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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[Editor's Note: TAI Czech correspondent Lukas Kuba recently updated us on Wizards 2012 draft pick Tomas Satoransky and the Czech National team's road to EuroBasket 2013. Through three games, the Czechs were 2-1 in Group F qualifying play -- a win against Belarus, a loss to Italy, and a win against Portugal. On Monday, Satoransky and his teammates matched up against traditional power Turkey (also with a record of 2-1), featuring Semih Erden of the Cleveland Cavaliers and another Washington Wizards Euro-stash, Emir Preldzic.

Saty and the Czechs destroyed the Turks, 82-64. Tomas led all scorers with 16 points and added six rebounds, five assists (two turnovers), and five fouls-drawn to his stat line, and he only played 24 minutes. Preldzic chipped in 10 points, six assists, two turnovers, three rebounds, and three steals for Turkey in the loss. The Czech Republic will next face Belarus at home in Chomutov, CZE, and then will head to Trieste, Italy for a rematch with Italians on September 2. They will close out group play against Portugal on Sept. 5 and Turkey on Sept. 11.

Below, Lukas Kuba translates a July 2012 (before NBA summer league) Tomas Satoransky interview with Czech Basketmag titled, "Miracle No. 32." -Kyle W.]

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With the above tweet, Bradley Beal committed his first act of social media as member of the Washington Wizards. And social media reacted: Wizards fans, members of the Florida Gators basketball community, Beal’s family, and his new Wizards teammates — all more than happy with the outcome.

“Few of the guys have already reached out to me, so I’m starting to develop a relationship with the guys already,” Beal revealed at his press conference in Washington D.C. ”Trevor Booker texted me. I talked to John last night. Chris Singleton texted me saying ‘FSU’, I told him like ‘no way.’  Trevor Ariza texted me as well. All these guys have reached out to me and I am glad that they all have did that. It shows me that they care, and they are ready to get going.”

To the Tweets…

Wizards Teammates:

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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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At the 2012 NBA Draft, the Washington Wizards got their man.

No matter how ornery Washington fans want to get over second round pick Tomas Satoransky, the Wizards got their man. Ernie Grunfeld didn’t have to scramble through his medicine cabinet, rattling small plastic containers, desperately searching for Plan B pills, aka Harrison Barnes; the Wizards got their man.

Bradley Beal, the 19-year-old whom NBA scouts have described as presidential-like in demeanor, is coming to the nation’s capital. Basketball-wise, the Wizards hope they got their man.

Beal had a helluva draft night finding out where he’ll be honing his professional skills for the next several years, all while celebrating a birthday with his athletic, football-playing family from Mizzou. Let’s watch the Bradley Beal experience from the draft floor.

Bradley Beal has four brothers, and they are big guys — we’re talking 240-plus pound oxes. They are much bigger than Bradley, who is the middle of the five. Bruce, 24, went to Alabama State, a hog on the varsity football team’s offensive line. Brandon, 26, was a tight end at Northern Illinois. Both older brothers will soon be moving to Washington, D.C. to help Bradley get acclimated to his new life as an NBA player.

Then there are the twins, Byron and Bryon. Both currently attend the same high school Bradley did, Chaminade in St. Louis, MO. Both play football, the guard and tackle positions. Even Bradley’s father, Bobby, is an ex-football player.

“I played strong safety a hundred pounds ago at Kentucky State University,” he told me, which is also where he met his wife, Besta. The proud mother wore Florida Gator orange on draft night and is an athlete herself, having played both volleyball and basketball at Kentucky State.

The Washington Wizards worked out North Carolina’s Harrison Barnes on June 19 along with Syracuse’s Kris Joseph and Northwestern’s John Shurna. Just when the media was finally given access to the Verizon Center practice court to see Barnes at work — normally for the last 10-15 minutes of a workout — Wizards coach Randy Wittman abruptly ended the session. No Barnes basketball-related activity was witnessed by the press. Wittman had issues with the media, but we’ll get to those later. A person who saw the workout said all three players shot the ball extremely well from long range, and Barnes had a highlight-type reverse jam on a baseline drive. More of that to come in the Verizon Center?

Barnes is turning into a stronger possibility for the Wizards at the third spot if certain trade rumors hold any weight — he’s Washington’s “Plan B,” if you will; Shurna and Joseph are fringe second round picks. The 6-foot-8 small forward starred at North Carolina for two seasons, but was highly criticized for not living up to the hype bestowed upon him coming out of high school. He’s happy to move on to a new chapter in the pros.

“There is not really any pressure now,” Barnes said after his workout. “Obviously, when I went to UNC, there were a lot of expectations put upon our recruiting class.”

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