What does a win really mean this late in the season?

One of the more divisive precepts of late-season NBA strategy is that of tanking. At the coaching level, it’s difficult to imagine the motivation for attempting to lose games. Even more difficult to imagine is a concerted effort by the players themselves to lose. For both players and coaches in a losing season, games played long after the specter of the playoffs has departed are sometimes as important as those early in the season. Several Washington players are still playing for quite a bit, and every game counts. A.J. Price, Garrett Temple and Cartier Martin are auditioning for a job, either with the Wizards or another NBA team. John Wall has made it reasonably clear that he’d like to receive a contract extension this summer, and his play in the last weeks of the season may inform any decisions to that end. To a lesser extent, Trevor Booker and Chris Singleton are playing to redefine their future roles.

With that said, front office employees are in a more complicated position. While mounting losses influence the team’s record in an obvious way and reflect poorly on the performance of team builders, owners are playing the long game, and understand that it may be in the team’s best interest, for better or worse, to lose as much as possible during the final stretch. Their knowledge of this reality should inform a relative leniency when it comes to resting “injured” players, or giving fewer minutes to starters, among other surreptitious tanking strategies which have been historically suspected of lottery-bound teams. Another, more productive goal may also be in play: late-season games provide on-the-job experience at full speed for young players who aren’t developed enough to play heavy minutes in meaningful games — like the 22-year old Jan Vesely. From an organizational standpoint, this is incredibly valuable. The average fan may not share that enthusiasm.

Without taking a position on the morality or healthiness of influenced losing, the tangible benefit of the Wizards losing their final game tonight can be readily discerned. The way things shake out across the Association on the last day of the season has the potential to slot Washington anywhere from No. 6 to 9 in terms of lottery odds and eventual draft slot, the latter of which far more important from a practical standpoint. While it would be nice to win the lottery, the best the Wizards can hope for is a 5.4 percent chance to land the first pick. The surer thing is where a losing team will draft if they don’t win one of the top three picks. After the first three spots are randomly decided, the unlucky rest of the lottery teams (picks Nos. 4 to 14) are slotted in the draft according to their record at the end of the season. Tiebreakers, in the NBA Draft Lottery, are determined by a coin flip for the purposes of positioning, but odds to land in the top three amongst teams with the same record are split as evenly as possible.

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Some people, ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz for instance, have argued that the NBA should kill the draft. The system is broken, teams are tanking, lottery teams stay lottery teams… The fix: End the NBA draft and have all rookies enter the league as free agents. Why? Well, the NBA is a “business,” free market this-and-that, yada-yada-yada…

However, in constant attempts to analyze the NBA as a business — “It’s a business,” often being a canned talking point of players and team personnel alike when unable to explain the real reasons behind a maneuver — people forget that one of the first principles of business is that the customer comes first (or that the customer is always right). Whatever the case, will somebody please think of the children?

Yes, free agency rumors and the current mass, social media dissemination of them can be fun for fans, but only media members (and maybe a few teams attempting to cloud their intentions), really benefit from the noise.

The NBA draft is for the customer. Well, it’s for the players, too. And, it also benefits the league’s marketing of itself and its individuals. So, there’s no need to muddy ceremonial pomp and circumstance with dollars and cents. Because if there are league-wide issues with the way the business of basketball functions, there are other ways to resolve them aside from eliminating one of the NBA’s most-covered events.

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John Wall contemplates…
Who the Wizards should take.

Anthony Davis would have been nice, very nice. But the world is not always nice. Sure, the Wizards technically “slipped” one spot to third in Wednesday night’s NBA Draft Lottery. But, looking at the odds going in — a 19.9-percent chance to land the first pick, an 18.8-percent chance to land the second pick, a 17.1-percent chance at third, and a whopping 31.9-percent chance to slip to fourth — you can live with the results. I woke up this morning feeling more than content with either Bradley Beal or Michael Kidd-Gilchrist — almost anxious for either/or to happen already.

But, there could be other options. Thomas Robinson anyone? OR… what about a trade?

Twitter is for excitement and overreaction, sometimes. So, in the hype, a conversation between myself and user @UGotTheseIn10 quickly advanced in the direction of sending the third pick to the Portland Trailblazers for Nicolas Batum and the 11th pick (assuming UConn’s Jeremy Lamb would be available at 11) — the idea of jettisoning Andray Blatche to Portland as part of the deal even surfaced. Of course, the unison of such thoughts heavily weighted with Wizards sensibilities means the scenario would most certainly be too good to be true.

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I left D.C. for Gotham on Tuesday morning with a handful of expectations, but mainly that I’d come back with my wallet, a few good stories and the rights to Anthony Davis. Turns out my good luck and charm didn’t work. Sorry about that.

While I failed in that respect, I did catch up with Ted Leonsis after the damage was done. I asked him about what he was feeling during the commercial break, knowing that the Wizards were guaranteed a top-three selection—the prospective winners of the Anthony Davis Sweepstakes had been narrowed down to three teams: Charlotte, New Orleans and the home team.

“That the odds of getting two number one picks in such a short period of time would be tough,” Leonsis began. “We finished with the second-worst record and I was hoping we’d get first or second (pick), but third is pretty good.”

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It was communicated by Ernie Grunfeld last Friday that Zach Leonsis, son of Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, would represent the team at the NBA Draft Lottery tonight in New York City. The younger Leonsis, Twitter handle @ZacharyLeonsis, is a business development manager with dad’s ownership group, Monumental Sports & Entertainment, and lists, “provided research and statistical analysis for formulation of business strategy for the Washington Wizards,” in the experience section of his Linked In profile.

The head of the Theodore Unit, Ted Leonsis, on his blog writes:

And to change it up, since we have fallen in the lottery the last two times we sent team members to the event, (a head coach, and a player), we are sending up a family member and employee of our sports team holding company to help us out. I hope it works.

Regardless of hindsight in the future, present or past, who the team sends as a representative probably doesn’t matter. But we walk down this path every year; superstition is as whimsical or worthless as we want it to be. And over time, you get a little less excited about the lottery because the value of winning it, in the big picture, has a diminished bearing on true team building. But, that doesn’t mean you don’t pour yourself some spirits and relish in the tradition of chance.

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[Pierce showing his bounciness, flexibility in unique pre-Draft workout. Courtesy SI Vault.]

When the Wizards have the 10^th pick in the NBA Draft, we get a player like … Jarvis Hayes.

The Celtics? They get an All-Star like Joe Johnson—or even better, a future Hall of Famer like Paul Pierce.

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The basketball world knew who the Washington Wizards were going to select with the sixth pick in the NBA Draft well before David Stern took the podium.

The Wizards, longtime fans of Jan Vesely since his emergence on the international scene in 2009, had considered selecting him in last year’s draft, before he decided to return to his Belgrade-based club Partizan for another year. And on draft afternoon, the paper trail spoke louder than ever. The Wizards’ sales department had invited staff members from the Czech Republic embassy to the team draft party in downtown Washington.

Now, while the selection might not have mystery, the player certainly was. To some extent, Vesely was misrepresented—even undervalued—having been surrounded by the popular, though incomplete, rhetoric from just a handful of available scouting reports and YouTube highlights. But the wing from Ostrava, Czech Republic, who has played basketball professionally since he was 16 years old, was the perfect pick for the Wizards. But you don’t have to take my word for it, consider head coach Flip Saunders’ review: Read more »

I should have known that the NBA Draft Lottery was not going to fall in the Washington Wizards favor when I walked into the media area.  Two members of the Cleveland Browns, Joshua Cribbs and Joe Haden, who are from Washington, D.C. and Fort Washington, MD respectively, were sitting at a table with former Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar.  Maybe under different circumstances Cribbs and Haden would have donned the new colors of the Washington Wizards, but on this evening, their roles were to be good luck charms for Dan Gilbert.  They were ensconced in Cleveland Cavaliers gear – the former pseudo-rival of Washington which also happened to be the team that eliminated the Wizards the last time they were fortunate enough to make the playoffs

Two hours later, Dan Gilbert, his charismatic son Nick, Kosar, Cribbs and Haden were posing for pictures in front of the ESPN camera, and celebrating the fact that the Cavaliers had won the first pick of the 2011 draft.  The Wizards, who were represented by last year’s number one selection John Wall, were left with the sixth pick, despite having the fourth-worst record in the NBA.

Despite the disappointing draft position, there were still some positives for the Washington Wizards franchise.  As I wrote for the DCist, in just a short period of time Wall displayed the type of confidence and leadership that the Wizards braintrust probably expected when they drafted him first just one year ago.  He worked the room, he joked around with his fellow 2010 draft classmate Greg Monroe, as well as Kyrie Irving, who figures to the first pick of the 2011 draft class.  He was equally comfortable in between Toronto Raptors President Bryan Colangelo and Mayor of Sacramento Kevin Johnson; Wall even mentioned that he asked Mayor Johnson about his role in keeping the Kings in Sacramento.

Here is Wall speaking confidently on his summer plans, his opinion of some of the players in the draft and his expectations for his fellow teammates among other things:

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In the seeming eyes of fans, media, Internet trolls and bar room sports pundits, Ernie Grunfeld should lie awake in his bed at night, restless over what to do with the sixth pick in the 2011 NBA Draft. The Wizards slipped two whole spots from where they finished the season to achieve No. 6 on Tuesday night, and the team president of basketball operations better put it to good use.

But it’s not all about this draft and this pick, it’s about the move behind the move which begets two more moves. Grunfeld should be up late into the evening, but not because he’s worried for his job, because he’s doing his homework. Because he and his team are adapting their creativity. Because he must be able to assess players beyond skills and exhaust trust in analysis to the statistical end. Because of course the pressure is still on.

A look across the NBA landscape yields a wide set of diverse circumstances: Aging dynasties, teams close to the next level, teams looking to rebuild, teams wondering where to go, and teams searching for how. Each of these situations must be ready to adapt to what will be a drastically different structure on the other side of the NBA’s pending labor issue.

With hype mounting for the 2011 draft, albeit a deemed weak one, as the last fun act of the league before the current CBA expires on June 30, beads of sweat may develop on Grunfeld’s brow due to the spotlight. But with a relatively secure position to manage the Wizards generally – likely for the next two seasons — it will be all about how Grunfeld can use a post-lockout environment to Washington’s advantage.

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NBA Draft Lottery thoughts and links…

{flickr/Lisa Brewster}

The life of a Wizards/Bullets fan has often been predicated on the NBA Draft Lottery. Being a fan of the team since moving to D.C. in 1990, it has generally been ‘the’ highlight of the season… More than the draft itself, more than peddled hope before a season. A simple flip of a card, the bounce of a ping-pong ball and/or the chance of mathematical equation can change the fate of a franchise for years… in just a brief moment. How exciting, right?

In 1992, with the fifth worst record in the NBA, second worst in the Eastern Conference, Washington fans hoped for Shaquille O’Neal, or even Alonzo Mourning. Instead, the Bullets were jumped by the Charlotte Hornets (who chose Mourning with the second pick), and ended up with the sixth pick and Tom Gugliotta.

With the fifth worst record again in 1994, did the Wizards succeed in landing one of three draft prizes in Glenn Robinson, Jason Kidd or Grant Hill? Nope. Fifth is where they stayed… begin memories of the Juwan Howard saga.

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