As the NBA regular season winds down, 16 teams will make the playoffs while another 14 get a head start on vacation. It might seem as though those 16 teams succeeded having made the playoffs, but the truth is that most playoff teams are the real losers each season, and that is especially true this season.
In the Eastern Conference, Detroit, Chicago and perhaps Cleveland and Miami - pending Dwyane Wade's health - are the only teams with a chance to reach the finals. In the Western Conference, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio and maybe Houston can make a run at winning it all. Everyone else ... well, they might steal a few games or even a series or two if they're very lucky, but all they've really done is taken themselves out of the lottery and weakened their franchise's future.
The NBA isn't the NFL or MLB, where wild card teams have a legitimate chance at winning the championship. Wild card teams in the NFL, such as the '05 Steelers, only need to win four games to win the Super Bowl. Wild card teams in baseball, such as the 2006 AL representative, Detroit, are often just as good as or even better than the division winners. In the NBA, the lowest seed to win a championship was the sixth-seeded 1994-95 Houston Rockets, who also happened to be the defending champions, had added Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler and had lost nearly 60 games from starters Hakeem Olajuwon, Drexler, Robert Horry and Vernon Maxwell due to injury during the regular season.
I guess you could say that all sixth-seed Washington needs to do to win the championship this year is to get Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler back from injury, sign Charles Barkley circa 1994 and quickly gain some championship experience, and they would be primed for a run at the finals.
But the key to building a championship team in the NBA is still through the draft - more specifically, through the top of the draft. It is extremely difficult to do this, however, when a team reaches the playoffs and takes itself out of the draft lottery. Looking at all the teams that won the finals in the last decade, each team's top players were lottery picks. The Bulls had Michael Jordan (3rd overall) and Scottie Pippin (5th), the Spurs had David Robinson (1st) and Tim Duncan (1st), the Lakers had Shaquille O'Neal (1st) and Kobe Bryant (13th, back when teams were afraid of drafting prep players too soon), the Pistons had Chauncey Billups (3rd), Richard Hamilton (7th) and Rasheed Wallace (4th) and the Heat had Shaq and Dwyane Wade (5th). The only possible top player that I have really failed to mention who was also a late-draft pick is Manu Ginobili from the Spurs' 2005 championship team.
So congratulations to Orlando, Golden State, New Jersey, etc. You've all missed out on the lottery in the draft considered to sport the best prospects in years. Congratulations to the New York Knicks for swapping Tyrus Thomas and their own lottery pick this year for Eddy Curry. And now a non-sarcastic congratulations to Boston and Memphis for winning this year's best-job-of-tanking-games-to-get-a-higher-seed award.
Just how deep is this year's class? For starters, in Greg Oden and Kevin Durant it features the best pro prospects since LeBron James. Joakim Noah, thought by many to have a chance at going first overall last year, should go no sooner than fifth, and even that seems like a stretch now. There is such depth that North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough, one of five candidates for the Wooden Award given to the nation's top player, opted to return to school because he was projected to go late in the first round.
The NBA lottery doesn't guarantee success - just ask the Atlanta Hawks. But it's nearly impossible to find a stud outside of the top picks the way it is in other sports. Albert Pujols went in the 13th round of the 1999 MLB draft, while Tom freakin' Brady went in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL.
So why don't more teams embrace the NBA Draft as the way to build championship teams? General managers, perhaps understandably, often put their careers in front of the team's long-term stability and value a few wins today more than a high draft pick tomorrow. It's also possible that ownership erroneously believes that fans would embrace a slightly above-average team more than a loser with a high lottery pick. Perhaps some teams fear drafting another Kwame Brown.
Still, it's time ownership realized that making the playoffs if you aren't actually a title contender sucks. It sucks for the franchise because it strips them of a lottery pick, and it sucks for the fans.
Just ask any Celtic fan how memorable their four-year run of making the playoffs starting from the 2001-02 season until the 2004-05 season was when compared to the excitement of possibly landing Oden or Durant. Or ask any Knicks fan what was better - the 1994 team that barely lost in the NBA finals or all the "fun" from 1995-2007 combined. Ask a Spurs fan if they wish David Robinson hadn't gotten hurt in 1996, which cost them the season but yielded Tim Duncan and three championships.
Tom Trudeau '09 will never forgive Scott Layden and Isaiah Thomas for ruining basketball for him.
