Kentucky’s 15-year NBA Draft first-round streak ending; NBA Draft Lottery smells
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — The NBA Draft Lottery is over. Dallas, a team with a hostile fan base and a franchise with an alleged 1.8% chance of winning the first pick, will draft first June 28.
Raise your hand if you believe this process has smelled for 40 years, back to the day in 1985 when the Indiana Pacers deserved Patrick Ewing but settled for Wayman Tisdale.
I’m with you. There’s a reason the NFL doesn’t play games with a lottery. The fan base would not tolerate it.
Utah, Washington and Charlotte, three sad-sack franchises that won 17, 18 and 19 games this season, will pick fifth, sixth and fourth. In other words, they were the teams most in need of the latest greatest Duke phenom, Cooper Flagg, but will remain perpetually irrelevant.
Somehow, the league will be better served with Flagg landing in Dallas, which won 39 games this season, more than Utah and Washington combined.
He’ll be a plug-and-play addition to a formidable Mavericks’ team that will be an instant contender and national TV attraction while playing with Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving (after his return from knee surgery), Klay Thompson and PJ Washington.
With the lottery over and the draft order fixed, our basketball attention shifts to the actual selection of players.
We don’t have an NBA team. We do have a long string of former local guys succeeding in the pros — from Donovan Mitchell of Louisville trying to keep the Cavaliers alive on a bad ankle to a pair of former IU teammates (OG Anunoby of the Knicks and Thomas Bryant of the Pacers) primed to face each other in the Eastern Conference finals to Kentucky being represented by eight former Wildcats on the eight remaining playoff teams, led by MVP frontrunner Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of Oklahoma City, to Mitchell Robinson stirring Western Kentucky pride with the Knicks.
So there’s NBA interest in town — and there will be interest in the draft.
Here are some items to consider as we dribble closer to June 28 after I studied the mock drafts shared by Jonathan Givony and Jeremy Woo of ESPN as well as Sam Vecenie of The Athletic.
*Two Kentucky players made the board but not in round one. Givony predicts Indiana will select guard Koby Brea with pick 54 in the second round. Vecenie also has the Pacers taking Brea.
Vecenie added a second UK player to his board, predicting that center Amari Williams will be the 59th and final selection of the night by the Houston Rockets.
This will be the first draft since since 2009 that Kentucky won’t have a player called in the first round — unless you claim Adou Thierro, who left Kentucky for Arkansas with John Calipari after last season.
Givony has Thierro at pick 30 in round one, while Vecenie dropped him to pick 39 in round two.
*Three lottery picks don’t go as far as they used to in college basketball.
Jon Scheyer of Duke couldn’t win a national title with a roster that featured three guys — Flagg, forward Kon Knueppel and center Khaman Maluach — likely to be taken in the first nine picks. ESPN’s Givony and Woo has that trio going 1-8-7, while Vecenie of The Athletic makes it Flagg first, Knueppel seventh and Maluach ninth.
For the record, ESPN projects that national champion Florida will be represented by guard Walter Clayton Jr. at pick 25 and forward Alex Condon at pick 31. Vecenie also has Orlando making Clayton the home-state pick at 25. Vecenie added a third Florida player to the second round — guard Alijah Martin at pick 53.
Take another bow, Todd Golden. The Florida coach proved you don’t have to recruit in the Vuitton and Gucci aisle to win a title.
Houston, the team that took down Duke in the national semifinals, will celebrate one mid-second rounder. Point guard Milos Uzan projects as pick 43 at ESPN, 40 with The Athletic.
Auburn, which lost to Florida in the semifinals after winning the Southeastern Conference regular season title, has a pair of second-rounders: center Johni Broome (37 at ESPN, 35 at The Athletic) and guard Tahaad Pettiford (39, 32).
*Was there a bigger bust last season than Rutgers?
The Scarlet Knights are likely to celebrate having the second and third draft picks in guard Dylan Harper and forward Ace Bailey. Somehow, coach Steve Pikiell turned that into a 15-17 record and 11th place finish in the Big Ten while missing the NCAA Tournament and losing games to Kennesaw State, Princeton and Penn State.
Rutgers had more success with Geo Baker, Paul Mulcahy and Ron Harper Jr., the last Rutgers squad to make the NCAA Tournament in 2022.
*How about this SEC oddity?
In a league that was unquestionably the strongest in the nation this season, the top three projected NBA picks from the SEC played for two squads that finished tied for 13th place and another that finished last.
That, of course, would be Oklahoma guard Jeremiah Fears (fifth pick at ESPN), Texas wing Tre Johnson (No. 6) and South Carolina center/forward Collin Murray-Boyles (No. 9).
Oklahoma and Texas finished 6-12 in SEC play while South Carolina won two games.
I’ll let you explain it.
