maybe, by 1996, the Hornets will be the ones wrapping up back-to-back NBA championships.

Our Olympic team that summer, well, we do know who won’t be on it. Larry Bird won’t be on it. Earvin Johnson won’t be on it.

(We can guess where Bird and Magic will be--on a driveway somewhere, playing one on one. Some guys never quit.)

Mike Jordan will be 33 and either playing Pebble Beach or designated-hitting for the White Sox. Clyde Drexler will be turning 34 but will continue, as always, to look 44.

David Robinson also will be in his 30s and ready to resume his NBA career after serving a year aboard ship during the United States’ surprise invasion of the Bahamas. (Despite pleas for peace from Prime Minister Mychal Thompson.)

Charles Barkley, 33, will be busy protesting his being the only African-American basketball player in Phoenix. Scottie Pippen, a pup of 30, will be trying to explain his not showing up in the Rose Garden to shake hands with President Perot.

As for Minnesota’s Christian Laettner, well, nobody will be more outraged than he after Duke’s run of consecutive NCAA championships ends at five.

“And here I thought they were building a dynasty,” Laettner will lament.

OK, 1996 seems far away, yet 1988 feels like yesterday. Since then, Russia, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have been reassembled like Rubik’s Cubes, and Germany has reunited. England has the world’s unhappiest princesses, Japan buys into American baseball and an American becomes Japan’s best sumo wrestler.

So, next time anybody supposedly knows what will happen next, don’t believe it for a second.

Today’s NBA draft is a glimpse into tomorrow. It shapes and reshapes the futures of your favorite basketball teams, filling all of them with promise that in many cases will turn into regret.

It is difficult to believe how many teams with diligently and expensively compiled scouting reports can bypass a Joe Dumars or an A.C. Green the same way it is difficult to believe that not one but two organizations passed on Jordan. In one draft, Ken Norman was the third--and virtual throwaway--choice of the Clippers in the first round and the only one who turned out to be worth choosing.

The NBA draft is a flea market. Much of the fun is in watching teams shop.

The Bulls once agonized for days over whether to take Orlando Woolridge or Albert King, convinced that the wrong decision would adversely affect the organization for years. Turned out the sure way to winning a championship was to have neither one of them.

Those same Bulls flipped a coin for Magic Johnson, called it wrong, then selected David Greenwood over Sidney Moncrief. Had they picked Moncrief, they would have become better sooner. Yet had they picked Moncrief, they wouldn’t have had a high enough pick to land Jordan.

The one spectacle that simultaneously excites and exasperates a team’s fans is an invitation to attend the draft. This can create too much audible pressure on teams to mistakenly select a local hero, as when the Clippers drafted Bo Kimble or the New Jersey Nets drafted Kenny Anderson.

Maurice Cheeks’ father once stormed out of a crowded auditorium when Chicago jilted his son, shouting for all to hear: “You’ll be sorry! You’ll be sorry!”

When the Clippers and Lakers draft today, their needs must come first and not some sentiment for so-and-so whose entire collegiate career occurred nearby for all to view. Merely because a guy played for St. John’s rather than UCLA is no reason not to grab him.

Who knows? The guy the Lakers like might be from Bosnia-Herzegovina.