NBA Draft

The old maxim about being careful what you wish for has a certain cache to it when it comes to the NBA draft. More than a few teams over time have celebrated getting the first or second pick only to have it turn to ashes.

And it's not always just a matter of getting bad picks, timing is also a critical issue. Take the Toronto Raptors for instance. In 2006 the ping-pong balls seemed to bounce their way and the team jumped up from fifth to first overall. In desperate need of a center, new general manager Brian Collangelo decided to make history by choosing the first European number one pick. While Andrea Bargnani has been a servicable player, his resume pales in comparison to the first-round picks of the previous four years: Andrew Bogut, 2005; Dwight Howard, 2004; LeBrun James, 2003 and Yao Ming, 2002. Three of those four are good-to-excellent centers while James is a one-of-kind of player.

It's not evident, however, whether Collangelo would have chosen another player if the ping-pong balls hadn't forced his hand. Having already recruited Italian Maurizio Gherardini as his assistant GM, Bargnani was clearly in the Raptors sights and likely would have been their pick whether it was at number one or five.

Probably no team has experienced the peaks and valleys of the draft more dramatically than the Boston Celtics. On the plus side, they managed to use an existing loophole to draft Larry Bird with the sixth pick in the 1978 draft. The future Hall of Famer had the option of joining the Celtics or playing his final college year. It's ironic now, in this era of one-and-done collegians, that a player of Bird's magnitude would remain in college for extra year but in those days players completed their college elgibility before heading to the pros.

Less than 10 years later, the luck of the draft turned against the Celts with back-to-back tragic picks in 1986 and 1987. First, the Celts used the second pick in the 1986 to land Len Bias, who died of a drug overdose shortly after the draft. The next year, Boston used the 22nd pick to take Reggie Lewis whose successful career was cut short six years later by death due to congenital heart failure. Of late, choosing Rajon Rondo with the 26th pick appears to be the steal of the 2006 draft.

Of more immediate importance, how will the choice of John Wall and Evan Turner as the top two selections in this year's draft play out over time? Since I don't claim to be clairvoyant, I can only look to the past for guidance. In the last 10 years, not a single one-two pick has proven to be infallible.

The best candidate is the 2003 class, which bears some similarities to this year's draft with a core of five players separating themselves from the remainder of the field. The one snag was Darko Milicic, the number two pick after LeBron James. I'm sure the Pistons would have been extremely happy with any of the following three selections: Carmello Anthony, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade. At this point, it's the number five pick, Wade, in a photo finish over Anthony with Bosh just finishing out of the money for top three picks in that field.

Although the jury is still out on last year's number one, Blake Griffith, who sat out the entire season due to injury (another Greg Oden?), the first decade of this century has provided some stellar choices at number one beginning with Lebron, Dwight Howard, Yao Ming (if he can stay healthy for a year or two?) and, lastly, Andrew Bogut, who's just begining to show his true worth five years after being selected number one. Again, whether he can remain injury free seems to be the critical issue.

So, will this year's selections at one-two be the tandem that NBA historians look back at years down the road as one of the best of all time? Probably not, although there is not as much competition as one might think. Over the years, there have been very few dominant pairing chosen although there have been opportunities.

Unquestionably the biggest miss is Michael Jordan going number three in 1984 behind Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie.

Certainly, 1979 would have been difficult to overlook as the best of all time if Red Auerbach hadn't pulled a fast one the previous year by picking the aforementioned Larry Bird. How about Magic Johnson and Bird as a one-two?

For the moment, we have to go back as far as 1960 to find the best-ever, one-two selection. In that year, the now-defunct Cincinnati Royals took Oscar Robertson and a Lakers team out of Minneapolis chosing Jerry West.

As for the biggest air ball in draft history, Michael Jordan aside, it's got to be the Rochester Royals -- later the Cincinnati Royals, then the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, Kansas City Kings and now the Sacramento Kings -- choosing Sihugo Green over Bill Russell in 1956. A 6-2 guard/forward from Dusquesne, Si Green played nine seasons with four teams and scored some 4600 points but none of those teams won titles because the fellow chosen as the second pick happened to be on the championship team for 11 of the next 13 seasons.

By the way, it wasn't the Celtics that chose Russell but rather the St. Louis Hawks, now Atlanta, who then traded his rights to Boston for (in their defense) some good talent, notably Hall of Famer Cliff Hagan and Ed Macauley a six-time all-star center -- up to that point!

Such are the vagaries of draft day.