Sporting an oversized polo shirt and fuzzy facial hair, Anthony Bennett sheepishly strolled over to the gathered media for his interview at the Verizon Center last Thursday. The NBA prospect looked like a deer in headlights. Bennett immediately admitted to being shy, an unenviable characteristic when having to face a hoard of cameras and journalists. Washington, D.C. is not Chicago or New York in terms of sports media, but this is not the Mountain West, either. By the end of the 11-minute session, the 20-year-old gradually opened up about his fear of heights, poked fun at his own shooting stats, and told a funny story about a fan locating him in the lobby of his Chinatown hotel. A college player being green in these situations seems pretty routine, and Bennett didn’t have the benefit of working up a sweat beforehand. Due to surgery on his rotator cuff in mid-May, Bennett did not actually work out for the Wizards, but the UNLV star out of Ontario, Canada, revealed that his recovery was progressing on schedule.

“It is going pretty well. I spoke with Dr. Altchek—he is the one that did my surgery—I spoke with him yesterday and he said everything is going fine,” Bennett said. “The first week of August, I should be 100 percent, full contact, back into the game of working out.” Dr. David Altchek should also be noted because he helped determine the nature of John Wall’s stress injury  last September. CSN Washington’s Ben Standig previously reported that Bennett was about eight weeks out from full contact but has been cleared to do some basketball things.

“[Altchek] said light shooting. I can dribble and do all that but no contact. Nothing crazy. No dunking or anything,” Bennett confirmed.

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The Wizards, on Tuesday, landed the third overall pick in the 2012-13 NBA Draft … and they will do with it what they please, your miseducated speculation and dime-store mock drafts be damned.

So Truth About It.net turned to online scouting regurgitations, mostly intuition, and a wing and a prayer to come up with a list of the most potentially #SoWizards players who could soon be given a fanny-pack embroidered with a scarlet Wizards logo, a spot on the roster, and a pain in our hearts.

#1) Rudy Gobert

At some point in time, Ernie Grunfeld yelled, to no one in particular, “Well, why don’t you just calculate a player’s ability to calculate!!?”

He was being facetious, but some scientist got right on it. Well, at least the guy was wearing a lab coat. He was also wearing a G-Wiz mascot uniform under that.

Grunfeld then, himself, went on to measure Frenchman Rudy Gobert’s 7-foot-9 wingspan in Grunfeld head-lengths (hey, that’s just his system… the answer is 5.138, by the way—Ernie has a really long head). Grunfeld also calculated Gobert’s 238-pound weight in Grunfeld heads, and it just so happened to be the very same number.

So it was determined that Gobert would be the third overall pick, especially since he can exchange “je m’appelles” and “toute de suites” with Kevin Seraphin and Snakey all season long, much to the chagrin of Randy Wittman. Take that, analytics!

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Emperor Ernie Grunfeld, more formally known as Washington’s Team President of Basketball Operations, discusses the ever-evolving process, which is more NeverEnding Story (the movie) and less Law & Order (an episode). Grunfeld also reveals that the Cleveland Cavaliers actually won twice. After winning the first pick, Cleveland also won the third pick, so they had to re-draw and Washington’s combination came up.

Here is a secret of the NBA Draft Lottery, which, by revealing, will result in me being sequestered, along with the ping pong ball machine, for the next calendar year with only a representative from Ernst & Young for company. My general assumption was that the NBA took a commercial break before announcing the top three picks to build drama for the audience watching at home. This is true and effective to a large degree, but the real reason they take that commercial break is so that the assembled media hoard can descend three flights of stairs, run across the street under the escort of New York’s finest, and get cordoned off in the basement of the studio in which the show is taking place. It was there, surrounded by machinery lifts, cameras that have been put out to pasture, and around 100 sweating reporters, that I learned that the Wizards had won the third pick in the lottery. You are then escorted into a freight elevator and unleashed upon the stage where you push your way to your interviewee of choice. You see the weirdest sights on the draft floor, such as Flip Saunders having an extremely candid and friendly talk with Ernie Grunfeld, Damian Lillard looking for every possible escape route, and the spawn of Dan Gilbert lapping up the attention. (Other members of the Gilbert brood looked visibly annoyed that their youngest sibling has become the human horseshoe and the only thing worth talking about on draft night.)

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It’s commonplace for the fan to get entrenched in ‘what ifs’—it simply has to be ingrained into DNA by now.

What if the Wizards didn’t win the pre-lottery coin flip tie-breaker against the Los Angeles Clippers after the 2008-09 season? Both teams finished with identical 19-63 records, and even though the Wizards got a single extra combination in the ’09 lottery after winning that coin flip (so, a 17.8 percent chance of getting the top pick instead of LA’s 17.7 percent), the Clippers won the prize, i.e., Blake Griffin. Not only that, but two other teams, Memphis and Oklahoma City, jumped into the top three, bumping Washington to five.

But what if the Wizards, who sent Flip Saunders as their lottery representative in 2009, had been part of the winning combination? They likely would have elected to not trade the fifth overall pick (for Mike Miller, Randy Foye and a money-save) and would have instead drafted (and kept) Griffin.

[To note: Saunders was Minnesota’s rep at the 1995 lottery and also returned to his team with the fifth overall pick, but that turned out to be Kevin Garnett—the Timberwolves finished tied with the Wizards for the second-worst NBA record that season, 21-61. Washington, holding the tie-breaker in odds to win No. 1 (18.3 percent to 18.2), landed the fourth pick and took Rasheed Wallace. Both teams were jumped by Golden State (Joe Smith, No. 1), and Philadelphia (Jerry Stackhouse, No. 3).]

Surely, with Blake Griffin missing his entire first season with the Clippers due to a broken kneecap sustained during the preseason, the Wizards, being themselves, likely would have been bad enough to land a high pick again, i.e., John Wall in 2010.

The what ifs… Wall, Lob City-ing, or whatever, to Griffin in the Verizon Center—the return of “Fun Street.” Speaking of…

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The NBA Lottery drawing is perhaps the last informal event left in the NBA this season. The set-up consists of three floors of conference rooms in the Millenium Hotel in New York City—you have to continously run up and down the stairs in hopes of getting the person you want to interview to speak on the record. This is how I found myself pushing past Monty Williams, who was bemoaning the summer heat in New Orleans, and making my way over to Bradley Beal, who was passing up on eating dinner until us pesky reporters were done asking our questions.

Draft Lottery night is also an evening for dumb questions, such as the requisite “did you bring anything for good luck?” Beal did not bring anything for good luck, he says, but indicated he was wearing the same burnt umber tie that he wore the night 2012. He also didn’t voice an opinion on whether the Wizards should keep the pick, stating that “it was up to Ernie and the front office, but you can see that we were doing better at the end of the year.”

More interesting news is Beal’s injury status, which remains uncertain. Beal told me that he was going in for another x-ray next week, but wasn’t particularly worried about the timetable or how he was healing. After talking to the Washington Post‘s Michael Lee, the reality is that the original recovery schedule may have been a tad agressive; waiting another four weeks till Beal is back and engaged in basketball related activities would not be entirely surprising.

Beal, however, was incredibly candid when it came to the resigning of Martell Webster: “Gotta resign Martell. Love that guy. Hits down open shots, high energy, court and locker room leader … love him, you gotta resign him.” This should be music to the ears of Webster, who is positioned to eat up the Wizards’ MLE.

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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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